An Essay I wrote in John Bodley's Anthropology course at WSU circa 2003
World problems such as poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation are the result of growth and culture scale increases whereby material benefits are concentrated to a few elite groups while socializing the costs to the majority of people. Many political, economic and non-governmental organizations try to address these problems in their own way based on the consensus of its members. Whether the solution is ideological, technological, material, or organizational, these ideas are not readily suited to meet the needs of the poor, hungry, or nature itself. In order to maintain a culture, whether it is in the domestic, political, or global realm, the subsistence of that culture must not sacrifice the modes of subsistence of future generations. That means protecting the livelihood, biology and environment of these future generations. Policies designed for sustainable development by political or economic elites many times serve the needs of the elite capitalists, rulers, and financiers.
One approach is that we observe subsistence and organizational patterns of domestic or political scale cultures which has proven successful through the test of time. I suggest that the concept of competitive feasting as a model will help people realize a sustainable future in the domestic, political, and global scale worlds. The idea is that accumulated wealth from a particular individual is redistributed back into the community in a social atmosphere. This practice also allows individuals who enjoy a significant level of material wealth to gain social approval. Competitive feasting also allows groups of people to reassess the source of food as well as efficiency of subsistence. This concept will be looked at in terms of how it can affect all three cultural worlds while separately addressing the issues concerning hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation. Rather than being a solution to such problems, competitive feasting will enable us to test a culture’s methods of sustainability.
Hunger is the result of many things. It can be the result of unequal distribution patterns, poor diet diversity, natural disasters, or maladaptive food production methods. Hunger is characterized as detrimental to the nutritional well-being of a person which may result in vitamin or mineral deficiency causing disease or even death. Feasting is characterized by organized mass consumption by large groups of people. The quality of feasting can vary from tribal feasting, to agrarian harvest rituals, and even college keg parties. First, such feasting requires that there is a surplus of food to begin with. Many argue that there is an abundance of food today but that it is controlled by a disproportionately few people with political and financial control over modes of production. Hosting a feast is an opportunity for both the multi-national financier as well as the domestic hunter-gatherer to gain social status. In the commercial world a feast might be in the form of a free barbecue of hot dogs, hamburgers, chips, and soda pop in a grocery store parking lot. This is what happens in Pullman, WA every summer at Dissmore’s. The case can be made that the nutritional value of such a feast is inferior to say a feast provided by a village chief comprised of traditional foods. The major difference is that the Dissmore’s barbecue has no competition on the same scale so that the people that attend have nowhere else to go for such a feast in the town of Pullman during the summer months when businesses slow to a crawl when a majority of the students leave town until the fall. While there is no data on how much food is distributed and how many attendees represent the town of Pullman, personal observations recall that the numbers of people easily reach the hundreds which is close to the optimal size of sociability at 500 persons. This is the size of a group of people which can be sustained without formal leaders, and advances in communication and technology (Bodley 2003: 87). This is important to maintain an egalitarian social environment with relatively small numbers of feasting guests. This prevents the need for a beauracracy of feast providers, organizers and administrators which would turn the concept of competitive feasting into a resource extractive event much like restaurant businesses whereby the livelihood of the hosts depends solely on the presence and appetite of the guests.
Poverty is a relative concept, the Malthusian concept of poverty incorporates “misery” by which a given population or person is barely meeting their minimum subsistence (Bodley 2001: 96). Depending on what cultural scale a person lives in poverty can be measured by material possessions, access of necessary resources, or levels of income among others. Competitive feasting has the potential for easing impoverished conditions because it requires a surplus of goods in order to function. In the case of a war or drought stricken areas where modes of subsistence has been obliterated or disrupted, special circumstances must be made in order for competitive feasting to be successful. First the community must organize and combine efforts to procure food, shelter, and clothing. A social gathering such as a feast, no matter how meager, provides great opportunity for people to share information to rebuild subsistence levels, and transmit methods of survival and holistic healthcare. A successful food producer may distribute surplus foods as gifts in order to exact labor from his personal network of kin and community members (Pottier 1999: 73). The host, who must be relatively wealthy to afford to feed a number of guests, has the opportunity to maintain his social standing in the community. The social gathering provides a face to face arena for members to test the leadership abilities of the host. If feasting is comprised of truckloads of mushy slop from charitable organizations then it would not be a feast if it isn’t shared. Feasting must be competitive so that the redistribution of surplus food is not used as a coercive tool on the impoverished. Individuals who have accumulated enough surplus could have an equal advantage in sharing social authority. The extreme concentration of accumulated goods by a few people on a global scale definitely poses a problem to competitive feasting but that does not mean that the impoverished must be completely reliant on such elite members. The concept of giving away wealth as part of a sustainable economy is best described by David Orr, “When wealth is no longer regarded as a gift to be passed from person to person, then and only then does scarcity appear” (Orr 2002: 11).
Environmental degradation can be eased through successful competitive feasting. In the contemporary case of college parties, a keg has proven to be more economical than beer cans or bottles. The energy required to recycle cans and bottles is much more than cleaning and refilling a keg. With the exception of plastic keg cups which can be substituted with more permanent personal containers, waste can be greatly minimized. Another example is Thanksgiving dinner in the U.S. While this is a cultural event which happens on a domestic scale, feeding 500 people has some advantages. The cooking can all be done in one place thereby reducing the amount of energy that would normally run 50 or so households. Culinary inclined members would bring more knowledge of efficient and nutritional cooking methods. The waste from prepackaged foods would also be reduced. If competitive feasting becomes a regular occurrence then hosts must increasingly find more efficient ways to feed their guests. If feasting is to be done in a sedentary environment, it would greatly reduce the damage caused by transportation of packaged and exotic foods to restaurants and markets around the world.
Competitive feasting in the contemporary world may be considered utopian. It relies on the good will of the elites to share their accumulated wealth. However, feasting is not impossible for less fortunate members of a given society. The amount of people who participate will vary depending on the household’s ability to provide enough to eat. Competitive feasting also requires some level of shared responsibility and work. This should empower more people to become more intimately involved with their community’s subsistence. Some of the problems that competitive feasting cannot address are those such as acts of violence. The point is that competitive feasting allows members of society to be directly involved in their social organization. Any goods or services that are distributed in a feast can come from one individual’s personal imperia or several voluntary members. The competition aspect of feasting would allow the chance for hosts to reorganize the processes in order to maintain their patronage from other hosts. The next step in researching the possible application of competitive feasting is to observe it in different levels of society from tribal ceremonies such as Native American Pow-Wows to American elite charity balls. If competitive feasting can cut across social stratifications it can bring about very unique changes in culture whether it is material, social or ideological. It may disempower some elite members and encourage them to join in the festivities. Within my own personal imperia I have experimented with feasting. Feeding friends and strangers alike help to reduce the burden of maintaining subsistence, where I can exact some sort of return in the form of tools, food, materials, or social support. Within the economics of reciprocal exchange, competitive feasting allows assertive individuals to reach more people to exact material or social resources on a small and manageable scale.
Works Cited:
Bodley, John H. 2001. Anthropology and Contemporary Human Problems. 4th Ed.
Mountainview, California: Mayfield Publishing Company.
Bodley, John H. 2003. The Power of Scale: A Global History Approach. Armonk, New
York: M. E. Sharpe Inc.
Orr, David W. 2002. The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention.
New York, New York: Oxford University Press.
Pottier, Johan 1999. Anthropology of Food: The Social Dynamics of Food Security.
Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.