Most of the places I’ve been (all over the United States and in parts of Europe), people tend to like eating sweets and other assorted ‘light’ foods after a typical meal. I’m curious as to how universal this is in the dining habits of non-Western cultures, and what sort of explanations have been put forth for this.
As an anthropology undergrad, I’m moderately acquainted with Marvin Harris’ idea of ‘protein sparing’, or some term like it, where people will eat carbohydrates with protein so that the body uses the carbohydrates for energy, instead of processing the proteins for that — thus saving the proteins for building stuff. Does that explain why I feel like I haven’t eaten a complete meal unless I follow it with something sweet, or are there other explanations?
I don’t have answer, but I do find your question interesting.
Myself, I find certain meals seem to trigger a craving for sweets at the end. Indian food being one of them. I like lots of kinds of spicy foods, but Indian food always leaves me wanting something sweet to finish up.
1.) I’m a big fan of Harris, but I don’t recall a theory of “protein sparing”, or any discussion by him of dessert. Is it my failing memory, and this is someplace like Good to Eat and I forgot it? Or is it in some obscure work of his (I’ve read all his major books)?
2.) Dessert isn’t always sweet stuff. Sometimes people have cheese as a “dessert”
3.) When I ate out with Chinese folk at a Chinese restaurant (and they ordered REAL Chinese food, that wasn’t on the menu) they had Swet Bean Soup as dessert. I don’t know if that’s traditional, though, or influenced by Western habits.
4.) Reading this, I couldn’t help but think of the Gary Larson cartoon “The Origin of Dessert”. It shows a caveman lokking at the remains of the feast. Standing atop one bone is a lizard.
I’m pretty sure I read it in ‘Good to Eat’, but I’m not entirely sure. Something about a group of Amazonian hunter-gatherers (mayhaps the Yanamamö? They get mentioned a lot by cultural anthropologists.) alternating bites of meat with bites of plaintain, or something like that, and the author suggesting that it may be to save the protein calories for building bodily structures, while the carbohydrate calories go to fuel the body. I think the author called it the ‘protein sparing effect’, but my memory fails me. It’s been a summer since I’ve read that book; I’ll have to look through it again.
True, very true. In anthropology, there always seems to be exceptions to so-called ‘universals’, and I’m curious about those exceptions. Also, when I wrote the OP, I was eating red beans and rice, washing it down with coffee and spice cake. Om nom nom nommynom…
I’m dubious of that. Certainly they don’t do this consciously, and in most H/G societies meat is a bit of a luxury item, so having plant food is necessary just to get enough calories to survive. The plant items are also usually more dependable. But there are H/G societies in polar regions that eat mostly meat and fish, since there isn’t much plant material to be had.
Discussions of meals in histories of cooking and eating are always biased because usually the records only of the upper classes remain. Given that, every culture of every time seems to have a record of desserts and sweets, either at the end of the meal or as palate cleansers between courses or as dainties to be had with, say, tea. Greece, Rome, India, Persia, China, Arabia. Everywhere I’ve read of.
Sweet foods are liked in and of themselves in every culture I know of. We have sweet receptors in the tongue and sweetness is a powerful draw. You can addict rats to sweets to the point of starvation just as you can addict them to hard drugs. Certain humans, too, from a casual glance. :rolleyes:
More seriously, children’s’ palates are not as sensitive to nuance and sweets are more readily tasted by them. This is a powerful influence on adult foods, too.
I don’t think it takes much cultural anthropology to explain the ubiquity of desserts. Biology and biochemistry should suffice.
I will be curious to see if you have a cite from Harris. From your description, though, I would bet that he was using that as a way to get to some larger point rather than as an explanation in itself. And he would have written it 30 or so years ago while we’ve learned huge amounts about foods, tastes, and diets since then.
