Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson
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farther north, further mutations gave northeastern Asians eye-folds, high cheekbones, padded cheeks, short noses, and nearly hairless faces. These are protective against cold; they reduce exposure of the face and its sensory organs. As the present writer, and any other bearded male who has been in really cold climates, know all too well, moisture freezes on mustaches and beards and becomes a real frostbite risk. Long noses are at risk of freezing.
With agriculture and settlement, northern and southeastern Asians spread out in all directions, leading to a wonderful mix in southern China. Typical extreme northeasterners survive on the very far north borders of China; fairly dark-skinned, short people survive in the far south. In between lies a vast gradient with a great deal of local diversity, variation, and remixing. The flow of people northward from Southeast Asia around 50,000 years ago was reversed about 8,000 years ago, and “China’s march toward the tropics” (Wiens 1954) began. Meanwhile, in Siberia and central Asia, East Asians spread west and West Asians spread east. Siberia was an uninhabited void until sometime between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. Central Asia became a meeting and blending ground where light-skinned, often red-haired or blond, Westerners met “yellow”-skinned and black-haired Easterners. At the dawn of history, most of central Asia was Western in general appearance. It is now substantially more Eastern-looking, thanks to massive migrations, especially of Turkic peoples. Afghanistan today is a wondrous mix of physical types—on a Kabul street or on a trip over the Hindu Kush, one can match individuals, as far as looks go, to Mongols, French, Arabs, or Chinese. To some extent this is still true in parts of Xinjiang, in spite of massive Chinese immigration during the last two millennia.
In India and South Asia, peoples from the Near East and Central Asia have been spreading down from the northwest for thousands of years, but the gradient from African to southeast Asian genetics is still quite visible in the southern part of the subcontinent (Reich et al. 2009).
It follows that standard racial terms are inadequate at best. The people of Europe do represent a fairly tight and genetically unified Caucasian or Europoid population, but they have mixed enthusiastically with everyone else along very broad contact zones. Also, their fondness for importing slaves and, more charitably, for welcoming immigrants has guaranteed that Europe itself is no homogeneous refuge. Similarly, in the East, vast migrations, largely but not only from north to south and northwest to southeast, have blended populations completely. Unsurprisingly, the differences in “intelligence” and “personality” that used to be claimed for different “races” disappear on inspection. Where people (of any origin) get an equal shake in the schools, they all perform pretty much the same. Given their long histories of mixing, this is no surprise.
Variation does not stop with visible adaptations. People evolved to tolerate milk in the West, but not in the East (see below). People throughout the Old World, but not the New, evolved some ability to survive common epidemic diseases—with the result that disease had more to do with conquering the Native Americans than superior armaments did (Diamond 1997). The differences that matter are not the trivial visible ones—which are mere simple adaptations to vitamin D intake, cold winters, and the like—but the invisible ones that convey resistance to smallpox, measles, plague, malaria, and so on. Southeast Asians widely share antimalarial adaptations; Chinese who ventured into that region usually died, in the old days. They often do today, as malaria evolves resistance to common drugs.
A final note of physical relevance to foodways and food anthropology is the existence of human taste abilities and taste preferences. Humans notoriously like meat, sweet, and fat—far too much for their own good, now that all those three things are easy to obtain. But humans also love a wide range of vegetable tastes, fruit flavors, and textures ranging from crisp to soft.
Humans everywhere also like certain spicy and herbal tastes (Billing and Sherman 1998). This might seem strange, since spices feel hot or even burning and are not major nutrition sources, but Billig and Sherman showed that most (if not all) of them are powerful antiseptic and antifungal agents and have other medicinal values. Many primates seek out such medicinal agents for food and for external application, and humans are clearly part of this pattern (E. Anderson 2005a). The Chinese fondness for things like peppers, cinnamon, rose, fennel, and other spices and herbs fits the world pattern perfectly, and the spiciness of much southern Chinese and Korean food tracks the high incidence of disease and contagion in these areas. Also, chiles are extremely rich in vitamins and minerals, and—like their Chinese relative the goji berry (goujizi or Chinese wolfthorn, Lycium chinense)—they take on a function as poor families’ vitamin pills. Worldwide, chile consumption tracks rural population density, since both its antiseptic and its nutritional values tend to be recognized. It is commonly used as a food preservative in China as elsewhere.
One odd food preference is for mustard-family plants, including the Chinese cabbages and kales, cresses, mustards, and radishes. These plants are second only to chiles and wolfthorn, and in many cases even better than chiles, in nutritional value. The flavorful ingredients are glucosinolates, which the plant produces to kill insects but which are not only harmless to humans but beneficial—we have evolved not only tolerance to them but also the ability to benefit medically from them. Worldwide, many people are repelled by an extremely bitter taste caused by phenylthiosulfates in cabbage-family plants. However, about a third of people worldwide cannot taste the bitterness, because of a genetic difference (E. Anderson 2005a). The Chinese seem to be much more prone to like cabbage-family greens than Westerners are and thus must often be nontasters or mild tasters, but data on this are inadequate.
Yet another important aspect of taste in Asia is the recent discovery of the umami taste receptors. Previously, human taste had been considered to consist only of salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and—if it is counted a taste rather than a burning sensation—hotness or piquancy. Umami, which was not recognized by either Western or Eastern sages, was discovered only in recent decades. It is the savory taste of soy sauce and other ferments. It is found in some other products, largely as a fermentation product. In spite of not being identified earlier, it was extremely important in the development of East Asian food, since fermentation has been a major way of preparing and preserving food, and the umami taste has been a major goal of food preparation for gourmet taste (H. Huang 2000).
All these cases show the importance of the relationship between physical tasting ability and food culture. It is impossible to understand Chinese foodways without a solid awareness of these complex and detailed genetically guided human abilities.
A Bit About Languages
Languages spread from centers to far-flung regions. When modern humans came out of Africa, they brought languages with them, and some linguists claim to find commonalities in all world languages outside of southern Africa. The evidence is elusive, and so far unconvincing to most, but the human radiation was real, so linguistic relationships must have once been there.
Failing proto-world, there is considerable suggestive evidence that all or most of the northern Eurasian languages have some distant relationship (Pagel et al. 2013). “Nostratic phylum” has been proposed as the term for these northern Eurasian languages (and some North American ones) if they are indeed related. The resemblances could be due to borrowing across tens of thousands of years, because the steppes have been a highway since Neanderthal times. But there is no reason to reject common origin out of hand. Evidence may someday resolve the issue.
Today, the world’s languages are grouped into a large number of families and combined in a somewhat smaller but still impressive number of phyla. Typical families are Germanic, Romance, and Sinitic (Chinese). Typical phyla are Indo-European, which includes most European languages and many Asian ones, and Tibeto-Burman, or Sino-Tibetan, which includes Chinese, Tibetan, Burman, and hundreds of related but extremely disparate languages in eastern and southern Asia. Many languages, including Basque, have no known relatives; Basque is its own tiny family and phylum.
A recent theory, developed from East Asian data, relates the spread of agriculture to the spread of language phyla. This theory was developed by Peter Bellwood to account for the dramatic spread of the Austronesian phylum (see Bellwood 2009, with critiques by other scholars appended). Beginning around 6,000 years ago, Austronesian speakers began to move outward from southeast China. They colonized Taiwan, evolving there into the