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Last Updated Jul 10, 2024
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Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
AnthroDishAnthroDish is a weekly podcast about the connections between food, culture, and identity through an anthropological lens. Each week a new guest joins me to discuss a food-related topic that relates to their expertise or experience.
The Evolution of Human Nutrition: Australopith Diets (CARTA)This presentation considers the fossils themselves and what they can teach us about the diets of our early hominin forebears. It focuses on a key part of human evolution, when our ancestors and near cousins, the australopiths, began to descend from the trees. By about four million years ago, Australopithecus had evolved thicker, flatter, relatively larger teeth than their predecessors, suggesting a change in diet from soft foods, like forest fruits, to harder or tougher ones, like nuts or leaves.
The Evolution of Human Evolution: Fire, Starch, Meat and Honey (CARTA)Unlike all other free-living animals, human populations need to eat much of their food cooked. When and why this evolutionary commitment to the control of fire began is a fascinating evolutionary puzzle. We now know that cooking causes starch and meat to provide much extra energy; that cooked food saves so much eating time that it makes dedicated hunting possible; and that honey-eating by African hunter-gatherers offers a remarkable clue that the control of fire is an ancient habit.
The Evolution of Human Nutrition: Current Hunter-Gatherer Diets (CARTA)Alyssa Crittenden (Univ of Nevada, Las Vegas) reports on the diet composition and foraging profiles of the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. The significance of meat, tubers, and honey is addresses and the role that these food items play in evolutionary models is explored.
Survival: The Human Diet (The Leakey Foundation)Humans are the only animal whose survival depends on controlling fire. A critical adaptive benefit is that cooking leads to large increases in net energy gain compared to eating our food raw. While cooking originated sometime between two million and four hundred thousand years ago, we still do not know exactly when our ancestors first tamed fire.
The ability to cook is unique to humans - something most of us take for granted. But now some scientists believe that instead of cooking being a mere by-product of evolved man, it could have fundamentally shaped our physical and mental abilities. In this programme, Horizon challenges our relationship with food, attempting to unravel the paradox: do we cook because we are human, or did cooking make us the humans we are today?
The Evolution Of Cooking: Studying Chimpanzee Cognition (WGBH Forum)Cooking is a universal human practice, and a complex behavior that involves multiple cognitive skills—such as patience, self-control, and causal reasoning. But the evolutionary origins of cooking are unclear. Examining chimpanzees' cognitive skills can illuminate the emergence of this uniquely human behavior.
Harvard researchers Alexandra Rosati and Felix Warneken will present new insights from a recent set of studies in which they found that chimpanzees possess many of the necessary skills for cooking, suggesting that cooking behaviors emerged soon after the control of fire in human evolution.
Changing the Menu (streaming, Academic Video Online)Examines the development of prehistoric agriculture in the Pacific Rim. Dr. Alan Thorne presents the story of how people changed from hunters and gatherers to farmers and herders in Southeast Asia, China, and the Pacific islands off the coast of Asia. He shows how this process is still taking place in some of these areas.
Modern Diets & the Food Industry
Overfed & undernourished (streaming, Academic Video Online)Overfed & Undernourished examines a global epidemic and our modern lifestyles through one boy's inspiring and personal journey to regain his health from the inside out. Interspersed with interviews and advice from leading health and wellbeing experts from around the world, along the way providing simple solutions, and ultimately asking the fundamental question ... are we really nourishing ourselves?
In defense of food : based on the book by Michael Pollan (streaming, Academic Video Online)Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants." With those seven words, journalist Michael Pollan distills a career's worth of reporting into a prescription for reversing the damage being done to people's health by today's industrially-driven Western diet. Pollan offers a clear answer to one of the most urgent questions of our time: What should I eat to be healthy?
King Corn (dvd)King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In the film, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil.
But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat—and how we farm.
Super Size Me (DVD)Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock embarks on a journey to find out if fast food is making Americans fat. For 30 days he can't eat or drink anything that isn't on McDonald's menu; he must eat three square meals a day, he must eat everything on the menu at least once, and supersize his meal if asked. He treks across the country interviewing a host of experts on fast food and a number of regular folk while downing McDonald's to try and find out why 37% of American are now overweight. Spurlock's grueling diet spirals him into a metamorphosis that will make you think twice about picking up another Big Mac.
The Raw Truth About Cooking with Rachel Carmody (SciCafe, AMNH)How has cooking given humans an evolutionary edge? And how is new research on the human microbiome challenging information listed on nutrition labels? Harvard University’s Rachel Carmody tackles these questions by studying the past, present, and potential future of how, and why, humans eat the way they do.
Orangutans, Obesity, and Human Evolution (SciCafe, AMNH)While wild orangutans in the rainforests of Borneo feed on a remarkable variety of plant life, they also endure unpredictable cycles of feast and famine. Erin Vogel of Rutgers University explains how research on these primates’ diet and health may help us to better understand the evolution of early human diets, as well as provide insight into today’s global obesity epidemic.