Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- Introduction: Food, substance and symbol
- 1 Diet
- 2 Food and the economy
- 3 Food crisis
- 4 Malnutrition
- 5 Otherness
- 6 Forbidden foods
- 7 Food and the family
- 8 Haves and havenots
- 9 You are with whom you eat
- Conclusion: Choice and necessity
- Bibliographical essay
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Food and the family
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- Introduction: Food, substance and symbol
- 1 Diet
- 2 Food and the economy
- 3 Food crisis
- 4 Malnutrition
- 5 Otherness
- 6 Forbidden foods
- 7 Food and the family
- 8 Haves and havenots
- 9 You are with whom you eat
- Conclusion: Choice and necessity
- Bibliographical essay
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
PRELIMINARIES
In antiquity men lived longer than women. This cannot be proved. But I am sure that this is what we would find, if the data were adequate to permit a demographic investigation of Graeco-Roman ancient societies. Where the two sexes are given equal treatment in the matter of nutrition and health care, women live appreciably longer than men. That is the case in Europe, North America and other affluent countries of the modern world. Women live longer than men because they are physiologically more efficient. They need a lower protein and calorie intake, and are more resistant to disease.
In the contemporary third world, men live longer than women. Instead of a female : male ratio of 1.05/1.06: 1, it is 0.94: 1, or worse. This means, as Amartya Sen put it, in the title of an article in the New York Review of Books (December 1990), that ‘more than 100 million women are missing’. I think we would find, if we had comparable data, that there were a lot of missing women in ancient societies as well.
Sen blamed pro-male bias in two areas: division of food in the family, and access to medical and health facilities. Only the first variable is clearly relevant to us. In antiquity hospitals were hardly known, and doctors were in a complete fog about the nature of disease and how to cure it. Access to medical attention was not necessarily a benefit for the patient. Of course in antiquity the sick, or a proportion of them, did submit to medical or quasi-medical attention, and the condition of some of these perhaps improved in consequence, as it happened.
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- Information
- Food and Society in Classical Antiquity , pp. 100 - 112Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999