Food sharing

Food sharing offers a clear example of prosocial behaviour, in which one individual's actions benefit another. Researchers have proposed a range of hypotheses that explain why food sharing may occur among unrelated individuals. Two such hypotheses, reciprocity and dominance, have been tested in many species, including fish, corvids, rats, bats and primates, showing that (1) recipients sometimes reciprocate sharing back to previous donors and (2) dominant individuals share more than subordinates. Although primates dominate the study of prosocial behaviour, active donation of food is actually quite rare in primates. In contrast, several corvid species spontaneously share food much more frequently. Here, we explored the role of reciprocity and dominance in spontaneous food sharing among male pinyon jays, Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus, a North American corvid species that exhibits high levels of social complexity. Unlike much of the previous work, we tested prosocial behaviour among unr...

The chapter suggests future research directions in food for degrowth studies. A range of theoretical and mainly transdisciplinary practical approaches and key research questions to advance food for degrowth futures are considered. The collection is based on case studies clustered by scale and content. First, activism within the household where ‘frugal abundance’ is practised. Case studies use research methods from autoethnography, interviews and surveys, analysed in statistical and qualitative ways. These methods are typical throughout the collection although the last part is characterised by a higher degree of critical methods, including critical discourse analysis. In Part I, themes of household self-provisioning and reconnection to food sources are interrogated, and conceptualised as ‘neo-peasantry’, ‘quiet’ food self-provisioning, as extensions of traditional practices, and in contemporary theoretical critiques, especially extending concept of ‘caring’ as well as sharing. Similarly collective endeavours emphasise important social and economic dimensions of food for degrowth, providing insights from diverse community supported agriculture style models in Hungary, Italy and Catalonia. The part on networks identifies reciprocal exchange and solidarity as key tenets for degrowth. Approaches of hybridisation of alternative food practices (Budapest), technological application (Catalonia), and processes of multi-level governance internationally are explored. The final part explores the power of narrative with respect to degrowth examinations of the circular economy, food waste and decolonialisation, and competing discourses within degrowth of citification versus densification. This chapter proposes a range of research questions around accessibility, visibility, temporality, spatiality, boundaries and processes, transformation, postgrowth, qualitative and quantitative measures and assessments.

Commensality, the act of eating together, is an important human ritual that benefits beyond the biological need for food and it is well established amongst food studies scholars. At the same time, novel forms of social eating are emerging in urban contexts, especially mediated by new technologies. Yet, ICT-mediated urban food sharing and the moments of commensality they generate have received limited attention to date. In response, this paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with three urban food sharing initiatives in London - a city which exhibits an active and dynamic urban food sharing ecosystem, to explore the experiences of commensality that are produced. By employing qualitative methods of enquiry, I illustrate how these initiatives go beyond the food offered by engaging with the material and affective elements of cooking and eating together and how they attempt to nurture collective spaces of encounter. Social isolation and loneliness emerge within this research as central drivers for participating in food sharing initiatives. The paper concludes that these collective spaces and the affective qualities that they generate are particularly vital in urban contexts in times of austerity, as these initiatives have capacity to embrace social differences and to facilitate the circulation of ideas and practices of care and hospitality. They operate as provisional bridging mechanisms between people, communities, projects and services, providing the connective tissue in ways which are hard to measure through simple quantitative measures and, as a result, are rarely articulated.

This thesis takes an evolutionary perspective on human psychology. To the extent that inherited tendencies shape behaviour, their design will be fitted to the social environments prevailing as Homo sapiens evolved, in foraging groups, the
nearest modern equivalent being hunter-gatherers. From ethnographies of hunter-gatherers, food-sharing and counter-dominance were identified as universal. Food-sharing was more thorough than is explicable purely by kinship or reciprocation; one functional effect was to even out the supply of valuable high-variance food. In contrast with the social systems of the other great apes, counter-dominance spread influence widely, preventing the emergence of dominant individuals who could obtain resources disproportionately. Potential paths for the evolution of egalitarian tendencies are discussed.
Two falsifiable hypotheses were generated from this perspective. First, sharing will facilitate risk-taking. The predicted effect was confirmed at high risk levels, similar to those faced by hunters. Given that during evolution risk was reduced primarily by social means, social as well as rational factors are treated by the evolved brain as relevant to risky decisions. It is argued that this result may suggest
a new perspective on the Group Polarisation experiments.
The second hypothesis tested was that an egalitarian environment will produce beneficial effects on individual and social behaviour. The data collected were consistent with the hypothesis: a comparison between three Italian towns showed that measures of health (including cardiovascular mortality), education, social involvement, crime and social perceptions were significantly more positive where cooperatives
employed a larger percentage of the population.
The evolutionary perspective showed its value as a means of generating novel testable hypotheses.

Degrowth as a concept, approach and practice challenges growth and excessive consumption to advocate for practices that limit socio-metabolic energy and material flows with respect to planetary limits. This chapter introduces a collection offering a sample of food for degrowth research studies and themes. Key degrowth concepts, such as ecological and political principles of frugal abundance, autonomy, commoning, conviviality, decolonising productivist imaginaries and open relocalisation are explained. The chapter positions degrowth with respect to alternative food network practices and literature. Each chapter in the collection is reviewed. Authors explore frugal abundance, nonmonetary economies and the concept of ‘permacultural neopeasantry’, resistance to neo-imperialist forces in the Global South, digital technologies for food organisations, governance bridging policy and self-conscious grassroots action. There are detailed accounts of lowly visible and unconscious degrowing, conscientious initiatives to establish degrowth, post-communist contexts, challenges involving decolonisation and ecofeminist themes of care. Utopian perspectives are raised, the tensions of hybrid niche farming aspiring to beyond-market practices within market contexts are identified, the ingrained cultural barriers of conventional ideas, say of ‘ugly food’, are examined, and a thought experiment using empirical studies of food literature explores whether a city of several millions can be self-provisioning in food.

Abstract Food sharing mobile applications are becoming increasingly popular, but little is known about the new social configurations of people using them, particularly those applications that use consumers as voluntary intermediaries in supply chains. This article presents a social network analysis of a food sharing mobile application conducted in partnership with OLIO. The study focuses on longitudinal social network data from 54,913 instances of food sharing between 9054 people and was collected over 10 months. The results challenge existing theories of food sharing (reciprocity, kin selection, tolerated scrounging, and costly signalling) as inadequate by showing that donor-recipient reciprocity and balance are rare, but also show that genuinely novel social relations have formed between organisations and consumers which depart from traditional linear supply chains. The findings have significant implications for managers and policymakers aiming to encourage, measure and understand technology-assisted food sharing practices.

Social facilitation occurs when an animal is more likely to behave in a certain way in response to other animals engaged in the same behaviour. For example, an individual returning to the nest with food stimulates other ants to leave and to forage. In the present study we demonstrate the existence of new facets in the colony organization of Dinoponera quadriceps: a positive feedback between the incoming food and the activation of new foragers, and the occurrence of incipient task partitioning during the food sharing. Lower-ranked workers located inside the nest process protein resources and higher-ranked workers handle smaller pieces and distribute them to the larvae. In conclusion, D. quadriceps has a decentralized pattern of task allocation with a double regulatory mechanism, which can be considered a sophisticated aspect of division of labour in ponerine ants.

The human aptitude for collective action may have implications for how the theory of kin selection applies to human kinship.
Several models show that if two or more individuals act collectively in assisting their mutual kin, their effective coefficient of relatedness can be greater than if each acts individually. Thus human beings may have psychological adaptations not only for individual nepotism but also for group nepotism—adaptations leading them to construct solidary groups enforcing an ethic of unidirectional altruism toward kin. Human kinship systems have a number of features that seem especially consistent with group nepotism: (1) Human kin groups come in many sizes, ranging from families to clans, lineages, and tribes of thousands of people. (2) Human kinship commonly features an “axiom of amity,” a presumption that kin are entitled to aid simply by virtue of being kin. But this kin altruism is often socially imposed, motivated less by affection between donors and recipients than by social pressure. (3) Relatedness as defined by human kinship systems often differs systematically from biological relatedness and varies with social structure—especially with the solidarity of the kin group. The theory of group nepotism may have implications for a number of research areas in the social sciences. I conclude by focusing on two: demand sharing of food among subsistence hunters and the psychology of ethnocentrism.

Communities are increasingly pressuring professionals in the field of arts and culture, and in the multi-sector realm of creative placemaking, to ensure that their projects are inclusive and equitable. Culturally based food-sharing offers arts administrators powerful ways to democratize arts experiences, celebrate the existing rich characteristics of a place, strengthen social infrastructure, and support communities’ self-determination.
An analysis of projects by artists and culture-bearers who draw on shared meals and heritage-based foodways; anthropological and sociological studies about the transformative social bonding that occurs through food-sharing; and research into the state of the field of creative placemaking shows that the interests of artists and communities are reflected by including culturally based food-sharing in creative placemaking plans.

Tolerant food sharing among human foragers can largely be explained by reciprocity. In contrast , food sharing among chimpanzees and bonobos may not always reflect reciprocity, which could be explained by different dominance styles: in egalitarian societies reciprocity is expressed freely, while in more despotic groups dominants may hinder reciprocity. We tested the degree of reciprocity and the influence of dominance on food sharing among chimpanzees and bonobos in two captive groups. First, we found that chimpanzees shared more frequently, more tolerantly, and more actively than bonobos. Second, among chimpanzees , food received was the best predictor of food shared, indicating reciprocal exchange, whereas among bonobos transfers were mostly unidirectional. Third, chimpanzees had a shallower and less linear dominance hierarchy, indicating that they were less despotic than bonobos. This suggests that the tolerant and reciprocal sharing found in chimpanzees, but not bonobos, was made possible by the absence of despotism. To investigate this further, we tested the relationship between despotism and reciprocity in grooming using data from an additional five groups and five different study periods on the main groups. The results showed that i) all chimpanzee groups were less despotic and groomed more reciprocally than bonobo groups, and ii) there was a general negative correlation between despotism and grooming reciprocity across species. This indicates that an egalitarian hierarchy may be more common in chimpanzees , at least in captivity, thus fostering reciprocal exchange. We conclude that a shallow dominance hierarchy was a necessary precondition for the evolution of human-like reciprocal food sharing. Am J Phys Anthropol 000:000–000,

Normativity refers to the human conformity to the behavioural modes of a society, which underpins diverse aspects of our behaviour, including symbolism, co-operation, and morality.  It has its developmental basis in overimitation, the uniquely human bias towards replicating the intentional actions of a demonstrator, regardless of their causal relevance.  Using evidence from stone tool technology, we suggest that both overimitation and normativity have their evolutionary origins in the Acheulean archaeological period.  Overimitation can be seen in arbitrary biases in Acheulean tool-making; while normativity is evident in geographically and temporally restricted sub-types of Acheulean tools, which do not appear to be functional specializations.  We argue that normativity would have conferred particular advantages for the Acheulean niche of co-operative hunting of mega-herbivores and living in large groups, through co-ordinating hunting strategies, promoting equitable sharing, and enforcing the punishment of free-riders.

The term “Alternative Food Networks” (AFNs) describes the practice and an academic body of work surrounding the emergence of alternative
food practices that emerged in the 1990s as a reaction against the standardization, globalization, and unethical nature of the industrial food
system. Common examples include community supported agriculture, farmers’ markets, fair trade, urban agriculture, specialized forms of
organic agriculture, direct farm retail, and the slow food movement. AFNs seek to diversify and transform modern food provisioning by
connecting ethical producers and consumers in more local, direct ways. They build on an ethics of environmental sustainability, social justice, and animal welfare. AFNs endorse the creation of new exchange models that support a return to community food production and demonstrate a commitment to social, economic, and environmental justice along the food chain. Produce from AFNs is often considered to be fresh, diverse, organic, quality, and “slow,” while networks are perceived as small-scale, short, traditional, community, local, and embedded. Goodman et al. (2011) chart two significant historical trajectories of AFNs that emerged from Western Europe and North America, resulting in different foci, objectives, and understandings. These trajectories are joined by AFNs from around the world. This entry discusses AFN trajectories and their common characteristics of quality, embeddedness, locality, and directness. Various criticisms have been raised in AFN literature about the conflation of AFN types and characteristics, their predominance
towards exclusivity, racism and elitism, and the impact of the capitalist market on their goals toward their desire to create an alternative
food system.

The chapter explores a broad dimensionality of experiences, learnings, challenges, and potential pathways of the sharing economy in food supply chains. Through technology-enabled business applications, the mobilisation of underutilised assets has been successfully facilitated in the foodservice industry. Community-based models have been relying on the mutual risk-sharing of producers and consumers. Service models and the uberisation of food, when contract workers use their personal vehicles to deliver food to customers, has gained more acknowledgement during the COVID-19 times. Based on our qualitative study, various peer-to-peer production and collaborative consumption initiatives are presented in this chapter to assess how the idea of sharing economy entered the food sector. Our arguments are substantiated with varied case examples at multiple value chain points (e.g., production, processing, transport, and consumption).

The chapter explores a broad dimensionality of experiences, learnings, challenges, and potential pathways of the sharing economy in food supply chains. Through technology-enabled business applications, the mobilisation of underutilised assets has been successfully facilitated in the foodservice industry. Community-based models have been relying on the mutual risk-sharing of producers and consumers. Service models and the uberisation of food, when contract workers use their personal vehicles to deliver food to customers, has gained more acknowledgement during the COVID-19 times. Based on our qualitative study, various peer-to-peer production and collaborative consumption initiatives are presented in this chapter to assess how the idea of sharing economy entered the food sector. Our arguments are substantiated with varied case examples at multiple value chain points (e.g., production, processing, transport, and consumption).

Human prosociality is one of the defining characteristics of our species, yet the ontogeny of altruistic behavior remains poorly understood. The evolution of widespread food sharing in
humans helped shape cooperation, family formation, life history, language, and the development of economies of scale. While the behavioral and ecological correlates of food sharing
among adults are widely studied, very little is known about food sharing among children. Here, in the first study to analyze the food sharing patterns of hunter-gatherer children, we
show that while sharing may be biased towards kin, reciprocity characterizes the majority of all sharing dyads, both related and unrelated. These data lend support to the recent claim
that discrimination among kin might be linked with reciprocal altruism theory. Furthermore, we show that age positively correlates with an increase in sharing, both in frequency and amount, supporting recent suggestions that prosocial behaviors and egalitarianism develop strongly in middle childhood when children acquire the normative rules of their society.

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Public fridges are open-access community-stewarded spaces where food can be freely and anonymously shared. As such, they are fertile ground for understanding the obstacles and opportunities for governing food as a commons. This paper examines the governance strategies that have developed within and around Foodsharing.de, a grassroots food-rescue network in Berlin, to manage food as a commons. Analyzing the commoning of food in Foodsharing.de provides a novel entry point into the multi-scalar and multi-stakeholder governance processes that shape our broader food system. In this paper, I further develop the concept of urban food commons to specifically analyze the governance of food and risk. In particular, I draw on qualitative research to analyze a conflict between Foodsharing.de and the Berlin Food Safety Authority over the potential health and safety risks of public fridges. Building on this, I show how different governance practices, informed by different risk ontologies and understandings of the common good/hazard of food, come into tension through the everyday practices of sharing food. This paper departs from previous research that has focused on how the benefits of food commons are shared and regulated at various scales, to also explore how their risks are managed, or could be managed, within an urban food commons framework.

Food sharing offers a clear example of prosocial behaviour, in which one individual's actions benefit another. Researchers have proposed a range of hypotheses that explain why food sharing may occur among unrelated individuals. Two such hypotheses, reciprocity and dominance, have been tested in many species, including fish, corvids, rats, bats and primates, showing that (1) recipients sometimes reciprocate sharing back to previous donors and (2) dominant individuals share more than subordinates. Although primates dominate the study of prosocial behaviour, active donation of food is actually quite rare in primates. In contrast, several corvid species spontaneously share food much more frequently. Here, we explored the role of reciprocity and dominance in spontaneous food sharing among male pinyon jays, Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus, a North American corvid species that exhibits high levels of social complexity. Unlike much of the previous work, we tested prosocial behaviour among unrelated, non-pair-bonded adults. We observed high levels of active sharing, and donors showed clear preferences with whom they shared. We found no evidence that pinyon jays reciprocated shares in either the short or long term. This was true for both sharing within dyads (direct reciprocity) and sharing irrespective of most recent partner identity (generalized reciprocity). However, dominance influenced sharing in one of our squads, with dominant individuals sharing more than subordinates. This study highlights corvids as a fruitful model for the study of the proximate mechanisms underlying naturally occurring prosocial behaviours.

Sharing is a common hunter-gatherer behavior, especially as it applies to faunal resources. Ethnoarchaeologists have documented the archaeological visibility of sharing behaviors. Methods exist by which to infer sharing from the analysis of zooarchaeological remains. An ethnographically derived model for meat sharing behaviors among Late Archaic households within North America’s Great Basin is proposed. Expected results are discussed.

Intensive food sharing among foragers and horticulturists is commonly explained as a means of reducing the risk of daily shortfalls, ensuring adequate daily consumption for all group members who actively pool resources. Consistently high food producers who give more than they receive, however, gain the least risk-reduction benefit from this daily pooling because they are the least likely to go without food on any given day. Why then do some high producers consistently share food, and why do some average producers share proportionally more food than others? We propose that although these individuals may not receive the same amounts they give (i.e., strict Tit-for-Tat), one explanation for their generosity is that they receive additional food during hard times. These include brief episodes of sickness, disease, injury, or accidents—fairly common events in traditional societies that can render individuals incapable of producing food, thereby having long-term effects on morbidity and fe...

Many animal species, from arthropods to apes, share food. This paper presents a new framework that categorizes nonkin food sharing according to two axes: (1) the interval between sharing and receiving the benefits of sharing, and (2) the currency units in which benefits accrue to the sharer (especially food versus nonfood). Sharers can obtain immediate benefits from increased foraging efficiency, predation avoidance, mate provisioning, or manipulative mutualism. Reciprocity, trade, status enhancement and group augmentation can delay benefits. When benefits are delayed or when food is exchanged for nonfood benefits, maintaining sharing can become more difficult because animals face discounting and currency conversion problems. Explanations that involve delayed or nonfood benefits may require specialized adaptations to account for timing and currency-exchange problems. The immediate, selfish fitness benefits that a sharer may gain through by-product or manipulative mutualism, however, apply to various food-sharing situations across many species and may provide a simpler, more general explanation of sharing.

This paper analyzes the impact of a randomized conditional cash transfer program on cognitive development in early childhood in rural Nicaragua. We first show that children have very large delays along various dimensions, including language acquisition, memory, and social skills, and that these delays are related to household consumption levels. We then show that the program had significant effects on cognitive outcomes. Program impacts are largest for older pre-school aged children, who also have more delays. We analyze how the program affected several key inputs into early childhood development, and present evidence suggesting that program impacts are not due to the cash component of the program only. The expenditure patterns of beneficiary households are significantly different from those in control households, indicating that households do not spend the cash received through the program in the same way as other income. In particular, we show that the program caused a significant...