Feasting Food

One of the things that people have said about agriculture is that on the whole it's more labor- intensive than hunting and gathering, and that's one of the reasons why people have looked to explanations which, you might say, are kind of coercive factors - that people have been forced into agriculture because they had no alternative. That is ultimately what may happen. But at the very beginning it could be that agriculture was developed because people wanted special status foods for feasting; that it was actually a social need. I mean, how much of what we do in our lives is generated by competition with others? And a lot of that is powered by desire for new things, new statuses, new whatever it might be. Respect, recognition also are important. And in small-scale societies a lot of those sorts of factors are generated by the ability to, for instance, throw feasts. One possibility is that some of these foods that were being grown were actually intended especially as feasting foods.