After long neglecting the area of food and eating, the social sciences first and quite naturally
concerned themselves with analysis of practices and collective representations. Claude Lévi-
Strauss (1968) and Mary Douglas (1966 ; 1979) focussed on the networks of meanings
underlying cultures and cuisines. Sociologists of culture (Grignon & Grignon, 1980 ; Bourdieu,
1979) analyse the social norms governing eating and work at showing that "tastes" can be
understood as socially constructed and differentiated, normative sets of practices ("popular" taste,
"bourgeois" taste, etc.). Other works are concerned with the social and cultural conditions for
emergence of elaborate forms of culinary art (Goody, 1982). With a few exceptions, in particular
that of Audrey Richards in the 1930s (Richards, 1932 ; 1939), the social sciences have rarely if
ever tried to relate meanings and practices to biological constraints or determinisms.