What is it that makes us human? Answers to this question vary among theologians, archaeologists and anthropologists. Is it the upright gait, which frees our hands to operate tools? Some animals, too, use implements to gain access to foodstuffs, and certainly a few of the human ancestors were already bipedal. Is it communication? In that case we have to concede that bees, birds and other creatures also communicate with one another. Yet there are two things for sure that differentiate humans from animals. The first is the ability for abstraction that allows us to use symbols in language, art and culture. The second is the understanding that our life span is finite. Evidence for this perception may be seen in the deliberate burial or cremation of the dead and the adorning of their graves. Such rites may have already been practised by one of the closest cousins of the Homo sapiens sapiens, namely Homo neanderthalensis. Care for the dead may be expressed in form of the adorning the grave with flowers. A third aspect of being human is food preparation: animals have no culinary culture.

Food and drink are both a necessity and an indicator of cultural identity. The symbolism and complex ideas of human interaction embedded in meals have been widely studied by anthropologists and sociologists. For example, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has shown that meals can convey much information about the structures and hierarchies of social groups (i.e. who is served when and how, who is allowed to eat with whom and so on may be issues of great significance). Lévi-Strauss observed that structures surrounding food and eating often mirror other constructs such as language, art and social etiquette. The correlations between food and culture have further been explored by the anthropologist Mary Douglas and the literary critic Roland Barthes. Both have shown that rituals connected with food and eating contain structures that can express a variety of meanings, in the same way that language uses different registers and figures, such as metaphors and metonymy, to convey certain aspects of interaction. Language can fossilise the nature of such relations, even after semantic aspects of words have changed. For example, the relationship between a retainer and lord is expressed in the original meaning of Old English hlaford, ‘lord’, which literally means ‘bread (loaf)-warden’, and his wife, the hlafdige, ‘lady’: ‘bread-kneader’.