ABSTRACT My initial academic trajectory was pre‐med, but early on I discovered anthropology. I soon realized that these were not disparate directions, but that some aspects of health could not be fully understood without attention to cultural aspects of behavior. Food consumption became for me a common thread across culture, archeology, human evolution, and modern epidemiology. A group of anthropology colleagues, with similar interests in the intersections of these topics, began to form, and thus I found myself as one of the founders of the Society for Nutritional Anthropology. This academic memoir focuses on the diverse biocultural topics I have embraced under this rubric, ranging from household refuse analysis (Garbology) to understanding (cultural) bias in reporting food intake, to diabetes etiology and prevention among American Indians of the US Southwest, Pacific Northwest, and Canadian NWT, to the role of lack of palatable water in the etiologies of diabetes and obesity.
Cheryl Ritenbaugh (Mon,) studied this question.