memetics and defended his epidemiological model as a better explanation of
cultural transmission. The two positions have been outlined above and for the
purposes of this book there is no need to go into a deeper discussion of their
details. However, in this section I will take a simple example to illustrate that
the transmission of some element of culture can be explained by more than
one model, and the explanations provided by different models can be in fact
complementary.
Let us take an analogy used by Boyer in hisReligion Explained(2002, p. 66),
who argued that in order to understand how the mind concocts religious
concepts we have to proceed as if we were Martian anthropologists who
wanted to understand how human cuisines over the world use a limited set
of cooking techniques to process a large but limited set of ingredients. Let us
ask the following question: do recipes, in the general sense of instructions to
prepare food, result from memetics or epidemiology? Indeed, we quoted
Dawkins (2006, p. 192) above, writing,“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas,
catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.”
From these examples of memes given by Dawkins it seems logical to conclude
that ways of preparing food are memes just as ways of making pots are. Yet the
epidemiologist might intervene: how we prepare food is constrained by the
nutritional needs of our bodies and the raw materials and techniques available
in a certain place. Thus recipes show consistency because they give us the best
solutions in terms of nutrition, given the constraints of raw materials and
techniques. To add an argument from evolutionary psychology, our predilec-
tions for fat, salt, and sugar are rooted in their scarcity and greatfitness value
in the ancestral environment (D. Symons, 1992), which allow for an epidemio-
logical (rather than memetic) explanation of the success of fast food such as
hamburger.
With a minimal interest in cookbooks, family recipes, restaurants, or food at
all, anyone can notice that while the epidemiological model seems to square
with our experience, it hardly tells the full story. Yes, we tend to prefer sweet
taste and fat, which are indeed found, in some form or another, in a great deal
of what we eat. We use other intuitive criteria to select food that fulfills other
nutritional needs, as well. Basic ingredients and techniques certainly constrain
our diet. However, in addition to all of these factors, there are also fads,
traditions, and changing cultural dynamics that influence what we cook and
what we eat. Recipes run in families and are passed on with relatively high
accuracy, with an accuracy that is certainly high enough to make them clearly
different form the neighbor’s variant. Occasionally, people like the neighbor’s
variant better and adopt it. Innovation can be Lamarckian, when some
property of the food is changed intentionally, or completely random, when
something gets changed inadvertently and the change is kept as it produces
better results. The spread of recipes through cultural contacts and their
adaption to local preferences (think of the career of the American pizza, or
46 Cognitive Science and the New Testament