The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson,

and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

The power of food rituals.

From the intricacy of Japanese tea ceremonies to the ornateness of holiday dinners,

food-related customs hold big sway in every culture.

They all reflect in some way an element of that culture's values and common story,

whether long inherited or deliberately chosen. While some of our rituals

can be traced to particular religious traditions, others are more secularly instituted, family-oriented,

or even individually constructed. Those grander social customs might evoke more conscious nostalgia,

but science suggests even the small practices we enact around our eating can have surprising results.

Food ritual, of course, is literally written in our genetic expectations.

In fact, how meat in particular was cut and shared over hundreds of thousands of years has been a central clue in how anthropologists track cultural evolution.

Relics of early human culture highlight the magnitude of it.

From the use of certain kinds of dishes for particular foods and drinks to the thoughtful, extravagant spreads for communal feasting,

for example, shared food ritual came before the agricultural revolution as an integral tool

for establishing and maintaining social cohesion.

But the impact isn't just social.

Instructing subjects to perform a given ritual before eating, University of Minnesota researchers

constructed experiments in which they instructed one half of people to perform a simple ritual

before eating and assigned food, and gave the other group no such instruction except to relax

for a time before eating.

Those who performed the ritual, literally just dividing and

...