Kris Gremillion, associate professor, anthropology, is the author of a new book, Ancestral Appetites: Food in Prehistory (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which explores how humans have adjusted the food they eat and the way they prepare it in response to new knowledge and new environments.

While there is much we can learn from what our ancestors ate, many of our more modern foods and diets were developed for very good reasons, said Gremillion.

“Human dietary behavior can’t be reduced just to our biology. Culture has always played a part in what we eat and how we eat it. And people have always been innovating, finding new foods to eat and new ways to prepare them. There’s no way to say that there’s only one way we are supposed to eat.”

Read the press release, courtesy of Jeff Grabmeier, Ohio State Research Communications,http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/ancestralappetites.htm