But ordinary does not only mean normal; it also means order or rule. In its nominal form, an "ordinary" refers to the same meal served from day to day, at the same price. Order and food are joined as well at the seder, or Passover meal, prepared by Jews to celebrate their escape from Egypt and liberation from slavery in the days of Moses. We might therefore consider "ordinary" in the title of this section as the rules people use to order--or give order to--what and how they eat.
There was a time in Anthropology when leading figures in the field tried to determine the rules of a culture by analyzing detailed sets of ethnographic data and making order out of them. For nearly two decades, for example, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss studied what people ate and how different cultures prepared their food, through their myths, in order to identify the underlying structures of human thought. In every culture, he tells us in The Raw and the Cooked (1964), people put the food they eat into three broadly defined categories, two natural (raw and rotten), one mediated by cultural intervention (cooked). To help visualize the relationship, Levi-Strauss imagines a "culinary triangle":
