This study seeks to shed light on the practice of entomophagy (insect consumption) across human population and seeks to explain the variability in its practice. The author explore potential ecological predictors for insect consumption (climate, subsistence practices, other available food resources, dietary needs) as well as cultural predictors (social transmission, cultural norms, evolution, and shift). Ultimately, the author concludes that entomophagy may be a useful medium through which to examine the interaction between social learning, subsistence strategies, and modernization.

The author tests various hypotheses regarding cross-cultural occurrence of geophagy, the eating of earth. Nearly 500 years of references to geophagy were compiled into the Database on Human Geophagy, which was then used to examine biological justifications for this little-understood behavior.

This article examines meat avoidance during pregnancy as an evolutionary adaptation. Data suggests that during pregnancy, meat avoidance is significantly more common cross-culturally than other types of food avoidance. The timing of meat avoidance, the presence of meat-borne pathogens, and sensory and ingestive changes in early pregnancy are also discussed.

This study, primarily a review on the evolution of the human diet, also includes a small study on the distribution of meat-eating and its relationship with climate and cultural factors, namely subsistence type. The authors find that societies with subsistence strategies that prioritize fishing, hunting, or pastoralism also tend to consume more animal products, whereas those that focus on agriculture have more plant-based diets. The authors argue that these small-scale societies have a healthier approach to diet than industrialized societies regardless of their subsistence type or meat consumption.

Textor summarizes cross-cultural findings on pregnancy and childbirth pertaining to cultural, environmental, psychological, and social phenomena.

Geophagy during pregnancy has been proposed to fulfill a number of adaptive functions, including relieving gastrointestinal distress, detoxification of the secondary compounds found in plant foods, and providing a supplementary source of minerals such as calcium. Using a sample of 60 African populations, the authors investigate geophagy during pregnancy in a cross-cultural perspective, emphasizing variation between dairying and non-dairying populations.

Cultures vary widely in regards to beauty standards for female body fat: while industrialized nations typically prefer thinness in women, ethnographic reports indicate that plumpness is valued in many small-scale societies. Here the authors evaluate several hypotheses that relate variation in female body fat preference to variation in socioecology such as food storage, climate, male social dominance, valuation and restriction of women's work, and female stress during adolescence.

This study utilizes Bayesian statistics to test the associations between harsh environments (specifically those with higher degrees of climate variability and relatively lower average temperature and precipitation) and alloparental care in societies throughout the world. Results support the hypothesis that societies in harsher environments show higher rates of alloparental care and that societies with higher rates of starvation and resource stress exhibit lower rates of alloparental care. The authors explain this theorizing that in the former relative costs are sufficiently outweighed by the benefits of this type of cooperation and in the latter they are not. They conclude that their results support the plasticity of human alloparenting as a response to varying ecology.

The author asserts that ecological conditions (and associated survival necessities) underwrite all human behavior and may be used to produce some general rules. Considering this, the author suggests that "culture" as a concept should be used to explain deviations from these essential rules rather than to explain all human behavioral phenomena. Data is compiled into a discursive presentation of the most important ecological factors determining choice in food animal consumption in "the primitive diet." These include abundance, herding (propensity to live in a herd or group), animal body size, dangerousness to humans, and "humanity" (spiritual closeness to humans or having a human spirit).

This article proposes that differences in diet may account for the presence or absence of morning sickness in a society. Data suggest that morning sickness is not a universal symptom of pregnancy, and there are significant differences in foods consumed where morning sickness does not occur, including more maize, fats, and vegetables.