Abstract
This paper seeks to identify how different practices of food sharing are related to one another, and the degree to which societies in North and South America may share practices with one another. The authors attempt this by using ethnographic literature to break sharing activities down into their constituent, multi-stage parts, and then comparing the prevalence of these parts and their relationships to one another. The study finds that the presence or absence of a distributor in a sharing activity, and who that distributor is, has a significant effect on how sharing is carried out. On the other hand, linguistic relationships between groups seem to have little impact on their sharing practices, and geographic proximity between groups only seems to have a significant effect on sharing practices in North America.