Food in History (file under dense but important read)

Reay Tannahill who recently died (November 2007) first published this book back in the 70’s. Since then food has undergone a revolution of sorts in that what was available in a standard supermarket then is vastly inferior to what is available today. People have gained a new found (or at least reinvigorated) love of food. This can be witnessed through the proliferation of ingredients that used to be labeled as somewhat exotic and that today are listed as commonplace. Especially in this great country, Canada, because of the wealth of immigrants that we have to this country. Who, unlike other travelers, to other countries, have to abandon much of what they were in order to assimilate. Here we decided that our tapestry is enriched by the incorporation of multiple cultures into our own and vice versa. I for one am thrilled that food has been one of the many areas that has been enriched by this factor.

Tannahill looks at the history of food from as far back as 10,000 BC. At that time the lifespan for the average human was less than forty years. This is largely due to factors such as climate, lack of appropriate nutrition, shelter and clothing. As humanity made advances in each of these areas there was an advance in our lifespan as well as our appetite.

One of the interesting points that she makes early on is that many of the “advances” we have made with regard to food and food science are in fact based on ancient principles that lacked the scientific and technological advances that we have today. She points out that the first deliberate use of fire is somewhere between 1,400,000 and 500,000 years ago depending on which theory of human evolution you ascribe to (meaning the African centered development or the Asian). With the purposeful use of fire humanity began to use that tool to cook meat that previously was eaten raw (and in my estimation may have directly led to such a low lifespan).

The importance of agriculture can not be understated. It is by far the single greatest thing that humanity has accomplished in terms of survival. By eliminating the need to forage and thus move from place to place humanity laid down the basic roots to civilization. Permanent settlements seem to have developed in order to collect harvests that used to be moved to caves, etc. That distance could have been as far as fifty miles or more. Agriculture seems to have taken hold over a 2000 year period somewhere between 9000 to 7000 BC. This shift is clearly delineated by a move from gathering to cultivating.

Perhaps through trial and error and incredible powers of observation humanity learned that by cultivating a harvest too well the next years harvest would not be as great. As such we started to leave portions of the harvest for two reasons, one to produce a better crop and two for regeneration of the crop.

With the advent of agriculture it became necessary for humanity to domesticate animals. The reason for this is simple; animals would travel around from place to place wrecking havoc on crops. This mandated a response from early settlers which was limited to three possibilities. The first was to defend the fields in a non lethal way. Force the animals to go somewhere else. The second option was to mount a battle against the animals which would lead to mass slaughter and the waste of a valuable food source and the third (ultimately the best and winning option) was animal domestication. The first animals domesticated were sheep and goats.

These two animals are clearly important to the early survival of humanity. They played multiple roles in our development. First as a food source they both were brilliant. Their importance is further understood by the use of lambs as a burnt offering to the gods first and then as society advanced the one true God, whether Christian or Jewish (and eventually Muslim). The second reason for their importance is that these animals are natural foragers. The goat was an exceptional tool for clearing fields once deliberate farming had begun. Sheep moreover were capable of clearing more than a hundred times their weight of green space in a single week. It took approximately another two thousand years for humanity to domesticate the pig predominantly because they were never a threat to crop harvests. Pigs like the same food as humans and so until such a time that there was a food surplus pig farming did not develop. Cows became domesticated somewhere between 6100 and 5800 BC.

Where did cooking develop first? Why did it develop? Is it possible to mark the delineation by saying that from fire and cultivation came settlement? What we do know is that somewhere around 5000 BC was the first evidence of “pit cooking” of meat. What we do know for certain is that the shift from pottery as the main cooking tool to metal also greatly advanced humanities cooking procedures and indeed the very flavour of foods.

From settlement it is somewhat easier to mark the dawn of civilization. Civilization, once settlement began to my mind became a fore gone conclusion. With permanent settlements there was a spread of knowledge through migrating tribes which would visit and then bring that knowledge elsewhere. That pattern continued and continues unabated today. With rapid advances of food surplus so too came population explosion. The correlation between the two is massive and had there not been the ability to produce surplus perhaps we would not know the world we know today.

With cultivation of these new agricultural centers came new foods that people would eat. A lot of these foods came out of weeds or off shoots of the predominant plant. For example from wheat came rye and from maize and beans came the tomato. This type of cross breading also resulted in a much larger food supply which again correlates to the furthering population explosion. By 7000 BC wheat and barley were being intentionally cultivated over vast swaths of land. By 6000 BC peas and lentils. By 5000 BC Persian Gulf farmers (think Mesopotamia and modern day Iran) had figured out irrigation to a distance as far as 3 miles. This is an incredible achievement which resulted in the further development of permanent settlement along flat lands near fresh water. By 4000 – 3000 BC olives, figs, dates, grapes and pomegranates.

A note on fresh water. As we all know fresh water is the life blood of humanity. Without it we would cease to exist the way we do today. As the Persians figured out irrigation this led to the need for an administration of some sort for the canals and ditches dug to irrigate the land. This administration led directly to administration of towns and eventually to cities. Once cities began to pop up in earnest this is the true mark for me of the dawn of civilization. People were now more free to concentrate on other things that food and water. Arts, Philosophy, Medicine, etc. all began to rise up in the great civilizations and gave rise to what we know today. It took less than 7000 years for humanity to go from massively independent survivalists to interdependent members of civilization.

The dawn of civilization gave rise to new issues. One such issue has still not been resolved today. Before this paradigm shift men and women were essentially equal partners in life. The means for survival were equally dependant on the man and the woman. The woman was responsible largely for the gathering (for specific evolutionary reasons) while the man was responsible largely for hunting. As civilization developed this equality was quashed. The woman became the “home” keeper. While men tended to the flock which gave them time to think, to dream, to develop. This dawn of civilization saw massive population explosion that went from 3,000,000 at the true dawn to 100,000,000 in a 7000 year period. That is remarkable growth that ONLY could have happened with the domestication of animals and purposeful farming of crops. We had become so efficient in our farming techniques that early Egyptian farmers (peasant farmers) were capable of producing enough food for their family in a multiple of three times or more. Hence the development of trade. To put this into perspective even more crop yields in the 1950’s in Egypt were roughly equivalent to crop yields in 1000 BC. That is a truly remarkable fact.

The next post is going to deal with beer and its importance on humanity.

W.R. Whitney once said; “In the advance of civilization, it is new knowledge which paves the way, and the pavement is eternal.”

Dream big and inspired!

A la prochaine

SDM