History of Food

Food Habits

Food habits have changed considerably over time, from the early history of human beings characterized as Homo sapiens more than a hundred thousand years ago to today's consumer society in the early twenty-first century. In this process of feeding mankind, we have gone from survival to plenty, from hunting and gathering in the wild to hunting and gathering among shelves and freezers in modern supermarkets, from an unprocessed unique selection of various foods in the wild to industrialized, mass-produced, and distributed food. In the past, a person's food habits were dependent on local availability of food, but in modern society, we see a global exchange of food as a commodity, where food has become a form of cultural expression among consumers. This also entails that the function of food has made a transition from being regarded foremost as fuel to being something that essentially fulfills psychological needs. Many modern researchers see nutritional intake during the prehistoric era as preferable in many ways to modern food intake, provided that energy requirements are fulfilled, whereas our food habits at the beginning of the twenty-first century are associated with welfare problems such as the metabolic syndrome, which is linked to overeating and an unbalanced diet.

Looking more specifically at food intake over time, there have been some major periods of transition in the history of food. There are debates as to whether man, meaning the first hominids during the early prehistoric era, snatched carcasses or behaved as daring hunters, as meat played an important part in their diet. Moving forward in time, we know that the human diet consisted of both vegetable foods, such as wild plants, berries, roots, nuts, and mushrooms, and food from the animal kingdom. Man learned to catch all sorts of aquatic animals, including fish and shellfish, such as fresh-water mussels, while everything from birds to mammoths were among the hunted land animals. Insects were also a common foodstuff. Hunting and fishing tended to be men's work, while gathering of plants was seen as a female task, showing that food-related work was gendered long before modern times. During this early period, cooking was invented. Cooking distinguished man from the animal kingdom and made both animal and vegetable food more digestible. About 10,000 years ago, there was a shift from food collection to food production. In the process of controlling nature, both animals and crops were domesticated, which made food items such as different grains and milk products (where milk-giving animals existed) an important part of man's food habits. Yet not only cows were associated with milk products. In Kazakhstan, the horse was used as a milk-giving animal, resulting specifically in the product koumiss, which is dated to about 3500 BC. In different parts of the world, grains became a staple food early on, for example, rice in Asia, rye in the northern parts of Europe, wheat in the southern parts of Europe, and corn (maize) in South America. Thus, the cuisines of most agrarian societies have two important elements: a staple food and accompaniments, the latter consisting of vegetable- or animal-based foods. Though we may suspect that the process by which food transitioned from merely meeting nutritional needs to symbolizing identity and cultural expression started before the Neolithic period, it is during this period that the latter function was more accentuated. An example of this was the decision not to domesticate the deer. In the Greek and Roman cultures, food from the untilled, uncultivated landscape was a cultural symbol of the poor and was therefore avoided by more fortunate citizens. However, it should be noted that the developing agricultural society was still highly dependent on hunting and fishing, and food products from these activities were important features of many food cultures and in many regions.

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