Food of Ancients

The food we eat has transformed profoundly due to innovation & use of technology developed.

The archeologists & historians have found useable ovens from the preagricultural world of twenty thousand years ago. Evidences prove that pottery existed before some twelve thousand years ago & we had been storing foods since then. We finally reached the zenith of modern civilizations after discovering the utility of metals and metallurgy.

The primitive men were hunters, food gatherers & reaped naturally grown fruits, grains. Once we turned into farmers, we settled down to live in one place & our food habit changed by including more of grains and dairy products. Slowly, innovation & technology led us to using fermentation to prepare food, preserve food. Baking, brewing started in the ancient time itself. Much earlier, with the use of fire, inedible vegetable, grains as raw had already become the food which could be eaten. Even though it might not be suitable to call as a gastronomical revelation, the changes in taste of food by cooking it on fire resulted in great increase of plant food supply as wheat, barley, rice, millet, rye, and potatoes, require cooking before they are suitable for human consumption. Thus, the use of fire to cook plant foods doubtless encouraged the domestication of these foods.

Early Use of Fire for Food

The discovery of eating cooked food was merely an accident in the hunting and gather society. Cooking used to be very simple – kill something, throw it on the fire along with whatever vegetables and fruits were found & simply eat it. Cooking equipment consists of a few sticks for skewering meat and vegetables, leaves for wrapping and for baking, a hot flat rock. In the ancient society, food used to be baked in coals or under heated rocks, steamed inside animal stomach and stuffing hot stones which are still practices in some ethnic tribes. An oven could be as simple as a hole in the ground, or a covering of heated stones.