Many and Varied Worlds of Food

MANY AND VARIED WORLDS OF FOOD

E. N. Anderson

www.krazykioti.com

gene@ucr.edu

This post consists of material left out of my various books on food because I haven’t had time or energy to pursue the topics enough. It consists of various reading notes and odd observations. They could be useful to food experts and researchers, so here they are. Many of them concern the early history and prehistory of foods in various regions of the world.

Note that China is covered separately in the post “China Food Updates” on my website.

Contents

PART I. SPECIAL TOPICS

Early Human Food

Good Farmers

Gut Microbiota

Fermentation

Fad Diets

PART II. FOOD AND FOOD REGIONS

Near East

Europe

Africa

South Asia

East Asia

Southeast Asia

Oceania

Central America and Mexico

South America

North America

PART I. SPECIAL TOPICS

Early Human Food

Modern human hunter-gatherers eat least meat in vegetation-rich, game-sparse areas like many brushlands. They eat the most meat and fish in the Arctic and near-Arctic, where the scanty vegetation is mostly indigestible to humans. Our insulin metabolism, stomach acid balance, and other metabolic signs show long adaptation to meat (Ben-Dor, Sirtoli and Barkai 2021).

We may be able to recapture some of the prehistoric experience. Vow, a company in Australia, has now made meatballs by using frozen woolly mammoth DNA to grow lab meat, and another company has made gummy bears with gelatin similarly derived from a mastodon (Chandler-Wilde 2023).

Early prehumans in East Africa ate a great deal of grass, as well as other vegetation (Uno et al. 2016). Australopithecus suffered from seasonal food shortages (Johannes-Boyau et al. 2019). Tooth wear shows that that genus and the closely related Paranthropus ate a varied diet, with both C4 (largely grasses) and C3 (other plants).

Hunter-gatherers are also rather casual in defense of territory. Their groups have fluid boundaries. Rich resources (often those exploited by women) and, above all, stored resources are staunchly defended (Codding et al., and following articles, 2019), but the typical hunting-gathering group wanders over a vast area, most of it little used, and this area is generally open.

They also share game, often according to complex patterns, which keeps men hunting even when they do not appear to need it (Gurven and Hill 2009). Many modern hunter people are devoted to the chase in spite of being wage-earners in modern enterprises (Ready and Power 2018). Even in rural white America, much hunting is for such social reasons. Game gives prestige, can be traded, and above all can be shared widely, maintaining personal networks.

The Hadza of Tanzania still hunt and gather, though they are rapidly losing their land to encroaching farmers and herders. Big game was once brought down once a month by an average group, but now people are lucky to get one in a year. When they were hunting, the men would devour the best meat in the field, and bring back what was left (if any); they also foraged honey and ate most of that when found. Women and children provisioned themselves, eating berries and root foods, small animals, some honey, and anything else available. Men used meat to consolidate reputations, and to make sure they could thus maintain a household, but they shared meat with each other or the whole group, not with their families. Grandmothers were critical to child and group life, helping mothers to get enough to raise the children (O’Connell, Hawkes and Blurton Jones 2025). Survival long beyond menopause was probably necessary for humans—the famous “grandmother hypothesis” of Kristen Hawkes. It has stood the test of time and a good deal of challenge.

Related to this is the idea of cultural keystone species. Oaks were critical in the life of Californian peoples (K. Anderson 2005), salmon in the Northwest Coast, wild roots in the interior Northwest. These were ritually and ceremonially marked as well as providing staple foods. They were not always dominant in nature, and often were not even the most important food; they were simply species that mattered a great deal (Coe and Gaoue 2020).

Like hunting, gardening and simple agriculture are socially embedded. Crops are shared in neighborhoods and even in much wider linkups. Most of us in the modern world live, or at least have relatives living, on a bit of land that can produce food, and we network constantly with it. This leads, thoughtfully, to considerations of what gives “value.” For Marx, it was labor invested (though he was aware that labor invested in fertile soil produces more than labor invested in rocks). For David Graeber, however, value “appers when individual acts become socially meaningful”; gardens are dynamic loci of value creation, resistance, identity, and action (Peña et al.2017:43ff).

Eventually, intensive agriculture can lead to states, when extremely fertile soil, productive agriculture, and large open areas without defensible space force people to band together under a war leader and eventually under a king. Hobbes (1657) was right that conflict leads to kings, but was wrong about “savages” (he meant hunter-gatherers) feeling the need; it happened in the most productive but open agricultural areas.

Good Farmers

            Traditional small-scale agricultural people and societies have a mixed, but generally good, record as efficient, resourceful, clever, successful farmers. They tend to practice mixed farming, and to leave wild breaks that harbor predators. They favor intercropping, which is generally a good idea (X. Li et al. 2021), though there are, of course, exceptions.

Consider shifting cultivation: cutting down and burning a small section of forest, farming the resulting ash-enriched opening, then abandoning it after a few years and letting it grow back to forest. This can be done with extreme care and expertise: leaving valuable trees, cutting firebreaks to prevent fire escape, reforesting with nitrogen-fixing or fruit-bearing trees, planting mixed and productive crops, and otherwise managing the enterprise with care. Or it can be simply burn-plant-leave. I have seen both. The Maya of Yucatan represent the highest ideal (Anderson 2005), but the minimalist form is also known in the world. The same goes for every type of cultivation.

            The near-universal tendency of European and American scholars and scientists before the 1950s was to write off traditional small-scale agriculture as backward, unproductive, and even “primitive.” This attitude began to change in the early 20^th century, but awaited major works to disprove it.

The first to succeed at this were two studies: Harold Conklin’s Hanunoo Agriculture (1957) and J. E. Spencer’s Shifting Cultivation in Southeast Asia (1966). Shortly after this, Gary Klee edited World Systems of Traditional Resource Management (1980), which finally put traditional cultivation on a serious footing in international scholarship. This was followed by many works on local systems, such as Gene Wilken’s Good Farmers (1987) on Mexican and Central American best practices, and by Robert Netting’s superb Balancing on an Alp (1981)and Smallholders, Householders (1993) which demonstrated in great detail the virtues of small mixed farming, whether in the Philippine outback or in the center of Europe. By this time, thoughtful agronomists realized that the traditional farmers knew a thing or two. Excellent books drawing on traditional practices applied to modern farming began to appear, such as David Cleveland’s Balancing on a Planet (2014; note that his title refers back to Netting’s book; Cleveland and the present author were friends with Bob Netting, who died sadly young).

A major breakthrough was the development of permaculture (Holmgren 2002, 2012; Mollison 1988, 1997). This system was developed largely from the best practices of southeast Chinese and Southeast Asian cultivators. It used a very wide range of plants and animals, an extremely efficient use of water and nutrients, and a nearly closed system such that these inputs are re-used and recycled constantly. It is modernized by use of machinery and chemicals, but these are kept to a minimum.

            Meanwhile, theories arose on farming and subsistence. Thomas Malthus (1960 [1798]) famously argued that food production increased linearly, while population increased exponentially, until lack of food led to starvation, war, and epidemics. This is true enough of some natural populations, limited by such “density-dependent factors.” It did not have much to do with humans, who can always invent a new dodge or domesticate a new crop, and can also figure out how to limit populations without violence. Malthus began to acknowledge this is the later editions of his work, but the crude and merciless theory had gone ahead of him. An irony was that he was writing just as the “agricultural revolution” took off in his native England, eventually leading to the present world of plentiful food. A billion people are going hungry right now, but the world food system wastes 30-40% of the food produced, so minimal civil responsibility would eliminate hunger and waste in one swoop. Food-short Nigeria wastes by far the most, over 3500 tons. India, also seriously troubled with hunger, comes next with 2500, then the United States with 2000. Brazil follows with 1000, Russia ca 800. Related are greenhouse gas emissions: Meat and animal products are by far the worst source—130 kg of CO2 emissions per kg of food. Roots and oil crops produce about 38, cereals and pulses only 10-15, fruits and veg about 3 or 4 (Padmanaban 2023).

            An extreme counter was Ester Boserup’s claim that “population pressure” would force people to work ever harder, raising food production at the price of exploitation, often self-exploitation. This theory is at least as dismal as Malthus’. Fortunately it is equally wrong. People are as good at inventing labor-saving devices as they are at developing new crops and farming techniques.

The gluten in bread wheat is particularly abundant and sticky, allowing us to make good leavened bread that rises with appropriate fluffiness; the sticky gluten traps the bubbles of CO₂ gas released by the metabolism of the yeast or sourdough ferments used for leavening. The wild wheats emmer and einkorn do not have much gluten; it was bred into wheat when some village women in what is now Azerbaijan observed that some odd wheats from the edges of their fields produced an extremely superior bread. The wheats had been hybridiziing with a local grass, a subspecies of Aegilops squarrosus, that has ideal gluten for baking. The result, hexaploid bread wheat, has revolutionized the world. It is now the commonest and most widespread domestic plant, the staple food of billions, and the basis of a fantastically elaborate and complex baking culture worldwide. We owe a very great deal to those Azerbaijani women, and we have no idea of their names or ethnicities. Never was Ecclesiastes’ passage about unknown but great people more appropriate.

Orchids and Ericaceae have their own very specific species and genera. Ectomycorrhizae dwell on pines, oaks, myrtles (including Eucalyptuses, which are in the myrtle family), Caesalpiniae (paloverdes and pride-of-Mexico). Endomycorrhizae are also widespread. Only a few plant groups, including the mustard family, amaranths, chenopods, sedges, pinks, and docks (Rumex, Polygonum) lack them. These plants must therefore find highly fertile soils. But if they do, they can flourish exceedingly, since they do not have to transfer resources to the mycorrhizae. They have thus become common weeds in gardens and in uplands fertilized by nitrogen in car exhaust and other air pollution.

Gut Microbiota

            Gut microbiota turn out to have major effects on eating and metabolism. They profoundly affect digestion. Ours evolved along with us, so are as close to those of chimpanzees and gorillas as we ourselves are to those apes (Moeller et al. 2016).

Those in the lower gut even digest some cellulose and other long-chain molecules unavailable to us otherwise (Gentile and Weir 2018). Some encourage their host humans to eat more. Some signal pleasure in consumption of fat, others delight in sugars, amino acids, and food in general; thus the gut biota greatly influence consumption (Li et al. 2022). Many, many, are known to be there and to interact with us and with each other, but we do not know how or why; probes demonstrate an incredible wealth of little-known interactions (Sonnenburg and Bäckhed 2016; Sonert et al. 2024).

We once had many more cellulose-digesting micros, but domestication and then industrialization have led to a steadily declining number of species and individuals; at least we have gotten some new ones from domestic livestock (Morais et al. 2024).

Some affect the circadian rhythm cycle. Some may even make us exercise more. Mice with certain microbiota (species unclear) exercise five times as much as ordinary mice, and inoculating germ-free mice with exercise-prone mouse microbiota make the (previously) germ-free ones exercise vigorously (Pennisi 2022).

Related to this is the fact that the gut’s nerves connect directly to the brain, telling it the state of nutrition and digestion, and what the gut microbiota are up to (Kaelberer et al. 2018). We literally think with our intestines. They order the brain around. They have the same neurochemical signallers we do—GABA, serotonin, dopamine, etc.—and that hits the vagus nerve. Mice with cut vagus gut nerves do not get the effects (Sanders 2016). Thus, the gut microbiota have a significant share in our thoughts, a fact that should be of interest to philosophers.

            Gut microbiota are profoundly influenced by lifestyle and food. Aashish Jha and colleagues (2018) found that in groups that shifted from hunting-gathering to agriculture in recent centuries, the gut flora tracks the shift. Those that are still basically hunter-gatherers have a distinctive flora, totally lost by those settled for a couple of hundred years, with those more recently settled being intermediate. Water matters as much as food; drinking from wells versus drinking from streams has much to do with it. Seasonal changes in diet also cause variety; the Hadza of Tanzania, who have an extremely rich and diverse microbiota, change it with the seasons as their diet seasonally shifts from berries and fruits to game and honey (Smits et al. 2017). The microbiome is shared widely, and people in nearby villages have similar biota, though this differs with the amount of contact (Beghini et al. 2025).

Malnutrition leads to weakened, imbalanced gut flora that makes the situation worse; transplanted into mice, gut flora from malnourished human children leads to malnutrition and poor growth in the mice (Blanton et al. 2016; Blanton, Barrett, et al. 2016). Mice raised germ-free and undernourished children both benefit from having healthy gut microbiota introduced, and then from eating food that nourish this healthy biota, including chickpea, banana, soy, and peanut flours (Gehrig et al. 2019).

Sugary drinks, among their other bad qualities, stimulate the wrong kind of gut biota. `They feed Erysipelotrichaceae bacteria, which kill the good bacteria that increase helper cells that reduce gut absorption of lipids (Nature 2022). Melissa Gutschall, among many others, warns us against “fruit juice” that is really mostly sugar. She notes that 37% of American children have cavities, rising to 58% by adolescence (Gutschall 2024:124, 133)..

Babies raised with the diverse microbiota of traditional upbringing (including vaginal birth and nursing) are healthier generally and have fewer allergies, with gut microbiota as a clear factor (Denworth 2024).

Gut microbiota can turn hostile in conditions of malnutrition. Poor nutrition also gives unpleasant microbes a foothold. Kwashiorkor (an aggravated form of protein deficiency) in particular seems associated with bad-acting microbiota (Ley 2013). The immune system actually recognizes the “good” microbiota and protects them from immune responses (Lyu et al. 2022).

It now appears that they can even damage the children of fathers with bad biota. At least in mice, major damage (experimentally induced by laxatives and antibiotics) led to “impaired leptin signalling, altered testicular metabolite profiles and remapped small RNA payloads in sperm. As a result, dysbiotic fathers trigger an elevated risk of in utero placental insufficiency, revealing a placental origin of mammalian intergenerational effects.” Young had increased risk of “low birth weight, severe growth restriction and premature mortality” (Argow-Demboba et al. 2024). In other words, the father’s contribution to the embryo leads to poor development of the placenta (the downstream half of which is produced by the embryo), and possibly even to the baby itself, which in turn leads to poor nutrition of the embryo and poor development thereafter.

Fermentation

            The Great Book of fermentation in food is Sandor Ellix Katz’ monumental work, The Art of Fermentation (2012). This bookcovers the entire world, and all the dozens of microorganisms that people use to turn inedible resources into edible ones, save edible ones by pickling, make more nourishment, or otherwise improve on natural gifts. Fermentation is indeed one of humanity’s most impressive arts.

            Apes have consumed fermented fruits for millions of years, explaining our high tolerance for alcohol. We probably came early to other fermented tastes. Preservation by pickling, leavening, souring, and other fermentive processes is universal in agricultural societies and far from unknown among hunter-gatherers. Keeping meat by putting it in a cold stream or spring preserves it but allows some pleasant fermentation.

Lactobacillus delbrueckii var. bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus, the main bacteria in yogurt, are domesticated–genunely transformed by artificial selection. So are Aspergillus oryzae¸ a fungus critical to East Asian ferments; Saccharomyces cerevisiae, wine yeast; and other fungal fermenters. The extreme importance of these domesticated microorganisms in human nutrition has never been properly assessed, though Katz’ book goes a long way to filling the need.

Yogurt is made from milk that is heated and then cultured; the bacteria thrive on heat. Milk for buttermilk originally was churned to remove the butter, then sterilized but cooled, and fermented by more cool-tolerant bacteria. It was a common drink from Europe through the Middle East to India. It is now, in the western world, produced by sterilizing milk and then fermenting it with Lactococcus lactis as well as Lactobacillus delbrueckii var. bulgaricus and various other ferments (Mendelson 2022; Wikipedia). The ferments produce lactic acid, which both inhibits spoilage and provides a sour taste that most of us enjoy.

In India, it and related products are lassi in Hindi, and are beaten up with a bit of salt to produce a wonderfully cooling drink. Mango lassi was once mango slices beaten up in buttermilk, a heavenly drink if there ever was one, but now in American restaurants serving India’s food it tends to be commercial yogurt blended up with commercial mango juice—oversweet and low on taste.

Buttermilk and other sour milk products were the ferment of choice in western Europe and America until the mid-20^th century, when yogurt swept the field. It was popularized initially by Elie Metchnikoff (1845-1916), the discoverer of the functioning of the immune system (for which he won a Nobel prize in 1908). One Stamen Grigorov, a Bulgarian, introduced him to yogurt and its health potential, and Metchnikoff became a convert. A pioneer of gerontology, he publicized it in his book The Prolongation of Life (1908), and further publicity came from his widow’s adoring biography of him, The Life of Elie Metchnikoff (1921). It slowly gained traction as a health food, and then exploded in the 1950s as health faddists and hucksters got wind of its potential for attracting many dollars from the gullible and the enthusiastic. It turned out to accord with world tastes, and soon developed many varieties, as well as the now-universal sweetened and flavored forms, most of which are essentially yogurt-flavored sugar.

Another widespread sour milk product is kefir. The word probably derives from one or more languages of the Caucasus (Wikipedia, “Kefir”). This is similar to yogurt, using the same basic L. delbrueckii, but contains various other ferments, depending on the region. Wikipedia mentions L. kefiranofaciens and other Lactobacilli, Kazachstania turichensis, and yeasts including Candida kefyr and the familiar Saccharomyces cerevisiae. It dominates the sour milk scene in much of the Middle East and central Asia. It is often dried, and then used as a starter for more kefir or as a food in its own right. It makes an excellent portabl food with high nutritional value and long storage capability. Under its Mongolian name of aarul, it fueled the Mongol hordes as they rode out to conquer the world, and is still a basic staple of Mongolia—one of the main protein sources. Concentrated kefir, with much of the moisture drained out, is lebni (laban, labni, etc., depending on dialect; the word is Arabic). Chopped garlic and herbs, and often chopped cucumber, is added to produce a side dish wildly popular from Greel tzatziki to Indian dehei raita, dehei being the word for curds in general. These resemble kefir but are complex beyond description in microbiota—are dehei in Hindi.

Kumis (koumiss, kumys, from Turkic qymyz or kımız) is a Central Asian drink, basically buttermilk made from mare milk, or in a pinch donkey milk. It is the classic drink of the Turkic and Mongol horse nomads. Since it depends on the mares’ giving birth and raising their foals, it is largely confined to summer; the mares foal in spring, and for a few months the milk must go entirely to the foals. Today, there is a dairying industry, and kumys is somewhat liberated from its tie to summer. The basic fermentation is by Lactobacillus spp., but yeasts are introduced in the starter, and thus the beverage is mildly alcoholic and also somewhat carbonated. It resembles buttermilk mixed with weak beer. Concentrating the alcohol by freezing, distilling, or otherwise produced “black” kumis, with higher alcoholic content. “Koumiss” was popular in the United States around 1900 (Mendelson 2022), but failed to catch on.

Penicillium roqueforti, the organism that grows in Roquefort cheese and gives it its flavor and color,goes back to the Bronze Age in Euro caves. Roquefort is produced at only one place: the village of Roquefort, halfway down a huge limestone cliff in south-central France. The drive down to it can be hair-raising. Here, natural caves in the limestone have been enlarged and shaped into cheese-making sites. Local sheep milk is cultured, and the cheese is aged, improving notably with aging.

Aspergillus oryzae is the national microorganism of Japan; it and closely-related Aspergillus spp. are the basis of koji. They hydrolyze raw starch, which Saccharomyces does not do. Saccharomyces cerevisiae may have started on oak trees. Saccharomyces and Lactobacillus show up in 2500-year-old millet breads in China. Grape wine is at least 7000 years old. The Chinese mummy cheese has the usual yogurt-type microbiota (Warriner 2022).

Lactobacillus is the wonderful workhorse of human fermentation technology. It is basic to everything from soy sauce to salami, from cheese to sourdough bread, from sauerkraut to kimchi. Life would be far less tasty without it, to say nothing of its value in preservation, due mostly to its production of lactic acid, a very effective preservative agent. Many species exist; new ones keep turning up. San Francisco’s famous sourdough bread uses its own species, described as Lactobacillus sanfrancisco. (Alas, this bread has fallen on evil days; it has lost popularity to whole-grain breads, and the real old-time sour loaf is very hard to find.)

            The long-standing problem of lactose tolerance remains with us. All mammal infants produce lactase, to break down lactose (milk sugar) into easily-digested glucose and galactose. After infancy, most animals—obviously not cats, or some others—lose their lactase production, and can no longer get benefit from lactose. In humans, the ability is lost around age 6, following which drinking more than about 250 cc of milk at a time is apt to produce bloating, gas, and diarrhea, though this depends on poorly-understood individual factors. In Europe, Arabia, and East Africa, over the last 5000 years or so, people evolved lifelong production of lactase, as a way to live to a great extent on fresh milk.

The mystery is that this ability never arose in most of the Near East or in India or Central Asia, in spite of dependence on dairying and a great deal of gene flow from the west, allowing a gradient of adult lactase production from almost 100% in west Europe to almost zero in China. China once had a major dairying tradition, though, and still has a considerable one, even using fresh milk; people space consumption to avoid getting more than 250 cc at once (my observation, plus consulting with Miranda Brown, the expert on Chinese traditional dairy products).

            The Near East, Central Asia, and India depend for dairying on processing techniques that break down lactose, usually into lactic acid. Lactobacillus bacteria do that, most famously L. delbrueckii ssp. bulgaricus. So do a few other microorganisms, including Streptococcus thermophilus and the yeast Kluyveromyces lactis (Rosenstock et al. 2021:S257). The one that matters is L. delbrueckii ssp. bulgaricus, involved in producing yogurt, most cheese, sour cream, and many other products. A problem with it is that the form of lactic acid it produces (the levo form) is not available to digestion by human infants, though adults can manage it. This raises the question: Why didn’t all Europe buy into this technology and avoid the human costs of evolving lifelong lactase? Presumably, a lot of people died, or at least failed to reproduce, in the process of such rapid evolution.

            In 1975, Frances James proposed that north and west European dairy fermentation specialized in sour milk, as opposed to yogurt, because of temperature: the sour milks of that area are prepared at room temperature, often of cool rooms, while yogurt requires at least initial heating of the milk to 40 or 50 C, and often continued heat.

            Beginning with this insights, Eva Rosenstock, Julia Ebert, and Alisa Scheibner (2021) wrote a monumental paper on dairying in west Eurasia. The paper requires detailed summary here. First the milks of available animals are considered. “The characteristic caseins in sheep and goat milk produce firmer curds than cattle milk” (S257), but cattle milk has larger fat globules which cause the separation of cream at the top. Horse and donkey milk has more lactose and does not form curds. They omit reindeer milk, but it is high in sugars and fats.

            The hot, dry southeast European and Near Eastern climate causes milk to spoil unless thus treated. North and west Europe are cool enough (except, often, in summer) to allow souring cultures to develop without the milk spoiling if left unheated.

            Any raw milk, anywhere, can carry Brucella, cause of the deadly disease brucellosis—formerly common in Europe and still common in Ethiopia. Tuberculosis can also be spread in milk. Louis Pasteur discovered the bacteria, and solved the problem by getting people to heat the milk, not enough to cook it but enough to kill the bacteria; pasteurization remains universal today in industrial settings.

            The various lactic-acid microorganisms are selected and propagated. Domestication of Lactobacillus was as important as the domestication of many food crops. Our friend L. d. bulgaricus does best at 40-50 C, so a marriage made in heaven is using it to treat milk that could not be left in any case. Conveniently, Lactococcus lactis will not only thrive at lower temperatures, but will even provide a small amount of lactose breakdown, and since the resulting lactic acid is both levo- and dextrorotary, it is available to all (Rosenstock et al. 2021:S259).

            Lactose tolerance evolved independently in Arabia among bedouins, who herd camels and used to live largely on camel milk. It will not solidify with Lactobacillus treatment, so does not make good yogurt or cheese; people had to evolve the ability to drink it straight. Urban and farm people of those areas usually lack the ability. Still other genes evolved in East Africa among the cattle nomads there, such as the Maasai, who depend heavily on fresh milk (Reilly 2013).

            At some point in the history of stockraising, cheese was invented. It can be either acid-set or rennet-set. The former uses lactic acid, or introduced acids like vinegar and lemon juice, to coagulate the protein fraction in the milk. Rennet uses nature’s way: the enzyme rennet is used by animals to coagulate milk in their stomachs. It is thus extracted from calf stomachs or from the abomasum (forestomach) of a ruminant animal, usually a cow. (Rennet cheeses are banned in strict kosher diets, because the rennet comes from meat; S266.) Most of our familiar cheese are rennet cheeses. They must be salted in preparation. Cheese is usually made from whole milk, but sometimes from milk after the butter is churned out.

            The remaining liquid after cheesemaking is whey, usually fed to animals, but in the Near East and Central Asia generally dried and made into a hard substance known as qara qurut in Turkic languages. Qara means “black,” qurut or qrut refers to dried milk. Dried (but often full-fat) yogurt qrut, called aaruul in Mongolian, is a standard food in the Near East, Central Asia, and northwest China. It is often offered to guests in hospitality. Dried whey products include whey cheeses like low-fat ricotta and Swiss sig (Rosenstock et al. 2021:S61).

            Rosenstock and her group point out that milk, and infant animals feeding on it, are—like carnivores—at a higher trophic level than adult herbivores. They take the herbivores’ food and go further, producing new protein from it.

            They shift to archaeology, which has been revolutionized in recent decades by development of ways to analyze milk products in ancient pots, boxes, baskets, and other items. (They have a long list of the advantages and disadvantages of various methods, S262.) Milking probably goes back to early domestication of animals, around 10,000-12,000 years ago, and can thus be demonstrated back to 8400 years ago, in Mesopotamia (S 263). It was probably common by then. Agriculture and herding came early to southeast Europe, but “Europe witnessed a major standstill of the Neolithic expansion until around 4000 to 3500 BCE,” when it spread rapidly to previously marginal areas in the north, west, and mountainous center. About this time, wooly sheep were developed; wild sheep do not have wool—it was developed by selective breeding. Bees were domesticated. Figs and olives were grown as tree crops (S264). In the next millennium, lifelong lactase may have come to central and western Europe with massive immigrations from the east, but it has not shown up in genetic studies until the 1^st millennium CE.

            About this time, history kicks in, with written records of dairying providing names for milk, cheese, and the like in ancient Egypt, to say nothing of archaeological finds of the cheese itself (S264). After this, dairying, milk processing, and cheesemaking all developed rapidly. The origin of butter making is obscure, but one suspects it was early; churning is not really necessary—one can simply shake a bag of milk for a long time. Butter provided a soft fat otherwise hard to get in cold parts of Europe, where animal fat got hard fast and vegetable fats could not grow. This is why chicken schmaltz and goose grease are famously identified with East European Jewish cooking; they could not use butter in meals with meat involved. Jews in the Mediterranean had olive and sesame oils.

            So, to return to our initial problem, heating milk and making yogurt was hard to do and not really necessary in north and central Europe, so lactase persistence evolved. People without lactase persistence can drink milk without too much suffering, and get the benefits of the protein, vitamins, and water, but in a famine they are in trouble; their problems with digesting milk sugars might spell doom in a milk-dependent society. This goes double for sick people, and still more for sick children above weaning age. Drinking milk persisted for thousands of years before lactase persistence started to become common, 5000 years ago; it then very rapidly spread to near-universality in west, central and north Europe, as well as East Africa, and became common in Europe and parts of the Middle East. Famine, disease, and extreme milk dependence are strongly suspected (Handwerk 2022).

There was also the benefit to infants, who could not get full nutrition from yogurt. A few groups in northern central Asia use largely cool-weather souring, yet mostly lack lactase persistence; they cope anyway, by spacing consumption and probably by gut flora adaptation (S269). Lactase persistence is found in 15 to 54% of people in eastern Europe, 62-86% in central and western Europe, 89-96% in Scandinavia and the British Isles. In India, 63% in northern India show persistence, but it is down to 23% in the south and east, where hot weather makes milk almost impossible to keep except as yogurt, so no reason for lactase persistence ever surfaced. In northeastern Africa one pastoral group shows 64% persistence (and probably some run well above that), while a neighboring agricultural group has only 20% (Gerbault et al. 2011).

Lactose fermentation also gives us sausage, at least the sour-tasting ones like salami; Martin Adams notes that the spicing typical of sausages has empirically been developed to assist: “Extracts of clove, cardamom, ginger, celery seeds, cinnamon, and turmeric, all with relatively high manganese content, have been shown to stimulate lactic acid fermentation…it is thought that manganese helps protect LAB, lacking the enzyme superoxide dismutase, from the damaging effects of reactive oxygen species….” Sausages are preserved by creating an environment in which bacteria and fungi/yeasts develop, each of which has some level of spoilage prevention (Adams 2010:314-316).

Other fermentations involve a whole host of yeasts and other fungi, as well as various bacteria. Alcohol is largely the product of various strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, wine and beer yeast. The winemaking strain, like the wine grape, is native to the eastern Black Sea, allowing the Georgians to make a believable claim for inventing wine as we know it today. Wine from cactus and other fruit was independently invented in the New World by Native Americans. Many other species of Saccharomyces, as well as other yeasts and fungi, enter into brewing. Euro-American ferments are usually simple, but Asian ones, from Himalayan local beers to Chinese soy pastes, involve many species and genera, some poorly known.

Brewing involves mashing up the item in question with water. This holds for making wine, where the simple juice of the fruit is enough. For soybeans (to brew soy sauce and paste) or other hard seeds, boiling is necessary first. Barley for beer requires yet another step: sprouting, to get the barley shoot to convert starch to maltose. Then the barley is baked to stop further growth, boiled or steamed into a mash, and brewed with introduced beer yeasts. Beer is also made from any grain, starchy root, and even starchy fruit like bananas; banana beer is extremely widespread and popular in Africa.

A further step is distillation—heating the fermented alcoholic drink till the alcohol evaporates and can be condensed by a cooler. Ideally, this will be some form of long tube or coil, allowing the “heads and tails” to be discarded and only the middle distillate kept. The lightest fraction—poisonous methanol—evaporates first, and must be eliminated. Then the ethanol, which is what we want, comes off. Last come the “tails”—heavier alcohols such as isopropyl—again bad for humans. They must be thrown out.

Distilled grain makes vodka if not aged, whiskey if aged. (The story that vodka is made from potatoes is true only of some home brews.) The original whiskey, or whisky if Scotch (the Scots must insist on their own spelling), is made from barley and sometimes oats. American whiskey is often made from rye, but Bourbon and other central-United States whiskeys are made from corn. Some makers add wheat for softness or rye for flavor. Chinese grain alcohol, generally made from millets and sorghum, is technically a vodka, but is known as bai jiu, “white [ie. clear] alcoholic liquor.” The stronger forms are san xiu, “triple distilled,” pronounced samsu in several languages. Aged whiskey commands a market, and C14 dating is now used to expose frauds. A whiskey said to be made in 1863 turned out to have been made between 2007 and 2014 (Nature 2020a).

Sugar cane alcohol is technically rum, but gets sold as vodka or whiskey by dealers cutting corners. It is produced widely in sugar-growing areas. Dark rum is colored and flavored with molasses from the sugar refineries. Distilled fruit alcohol is brandy, usually made from wine but often from apples, such as the calvados of Normandy and the apple jack of America. It is also made from peaches, cherries, pears, and potentially any sweet fruit—even tropical fruits have often been used.

Fad Diets

            The modern diet is notoriously bad for you. As noted above, it includes far too much sugar, especially fructose. It includes more fat than we need, It is based on highly processed foods. Worst of all, it includes a vast range of chemicals quite alien to the supposed foods. Some are artificial flavorings, but at least these are usually based on real flavors. Some are preservatives, in quantities enough to get some foods described as “embalmed.” Some are colors, many of which turn out to be carcinogenic; they are sometimes banned when this is found, sometimes not, and new untested compounds often appear in spite of laws forbidding untested ingredients. The most highly processed foods, involving not only processing in the narrow sense but also adding lots of fat, sugar, and salt, are baked goods. Cookies top the list, followed by muffins and eventually bread. At the other end of the list of grain foods comes pasta, which is processed in that it is ground and shaped, but at least has no added evils (Youmshajekian 2025). Seafood and spices are not usually much processed, nor is meat except for butchering.

            The modern diet is all too well known as a cause of metabolic syndrome, leading to diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and various deteriorative conditions. The most forthright critic, Marion Nestle, has devoted a lifetime to exposing the ugly underbelly of the American food industry, which tends to sell bad nutrition and bad foods with an unhealthy dose of dishonesty about their safety and the dangers of the alternatives. (From a whole library of Nestle books, we may note only the most recent, Nestle 2015 and 2018. Out of a vast further literature, one may note Outlive by Peter Attia, 2023, as a pretty good introduction to why the modern diet is especialy bad when combined with lack of exercise and other modern shortcomings.)

            One result has been powering up the ancient art of inventing fad diets. The first fad diet was probably invented in the Pleistocene by a shaman a couple of hundred thousand years ago. By the time of the ancient Greeks, we had Pythagoras forbidding beans (possibly because of favism), others advocating meat, others revering bread as sacred, and Porphyry concluding that we should be vegetarians because eating animals makes us act like predatory beasts. The ancient Chinese had already thought of the idea that everybody who depends on grains dies, so maybe we should simply not eat grains—especially since the alternatives, pine seeds and other nutrient-packed seeds, did sometimes provide better health. Unfortunately, the eaters of these died too eventually, in spite of countless legends of people achieving immortality or at least very long life. (As the saying goes, “everyone who confuses correlation with causation eventually dies.”)

            Fad diets never stopped. In the United States they hit a high point in the 19^th century, when people got enough white flour and white sugar to realize such processed foods were not ideal. Whole grain, vegetarian, and abstemious diets came into play (Deutsch 1977). My wife worked for decades at a Seventh-Day Adventist instution, and though not an Adventist she had to live and eat by the code a good deal of the time: whole grains, minimal or no meat and certainly no pork, no alcohol, no tobacco, no indulgents of such sort. There is a great deal to be said for this diet, and we still shop at the market and eat a lot of whole grains, beans, and vegetables. In practice, Adventists tend to use a great deal of sugar, to skimp the vegetables, and to cheat on the meat, but that’s not the diet’s fault.

            Then in the 1950s came Frances Moore Lappé and many imitators, promoting essentially the same diet (vegetarian, whole grains…) but also making a gospel of organic food. Lappé had less than ideal knowledge of either ecology or nutrition, and her “diet for a small planet” (Lappé   ) produced many a vitamin deficiency, particularly in devotees’ children, and did only some good (but, indeed, real good) for the environment.

It did spread the already-known ideal of organic food. Organic food is raised without artificial fertilizer or pesticides, and is indeed an extremely good idea ecologically (see above). In the markets, though, it differs from conventional food mainly in being more expensive. Unless you know and trust your dealer, it may not even be organic. Or it may be saved from pests by pesticides blowing in from a conventional farmer’s land. Conventionally produced food is now usually grown without heavy pesticide use before marketing. Still, organic is safer, on balance, though dubiously worth the extra money, especially for crops like wheat that are raised with minimal chemicals in any case.

            What these critiques of fad diets fail to realize is that the modern diet worldwide really is pretty unhealthy, and getting worse over time. The fad diets take a good idea and run too far with it. They often become far more unhealthy than the ordinary American diet, largely by limiting foods to the point at which adequate nutrients can only be gained by heavy use of vitamin and mineral supplement pills. One can move along a continuum from apologists for the ordinary diet (Deutsch, Chrzan and Cargill) to critics who still follow science and recognize we need to eat a variety of foods (Appia, Nestle) to mild faddists who still allow us decent nutrition (the more sane Paleo advocates) to outright faddists who restrict diet so much that followers cannot maintain adequate nutrition.

PART II. FOOD AND FOOD REGIONS    

The great food regions of the world can be defined by staple foods: the dominant foods—not just one, but a complex—in each area. Famously, the Native American agricultural system was and is defined by the “Three Sisters,” maize, beans, and squash. Similar integrated complexes define other regions.

This is to some extent arbitrary, and of course the systems grade into each other, blending at the boundaries. Any sharp lines drawn around our systems are arbitrary if necessary mapmakers’ conventions.

For this book, I define the following agricultural regions:

1. The classic wheat-barley-livestock realm of the Near/Middle East, first in time and first in worldwide spread as a system. This system moved slowly into Central Asia, a hunting-gathering world, which persists in Siberia.
2. Inevitably, I need to separate out Europe as a separate section, since its food history has been treated so extensively, and all too often with very little reference to the Middle East. Agriculture spread first to the south, then to the center, finally to the north. Also, extensions of the Near Eastern system to European colonies in the Americas and Oceania are treated with those regions, since in the Americas they necessarily came to terms with local foods and adopted them; North America produces far more maize than wheat.
3. Next in line, the East Asian system, based on rice, millets, and soybeans. This system began as two separate systems in north and south China; these fused early and spread to Korea and Japan.
4. The Indian subcontinent, which adopted both the above systems, integrated them, and added their own touches. Many variations on spicy themes emerged in the different regions.
5. Southeast Asia, originally based on root and fruit crops, later adding rice. A very special extension of this is the root and tree system of Oceania, covering the most area of any agricultural system except the first, but supporting relatively few people on small islands scattered over the vast Pacific Ocean.
6. Sub-Saharan Africa, based on its own local grains and roots.
7.  Native Mexico and Central America, based on the aforementioned “three sisters.” Many variants arose, and hunter-gatherer cultures persisted at the margins in the north.
8. South America, which added the all-important root crops: manioc, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and others. Highland and lowland South America had quite different systems, each with variants.
9. North America north of Mexico, with its own domesticated grains and vegetables in some areas, hunting-gathering maintained and intensified elsewhere.

To these we may add the hunting-gathering cultures, which preserve even today the way of

life that supported all humans for millions of years. Hunter-gatherers eat almost anything edible in their environments, but usually live on plant foods, especially seeds and roots, and on small animals. Only those in the far north live mostly on mammal meat. Many coastal groups live mostly on fish. These cultures will be discussed in the relevant geographic sections.

I will focus largely on the areas I know best: China, Europe and the Middle East, and Mexico. Comparative notes on other regions will be included, but I make no attempt to be exhaustive or even close.

Near East

            This area comprises dry Asia and neighboring North Africa, from Iran and Afghanistan west. The present chapter includes special sections on central Asia and Siberia.

Over a million years or more, during periods when Arabia was moist and cooler, people radiated out and settled widely. This occurred aroud 400, 300, 200, 130-75, and 55 thousand years ago, as shown by stone tools datable by type. In moist times, central western Arabia and the Salalah area had woodland, as well as high Yemen, and most of the peninsula was grassland (Groucutt et al. 2021).

During this period, and even earlier, hominins immigrated from Africa in successive waves. First, so far as we know, were Homo erectus, who appear in Georgia about 2 million years ago, and then in China and Indonesia not long after, indicating successful colonization and rapid spread. They are associated with huge, heavy hand-axes in the west, choppers and chopping tools in the east. The latter are heavy cobbles chipped to a simple edge, useful for bashing game or for working wood and bamboo; it seems likely that much better and more complex tools were made from those materials after initial working by choppers.

Homo erectus was a large, tough human with heavy skull bones. Brain size developed slowly from not much more than half modern size to about ¾ of our brain size. The species seem to have died out without issue in Asia, unless they engendered the tiny island hominins with small brains in island Southeast Asia, Homo floresiensis on Flores and Homo  in the Philippines. These persisted until relatively recent times.

In Africa, Homo erectus evolved into later humans with larger brains and less heavy skulls, classified under several confusing names. These also radiated into the Near East and thence the rest of Eurasia. Homo antecessor and Homo heidelbergensis are the names used, the latter one for extensively found relics with much more sophisticated tool types. Heidelbergensis even made very good spears from hard wood; some survived for over 300,000 years, to be discovered in a bog in Germany a few years ago.

The evolution of these mid-Pleistocene hominins into more modern types is still mysterious, but probably took place in Africa, like the other advances in human evolution. In any case, the later Pleistocene saw the Near East dominated by Neanderthal humans, Homo sapiens neanderthalis. (They could and did interbreed with modern humans, thus showing they are the same species, in spite of usual terminological differentiation.) This large, bony, muscular human successfully hunted huge elephants and other Pleistocene megafauna in Europe, the Near East, and Siberia. They also created diverse and beautifully crafted stone tools, and some early cave art.

In central Asia they met a related but quite different hominin. This latter is new to science. Neanderthal remains were being excavated from Denisova Cave in south Siberia. A young girl’s finger bone turned up, and was duly sent to Svante Paabo’s lab, the leading site at the time for analyzing fossil human genetics. They ran a test, expecting another Neanderthal. The result was truly weird. They assumed an error in the process (such readings were few and innovative at the time), so they ran it again. Same result. Something must be contaminating the lab…but another run and then another produced the same weird reading. By now “a wild surmkise” had entered the lab: We may have a totally new type of human here. And so it proved. Denisovans have now turned up as genetic remnants, and one or two fossils, all over eastern Asia.

Neanderthals and Denisovans contributed to modern human genetics, via  a good deal of mixing. They contributed possibly some disease resistance, and other traits. In Tibet, Denisovans adapted to high altitudes, and passed some of these adaptive genes on to modern East Asians.

Modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, got into the Near East before 100,000 years ago, but little is known of their early presence. Perhaps they did not persist. More likely, the record was fragmented by such events as the spectacular eruption (or eruptions) 74,000 years ago, that dug the trench now filled by Lake Toba in Sumatra. In any case, by 70,000 years ago, people abounded in the warmer parts of Asia and were beginning to probe north toward Europe. They became a visible presence there somewhat after 50,000 years ago, and extended in the meantime throughout eastern Asia, into the Indonesian islands. By 20,000 years ago they were not only in Siberia but had reached the New World, moving rapidly south; of this more in the relevant chapter.

A long period of hunting and gathering followed. In the Near East, game was till abundant, partly because deserts were less extensive than now. Much of the land was green, varying considerably according to glacial and interglacial periods. Here we meet the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the vast ocean dynamic that creates much of Eurasia’s weather. Warm water flows north in the Gulf Stream, warming north Europe. Cold water flows south in the Labrador Current and other cold subsurface streams. Being heavier, it sinks under the warm water, to surface again far downstream (mostly in the South Atlantic or even farther afield). Meanwhile, cold water wells up off Morocco, from the deep sea. Warmth moves north over the ocean, from the tropics, with warm air and rain. The temperature of the ocean from France to Morocco can fluctuate. The important result for humans is that the extent of warmth southward determines rainfall over all western Eurasia and North Africa. A warm south means more rain in the southerly parts of west Eurasia, including the Near East. If the warmth shifts north, so does the rain, and Europe gets a very wet year. The prevailing strong west winds of the temperate latitudes drive the rain far inland; even far west China (the western mountains of Xinjiang) benefit from a southward extension of the rain.

Hunting cultures in Eurasia created, among other things, some of the world’s greatest art. The cave paintings of Europe are often anatomically accurate, and more often stunningly beautiful. It has been observed that in terms of sheer beauty and effect on the viewer, art was as “fine” in those days as at any time since.

The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) is usually capitalized, because it was such a dramatic event in human affairs. Temperatures sank to one of the lowest points seen since the “snowball earth” days hundreds of millions of years ago. The worst time was about 20,000-18,000 years past. Atmospheric CO₂ now worries us because it is rising above 400 parts per million. In the LGM it was less than half of that. Cycles of warming and cooling had persisted through the Pleistocene, with CO₂ peaking around 300 or a bit less during interglacials and sinking to or below 200 in glacial phases. It stood around 270 in historic times. During the LGM, ice sheets covered all northern Europe and the mountain regions of Asia. Sea levels were hundreds of feet lower, with so much water tied up in land ice. Rain was greater in many temperate zones, but worldwide it was less, for the same reason: so much water was frozen. Much of dry Eurasia was wetter, but the Sahara was even larger and drier than now. Arabia, at least in the south, was wetter, and served as a human refugium, but much of the Near East was dry, cold, and barren.

Hunting in the nonglaciated parts of Europe was good, because moist steppe conditions created ideal habitats for mammoths, rhinoceroses, giant deer, and other megafauna, as well as smaller animals.

The Near East and Central Asia were generally less well off. Central Asia was drier than today. The Altai and Tibetan Plateau were frigid desert where not under ice; they cooled the lowlands. Hunting megafauna, a way of life in Europe, was inadequate; people chased gazelles and other smaller game, ate acorns and almonds, and foraged for seeds.

Warming after 18,000 years ago was fairly rapid. Even more rapid, in fact extremely sudden, was its reversal in the Younger Dryas event, from 12,900 to 11,700 years ago. (The name refers to the re-expansion of the arctic plant genus Dryas as cold conditions returned.) Temperatures in Greenland fell by 4-10 degrees C (Wikipedia, “Younger Dryas”). Outside of the North Atlantic world, the period was less dramatic; it may have been caused in part by cold fresh water from melting of the North American ice sheets, flooding into the North Atlantic and overriding the warm circulation of the Gulf Stream. In any event, Europe and the Near East were whipsawed: extreme cold, sudden warmth, then extreme cold again, then almost immediate rewarming to modern conditions, and then onward to even warmer years from 8000 to 6000 years ago.

This, combined with heavy hunting pressure by well-armed humans, destroyed the megafauna. People are usually reasonable about hunting, and come into a loose equilibrium with the game, but this wild fluctuation stressed the game and the hunters both, making it impossible to find an easy balance.

However, all was not lost. The Near East, unlike temperate Europe, had not been lush enough to have many megafauna at best. When it warmed and moistened after the Younger Dryas, the main effect was on plants, which poured in from refugia in the south. A combination of cooling and drying with human mismanagement has made almost all the Near East into desert, steppe, and brushland today, but much of it was downright lush in the early postglacial period, with extensive oak, cedar, and mixed forests on the uplands. Pathetically tiny relics of this forest in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and the high mountains of south-central Anatolia show what once was.

At Tel Tsaf, Israel. 14,000-year-old beer was found; this is the oldest drinking party on record (Archaeology News Network 2021).

With plants more numerous, people became much more dependent on them. Coinciding perfectly with the end of the Younger Dryas was the most momentous event in human history: the invention of agriculture. Anthropologists used to think that the wipeout of the megafauna made people turn to farming, but we now know that the megafauna die-off in Europe (and America, for that matter) did no such thing. Agriculture was invented in areas where the megafauna had been in short supply. Farming coincided with the rise in plant abundance.

People became dependent on gathering seeds, including wheat, barley, rye, peas, lentils, and other familiar plants. These naturally became the first to be planted. They also ate plenty of fruit, including pears, jujubes, olives, and, in the desert, dates. In cooler mountains grew wild almonds and other nuts. All of these were domesticated too, but more slowly, in view of their much longer generation times.

            Domestication of grains is usually first seen in selection for nonshattering rachises. The rachis is the tiny stalk attaching a grain to its stalk. In nature, it usually breaks when the grain is mature, so that the grain will roll or be carried by animals away from the parent plant, and thus grow without too much competition. Humans carried the stalks and grain back to their homes, thus automatically selecting the few nonshattering rachis bonds. Eventually, all domestic grains had nonshattering heads. Lentils, peas, and beans—the leguminous crops—have an equivalent in naturally breaking pods. Humans select for pods that stay closed.

            These marks of domestication show up around 10,000-12,000 years ago in the Near East. They are first recorded in the dry interior slopes of the Levantine mountains. Often, they occur near springs and streams, where people would naturally settle for the good water supply, and much later come to stay for the good soil and irrigation opportunities.

            Farming is notoriously a lot of work. Hunting and gathering is so pleasant that it remains a favorite hobby all over the world. The first two chapters of Genesis show very clearly what early Near Easterners thought of the matter. They are a story, compressed into a tale of two people in finite time, of expulsion from the paradise of hunting and gathering into the dreadful suffering of farming, where old Adam must win his bread by “the sweat of his brow.”

            Many grave minds have wondered why people would leave paradise for such a hell. The Bible implies it was the development of culture. The “tree of knowledge of good and evil” is not a real fruit tree. The Bible does not use imaginary things as images of real things, but always does the reverse. Eating the fruit of this metaphoric tree means developing a self-conscious moral code, independent of the happily innate self-regulation of wild primates.

            Modern speculations have generally done even less well. Most 19^th-century speculations were based on the idea that hunting and gathering paid so badly that people would naturally turn to agriculture as soon as they realized plants could grow from seeds. The problems with this are that, first, all hunter-gatherers know plants grow from seeds (one cannot miss that in the wild), and, second, hunting-gathering pays so well that many groups still do it, and manage a good living. A 20^th-century version assumed people were living off megafauna, hunted them out, and then had to turn to farming; we have seen why this idea fails. In no place in the world is exterminating megafauna followed by turning to agriculture; agriculture was always invented in areas that either had little to start with (not only the Near East, but also South America, New Guinea, and elsewhere), or preserved much of what they did have (China, southeast Asia). Many other ideas were proposed. It was even suggested that it was all an accident, because of the possibly accidental selection for nonshattering rachises (Rindos 1984). This did not explain why people kept planting more and working harder.

            For one thing, early agriculture does not pay well. It took thousands of years for grain in the Near East, China, and Mexico to be domesticated thoroughly enough to yield better than wild grain, if the wild grain was growing in ideal conditions. Early cultivated wheats and barley yielded the same 300-400 kg/ha as wild ones.

Two agreements were generally accepted. First, agriculture arose in what archaeologist Robert Braidwood called the “hilly flanks” of the interior Near East. Early sites stretch in a band from south-central Anatolia to Palestine and Jordan. Second, people found it desirable to concentrate more and more on small annual seeds, and eventually cultivate and then domesticate them.

A critically important site was Göbekli Tepe in southern Anatolia. This was an enormous community, almost a city, of hunter-gatherers, living by gathering wild wheat, barley, chickpeas, and other crops that would soon be domesticated. (It was probably only seasonally inhabited.) The wild ancestors of two of these—chickpeas and einkorn, an ancestral wheat—have been traced to the immediate area. This brought back memories of the long-ignored idea of Jane Jacobs (1984) that cities invented agriculture to feed their people. This idea had been dismissed at the time, because no large early settlements were known; cities arose, to everyone’s knowledge, well after 5000 years ago, when agriculture was already highly advanced and productive. Göbekli Tepe, and other large sites that began to turn up, suddenly made Jacobs’ idea look much better. However, very early plant domestication occurred widely in the Fertile Crescent, often in areas with extremely small settlements and low population densities.

There are two clues in the above brief summary. First, that note about “ideal conditions.” If ideal conditions are not met, selecting the right strains of crops and planting them in managed situations allows having them at hand. Sure enough, many small early farming settlements are in dry areas where they could take advantage of soils around springs and streams.

Second, if ideal conditions are approximated but settlements are really dense, it pays to plant grain as close to them as possible. You can have them ready to hand, and, probably more important, you can protect them from raiders and wild animals. Many habitats are folded together closely in the Middle East: woodland, conifer forest, riverine wetlands, lakes, marshes, deserts, steppes, shrublands, and intergrades between all these.

 This allowed a great deal of exchange and interdependence, as people shared products across ecological gradients, moved to protect what they had, learned about other zones, and above all found it very easy and tempting to plant items from one zone in another. Certainly, a part of domestication involved growing wheat, barley, and the other crops around oases in areas hotter and drier than the grasslands where those species were native.

This provides a neat explanation that fits the evidence. We await further research.

The classic “founder crops” of the earliest agriculture in the Near East were einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, barley, lentil, pea, bitter vetch, chickpea, and flax (Zohary and Hopf 1988; Zohary 2012).

It now appears that this was too specific. Slow progress toward agriculture involved long experimenting with these and other plants. Crops important later, such as fava beans, rye, and oats, were already being used and apparently subjected to some experimentation. The oats were wild; domestic oats came later, when two wild species, diploid A. longiglumis and tetraploid A. insularis, hybridized to produce our familiar A. sativa, a protein-rich grain with much potential. It is, for instance, a major source of soluble fibre, useful in fighting metabolic syndrome(Kamal et al. 2022; Paudel et al. 2021).

Tree crops were already used and managed; they have always been critical to Near Eastern farming. Domestication was a leisurely process (Arranz-Otaegui and Roe 2023).

Some early bread was found dating to 14,000 BCE, a time well before the origins of agriculture. Bread was made of the seeds of club-rush (Bolboschoenus glaucus), with small legumes, barley, oat, andeinkorn wheat. The flour was apparently carefully sifted, since no chaff appears in the bread, which has gas holes as if kneaded—certainly carefully made (Arranz-Otaegui et al. 2018).

A monumental neolithic village developed at Çatalhöyük, Türkiye, in a marshy area where a mountain stream flows out into the lowlands and spreads out in a delta. The area is now dry, but was wet in Neolithic times. The population was sizable over times, but probably only about 600-800 in any given year, not thousands (Kuijt and Marciniak 2024). It and other Neolithic early villages probably had many unoccupied houses at any one time, as modern villages do. The town lived on wheat and barley, with a few of the usual attendant crops.

Most of the languages in Europe, the Iranian world, and northern India are related, in the vast Indo-European language phylum. It first appeared in Anatolia, but recently there is a move to use Indo-Anatolian for the earliest ancestral form, which gave rise to Hittite and related languages. (To give some idea how close these languages all are, the Hittite for “water” is wadar. An unusual case, but you get the idea.) This early phylum may have started in Turkey south of the Caucasus, and broken up into the Anatolian languages around 4400-4000 BCE. There was already some mixing with Caucasus Mountains groups; a long genetic cline stretched from there to the Ukrainian steppes and then to the Volga River. Its genetic signature shows up in Anatolia by that period. Possibly the mix of Caucasus-Volga people, intruding into Anatolia, sparked the birth of the phylum. Farmers evidently moved up to steppes, already settled by rather mysterious farming cultures of the Trypillia and other cultures (Haggerty, Paul, et al. 2023; see also Ghalici et al. 2024).

By 4000 BCE, a mix of Caucasus-Volga people with local people of northern affinities created the Seredny Stih and then the Yamnaya (or Yamna) cultures. From 3700, climaxing around 3300, the Yamnaya exploded from their Ukraine source area, rapidly reaching Hungary on the west and Kazakhstan in the east. This appears to be the real Indo-European expansion. Indo-Anatolian had presumably been evolving rapidly into Indo-European forms. TheYamnaya mixed with locals—many derived from earlier Anatolian farmers—along the way. The Corded Ware and Bell-Beaker cultural groups emerged, almost certainly speaking the ancestors of our modern Indo-European languages: Germanic, Greek, Albanian, Slavic, Romance, and so forth. An earlier stream moved all the way across the steppes to establish the Tocharian languages of what is now western China. (The foregoing is a drastically simplified version of the involved story told in Lazaridis et al. 2025 and Nikitin et al. 2025. The senior figure behind both is the leading human geneticist David Reich.)

            Alcohol continued to be produced. Wine developed in the east Black Sea area, where the wine grape and the wine-making strain of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae are native. The Georgian word for wine, ghvino, is clearly related to Hebrew wainos, Latin vinum, and all the modern cognates. The earliest wine so far known from Georgia dates to 6000-5800 BCE, identifried from residue in a jar (McGovern et al. 2017). Many similar jars like it occur from then onward, showing widespread winemaking. Presumably they are the ancestors of the large ceramic qvavri now used for quality winemaking. Grapes and winemaking spread very fast, being well known in the ancient Near East. The Hebrew Bible records its extreme importance by the Bronze Age.

Another word that has lasted is buza, of very ancient origin, surviving in “booze.” A noteworthy history of alcohol in the Near East, Joseph El-Asmar’s The Milk of Lions (2020), concerns itself more with distillation, a much later event, but recognizes the early roots.

            The ancient Mesopotamians developed date wine, called shekaru in Akkadian, whence modern Hebrew sheker for ale and Yiddish shikker for “drunk”; the same Akkadian root may give us the word “cider” (Jurafsky 2014:75).

In ancient Mesopotamia, barley was the staple; einkorn, emmer and hexaploid wheat were used; pea, grasspea, chickpea, broadbean (rare), lentil, onion, garlic and other vegetables existed (Potts 1997). Sizable settlements developed by 4000 BCE, cities by 3000.

Early documents actually provide a number of recipes for ancient Mesopotamian food, as recorded by Jean Bottéro in The Oldest Cuisine in the World:  Cooking in Mesopotamia (2004).

            New data on this appeared in Food & Drink (online, Nov. 4, 2019), including recipes. One simple example is:

“Meat is used. You prepare water. You add fine-grained salt, dried barley cakes, onion, Persian shallot, and milk. You crush and add leek and garlic.”

Newly-found tablets add four dishes to those known to Bottero. “The four dishes culled from the list-style tablet also each have unique uses. Pashrutum, for example, is a soup one might serve someone suffering from a cold, Lassen said, though the meaning of this bland broth accented by leek, coriander and onion flavours translates as “unwinding”. Elamite broth (“mu elamutum”), on the other hand, is among two foreign (or “Zukanda”) dishes listed in the tablets….”

A full recipe is worth reproducing here:

“Tuh’u recipe

Ingredients:
1 lb leg of mutton, diced
½ c rendered sheep fat
1 small onion, chopped
½ tsp salt
1 lb beetroot, peeled and diced
1 c rocket, chopped
½ c fresh coriander, chopped
1 c Persian shallot, chopped
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 c beer (a mix of sour beer & German Weißbier)
½ c water
½ c leek, chopped
2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed

For the garnish:
½ c fresh coriander, finely chopped
½ c kurrat (or spring leek), finely chopped
2 tsp coriander seeds, coarsely crushed

Instructions: Heat sheep fat in a pot wide enough for the diced lamb to spread in one layer. Add lamb and sear on high heat until all moisture evaporates. Fold in the onion and keep cooking until it is almost transparent. Fold in salt, beetroot, rocket, fresh coriander, Persian shallot and cumin. Keep on folding until the moisture evaporates. Pour in beer, and then add water. Give the mixture a light stir and then bring to a boil. Reduce heat and add leek and garlic. Allow to simmer for about an hour until the sauce thickens.

Pound kurrat and remaining fresh coriander into a paste using a mortar and pestle. Ladle the stew into bowls and sprinkle with coriander seeds and kurrat and fresh coriander paste. The dish can be served with steamed bulgur, boiled chickpeas and bread.”

            The characteristic beehive oven was already known long before civilization. It is made from clay or brick. The fire is built in the oven and then raked out; the breads, stews, pizzas, and other foods cook in the residual heat. They start extremely hot, hundreds of degrees in temperature, and then cool slowly, Ths result is a crusty, even charred top and a slow-cooked interior, much liked by old-fashioned-oven enthusiasts. There are many of those; modern civilization has not even displaced them from New Mexico, where the Spanish introduced them in the 17^th century. There, they once produced sourdough bread of amazing quality, but the cultures are now hard to find. In west and central Asia and Mediterranean Europe, beehive ovens survive abundantly. They gave rise to the modern pizza oven, which has imitated with electricity the blazing start and slow cooling.

            One early invention, probably long in use by the time the above recipes were written, was the tinuru. The word evolved into the modern tandur (Sen 2016:31). This is a large oven, often sunk into the ground. A fire is built at the bottom. Ideally, the ash must be removed somehow. Breads are stuck to the walls, and later peeled off with a peelboard, a long-handled wooden paddle. Tandurs are usually pots about a metre deep, but they can be huge. I saw one in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in 1974 that was almost as big as a room. It was sunk into the ground. Retrieving breads from it was a true art. One had to use a very long and heavy peelboard, and any bread that fell was lost forever. There was nothing else to eat in town, but the bread was made from freshly-ground hard mountain wheat, and was among the finest bread I have ever tasted.

            The tandur became universal in Iran and Central Asia. It also spread to China along with the characteristic tandur bread, which became shaobing (“roasted cakes”) in Chinese. This bread is made from white flour and usually sprinkled with sesame seeds. Shaobing became small early on—a miniaturized Persian naan. The classic naan itself is small loaf size.

Contacts with the rest of Asia were already important in Mesopotamia from early times. Soybean, banana (probable), millet (unident. Panicoid), and turmeric, are found in dental calculus at Megiddo and Tel Erani, dating to the 2^nd millennium BCE. Staple foods there were wheat, sesame, and dates; the new exotic foods must have provided exciting variety (Scott et al. 2021).

Zebus—a separate species from the European and Near Eastern ox—appear in the Near East by the 3^rd millenn BCE; they are common in Egypt by the 16^th  century BCE. Chickens, originally from south China and southeast Asia, appear in the Near East about the same time. Citron, presumably from India, was common by the 1^st millennium. Pepper appears by 1300 BCE and cloves by 1700 BCE in Egypt and the Near East (Scott et al. 2021).

In ancient Egypt, the period just before the dynasties began was characterized by building subsistence on emmer, barley, peas, and lentils. By dynastic times (after 3100), flax is important; the Egyptians were famous for their linen clothing from then onward until cotton came to rule. Condiments like dill and oregano were used, becoming more important over time (Marinova et al. 2024).

The Epic of Gilgamesh (Nayeri 2018) records a good deal about ecology. Gilgamesh (the name belonged to an actual Sumerian king) was the quintessential city man, sophisticated, well-dressed, well-educated. He acquired a sidekick, Enkidu, who was the prototypic “wild man”—described in terms almost identical to those used for the yei, sasquatch, Bigfoot, and other imaginary forest fellows. He is, in fact, the first portrayal in literature of the stereotypic “savage.” The contrast of urban and rural is overdrawn to the point of satire. Both of them then go to raid the Cedar Forest, protected by a monstrous guard. We know from many sources that cedar forests were among the most valuable properties in the Near East, since the wood was by far the best in quality, necessary for ships and other goods. We even know the name of one actual forest guardian. King Nehemiah, in the Bible, ordered “…a letter unto Asaph the keeper of the king’s forest, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the palace…and for the wall of the city, and for the house that I shall enter into” (Nehemiah 2:8). Making these real, important, very human guards into monsters is another bit of urban arrogance in the Gilgamesh epic, otherwise one of the great literary achievements of all time.

       The importance of the Bible as an ecological text has been greatly underappreciated, thanks to poor knowledge of ecology by divines and poor knowledge of divinity by too many ecologists. What could be done was shown many years ago by a former shepherd, Phillip Keller, in a book called A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23. He explained how incredibly deep was the knowledge of sheepherding displayed in that short poem. Every verse of it required a chapter of explanation. The shepherd really does lead his flock beside still waters and to green pastures.

       In the Bible we first hear of tabooing many animals, notably including pigs and dogs, not only for food but, in the case of pigs, even for contact. They are unclean and polluting. Many reasons have been given for the suite of animals condemned.

       The earliest, and major, source for this is the Book of Leviticus, supposedly revealed by God to Moses, and incorporating much ancient material, though probably put in modern form around 500 BCE. The taboos on animals are found in Chapter 11 (repeated in Deuteronomy 14), which appears to preserve very old material. The taboos are of animals that chew the cud or similarly linger over vegetable food, but do not have cloven hoofs, like camels (they have pads, not hooves), “coneys” (hyraxes), and hares. Next come animals that have cloven hooves but do not chew the cud, like swine. Then come water creatures: those with fins and scales are clean, those without are not. Of birds, including bats, a list is provided that consists basically of eagles, hawks, vultures, and other predators. Finally, all animals that “creep, going upon all four” and close to the ground, are taboo, with the explicit exception of grasshoppers, locusts, and crickets, which are fine.

       A range of explanations have been offered for these taboos, and clearly they cannot be covered by one single explanation. The taboo on cuds and hooves is clearly part of a general ban in Leviticus and Deuteronomy on anything that seems to mix up two categories or violate categorization rules, as shown by Mary Douglas (1966). (The same rule outlaws wearing mixed-fibre garments, plowing with a mixed-species team, and homosexual activity—seen as a category violation.)

       The rest of the rules, and also the pig taboo, are neatly predicted by one factor: the tabooed creatures are all eaters of meat or carrion, as shown by Eugene Hunn (1979). Elsewhere in Leviticus it is made clear that blood is sacred to the Lord, and must be shed in ritual fashion. Otherwise it is intensely dangerous and polluting. This is why kosher butchering is such an extremely important aspect of Jewish rules, and also why halal butchering is so important in Islam, which maintained many of the Jewish food rules. Animals that live by eating other animals, or blood, or carrion—which pigs do, with enthusiasm—are tabooed. After that, a miscellany of crawling things is tabooed simply because they are not obviously clean feeders—as grasshoppers are.

        The pig taboo has been extensively discussed over time, notably by Frederick Simoons (1994) and Max Price (2021). They argue for multiple factors. Carleton Coon (1958) pointed out long ago that pigs are hard to herd, don’t like desert vegetation, are not useful for milk, need water and mud, and otherwise do not fit well with mobile desert-dwelling nomads. Wild pigs thrive and flourish in the riverine and forest lands of the Near East, however, and can be kept and herded there, but the nomadic tribes had little love for the settled pig-herders, as Egyptian records tell us. Very likely, such rivalry was involved.

            In any case, the pig taboo goes far beyond ancient Israel. In fact, it extends throughout the Near East and India (though very “low caste” Indian groups sometimes keep pigs). Several Christian groups maintain the ban. Everywhere, it is justified by the filthy habits of pigs, which notoriously eat garbage, excrement, snakes, and the like, and wallow in mud. The Bible nails two unclean animals in one saying: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly” (Proverbs 26:11) amplified by St. Peter to “The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire” (II Peter 2:22). One wonders how a good Jewish thinker knew that much about dogs and pigs….

            A quite different taboo goes all the way back to Exodus: “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk” (Exodus 23:19, repeated verbatim in Deuteronomy 14:21). This has long been explained by stating that such a dish was a ritual dish of enemies of the Israelites. This explanation is found in Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed (1948, Hebrew original ca. 1190 CE), one of the greatest religious and philosophical works of all time, and that satisfies me, at any rate. Other explanations have been raised, including Mary Douglas’ category-violation theory, which seems much less persuasive here. Indeed, “kid boiled in its mother’s milk” is a known dish in non-Jewish parts of the Near East, morbid name or no. Naturally, the milk is usually from some quite other animal.

            Other food taboos are discussed extensively by Simoons (1994). It seems that almost every culture has taboos, or at least avoidances, and they usually concern animals, not vegetables. The Buddhist rule against eating onions and garlic has more to do with their bad scent and exciting nature than with uncleanness per se.

       The Biblical Land of Canaan was a land of wine. In a Canaanite city, 40 jars were found, dating to 1700 BCE. They were a meter high, total 2,000 liters (about 3000 bottles’ worth). The wine, some red and some white, was “sweetened with honey and infused with juniper berries, mint, cinnamon and myrtle.” Apparently they had cinnamon then. The whole operation was standardized; evidently the Canaanites had real quality control on a large scale (Netburn 2013).

       Dates were domesticated in Mesopotamia, and became a staple food quite early. Date syrup was produced by piling the dates on a clean floor and taking the liquid pressed out (Høglund 1990). Date syrup remains important, though now produced in more sanitary means. Dates must be pollinated, and many bas-reliefs from Assyrian times show the process, often done by angel-like winged figures.

The early Nubians, in southern Egypt, managed to treat their illnesses, apparently without knowing why; they brewed beer with Terramycin as part of the starter culture. Apparently it was abundant enough to cure bacterial ailments. The beer was a sour porridge, like modern African homemade brews (McNally 2016).

Near Eastern food historian Charles Perry has told me that the first reference to boiled noodles is in the Babylonian Talmud, 5^th C CE.

Medieval Near Eastern Food

            Medieval Near Eastern food is abundantly recorded. Arabs, and people of other backgrounds writing in Arabic, were enormously fond of good food. Many long and detailed recipe books survive. More impressive is the huge literature on food, from daily bread to feasts to famines. Food was medicinally evaluated, according to the classic humoral theory that goes back to Hippocrates (Buell and Anderson 2022). It spread from Greece to Anatolia and Syria, thence to the entire Arabic and Persian world. Persian hot/cold medical evaluation of food may be as old, reaching back to a very ancient common origin with the Hippocratic ideas. In any case, Arabic became the language of medicine by the 700s CE. Among Syro-Arab innovations is the idea that sweet, dulcet, pleasing food must be health-giving and strengthening, or at least digestive (Buell and Anderson 2022). These include sweet drinks, candies, cookies, small cakes, and the like (Yungman 2024). The English words sherbet, sorbet, shrub (the drink, not the plant), and similar words all go back to the Arabic root sh-r-b, “drink,” and were borrowed, mostly via Italian and French, because so many of these drinks were medically important.

Another valuable insight is captured in the saying: “When you sit with good company, sit long, for God does not count against your lifespan the time spent eating in good company” (attributed to Ja’far ibn Muhammad as-Ṣadīq, the Sixth Shi’a Imam, but not reliably nailed to him; see Buell and Anderson 2022 for discussion of this and the whole Medieval Arabic medical context). This remark captures a truth: enjoying good friendly company does prolong life, in proportion to the time spent.

Particulary impressive recent translations and studies by Nawab Nasrallah cover her own Iraqi heritage, and several early Arab cookbooks, translated in great detail and with notable accuracy (Nasrallah 2017, 2021, 2025, etc.). She discusses the medical issues in detail.

Serena Aneli and colleagues (2022) have tracked food and genetics across Central Asia. Genetically, Armenians and Georgians are largely descended from Caucasus hunter-gatherers, plus fair amounts of early Anatolian farmers. They have almost no Yamnaya-related steppe ancestry. Azerbaijan is similar, but has more Yamnaya heritage. Central Asia is broadly similar but has more genetic inheritance from farther east, mainly China: 41% among Kazakhs, 27% in Uzbekistan. Kazakhs, Tajiks and Uzbeks have 15-25% Yamnaya genetics, but very little early Anatolian farmers.

Food choices do not correlate with these genetic influences. They track Islam and Persian culture in Central Asia, though young males were and are more apt to drink than Islam allows. Skeletal data indicates they got few vegetables in the past.

Words traveled far: Farsi and Arabic Psikbaj for vinegar-sour foods became escabeche and ceviche in Spanish, for different foods. In Moorish Spain it evolved into a battered and fried fish dish eaten with vinegar, which was brought to England by Sephardic Jews and became fish and chips (Jurafsky 2014). Portuguese temperar (to season) and tempero (seasoned) were brought to Japan the same way, as batter-fried food, and became tempura (Jurafsky 2014:46).

One fascinating Medieval Near Eastern food was murri, fermented barley dough. The dough was inoculated with starter, wrapped in leaves, and left in a warm place. After much wondering about this substance, Charles Perry, leading scholar of Medieval Near Eastern foodways, decided to follow surviving recipes and create it. To his astonishment, the result was, basically, soy sauce. It disappeared from texts around 1400 (Perry 2012). This is not surprising; the fungi that do the fermenting turn out to be pretty much the same. Kevin John Qiu writes me (email of Feb. 27, 2024) that the starter, burdaj, is basically the same as the Chinese technology for making jiaqu (wine starter), and for Korean nuruk and Indonesian tempeh (fermented boiled soybean cakes). All involve paste wrapped in leaves—fig in the Near East; lotus, hibiscus, mugwort, or mulberry in E Asia. These leaves mostly inhibit wild fungi and bacteria that could spoil the ferment.

Modern Near Eastern, or Middle Eastern, Food

            Persian, or Iranian, food has a very long history. Iran was settled by Indo-European speaking nomads from the steppes, who assimilated whoever was there before, including Elamites in the southwest. The original center of power was Parsa, just north of the Elamites and in the low mountains—a dry, barren area, though with streams that concentrate water from higher peaks. The name gave us “Persia,” and later “Farsi” for the language, as p turned to f in such contexts. Iran always referred to the entire region, roughly the modern nation.

            Iran is basically a vast desert. Better conditions exist in the Zagros Mountains, the spine that runs along the western side of the country, but even they are dry and thinly vegetated. The only lush part of Iran is the Caspian Sea coast and the mountains behind it, which soar over 18,000 feet. They catch rain, and moisture from the Caspian Sea blows over the coast, making it a vast and rich oasis. It produces rice and other wet-climate products.

            The rest of the country is desperately short of water. Mountain chains produce small rivers, which flow into the surrounding basins, there to dry up and die without coming anywhere close to the sea. Cities arise where the rivers leave the mountains. Here, mountain drainages come together. Below the cities near the mountain feet, the rivers spread out into delta fans, and disappear in the sands.

            Water is captured by qanats: tunnels dug back into the outwash fans, to tap underground flow. These can be identified on satellite photographs by the neatly spaced rows of holes—wells that allow access for maintenance. Such management is exceedingly skilled and dangerous work, and is the realm of specialized experts, usually with long family histories. The qanat was probably invented in the borderlands of Mesopotamia. Few are left in Iran, but Afghanistan still has several. The great contemporary home of these water tunnels, though, is Xinjiang, where they were introduced—probably by speakers of Indo-European languages—many centuries ago. They are known there as karez.

            Moving westward, qanats were introduced by the Arabs to Spain, by the Spanish to Mexico (especially the Tehuacan Valley), and by Mexicans to California, where “water tunnels” were dug in the 19^th century to water San Bernardino. This bit of water lore was related to me by old-timers, many decades ago.

            Returning to Iran: current overdraft of rivers and groundwater, plus hotter and drier weather thanks to burning fossil fuels, is a deadly menace to Iran’s survival. An example of how bad things can get is the fate of the province of Sistan. It depends on the Helmand River, which flows from the mountains of Afghanistan, barely reaches Iran, and ends in what was once a huge and wet inland delta. Afghanistan now takes more and more of the Helmand water, and the Taliban government is not interested in the fate of Iran. 

            Far more pleasant is diving into the actual foods. Many foods and food words known all over the Middle East and Mediterranean have Iranian (Persian/Farsi) origins, such as kofta, from Farsi koftan, “to grind.” Nan, for bread, is the familiar Indo-European word pan, this time with n rather than f replacing the p. It has been borrowed from China to North Africa. Less well known, but found all over Central Asia, is kaleh pacheh, “heads and feet,” a stew of those parts of a goat or sheep, usually with other bits and pieces added. Liver, heart, and other organs are possible. (The result tastes much better than it sounds.) This food is eaten in one or another form, under recognizable derivatives of the Farsi name, as far east as the Uyghur cities of China.

            Historical records include a cookbook from 1521 (surviving in later additions; Hassibi and Sayadabdi 2018) that records a cuisine very much like today’s, including a heavy focus on flavorful stews. In it, pilaf did not involve frying the rice first before boiling it, but briyani did; this is the opposite of some modern usages. Pilaf in particular varies all over the map today, with different areas frying or not frying, and often acting differently with different materials (rice, bulgur…there are even fonio pilafs in Africa).

            Iran produces almost all the world’s saffron. This spice consists of the stamens of the saffron crocus (Crocus sativus). There are only three per flower, and they must be collected by hand, so the spice is expensive—often worth more than its weight in gold. It is disinfectant and digestive, but hardly available in enough quantity to make a medicine. Its intense flavor lights up Iranian cuisine and that of neighboring countries, but it is too expensive to have caught on widely. It is perhaps at its best in the meat-and-fruit dishes so typical of Iranian cuisine. It also figures heavily in their rice cookery. Iran grows it on about 50,000 ha of land (Koehler 2013). Spain and Morocco produce tiny amounts.

            Turkish food is a marvelous mix (not fusion; not all has fused) of Central Asian, Greek, Armenian, Persian, Arabic, and others. The Turks came from Central Asia in the 11^th century, and the Osmanlı (Ottoman) Turks completed the conquest of the moribund Byzantine Empire in 1421. Taking over its capital, Byzantion, they renamed it “Istanbul” (from a local phrase for “to the city”) and made it the crown and glory of Near Eastern architecture. It already had the magnificent Santa Sophia church, which became the grand mosque and set the style for further developments. The brilliant architect Sinan in the 17^th century repaired it and went on to build or oversee dozens of mosques, town halls, bridges, and other works all over the Empire, creating a distinctive and beautiful style

            Turkish food is based on a range of grains, vegetables, fruits, and meats (Işin 2013, 2018; Jianu and Barbu 2018). Wheat is the staple, providing not only bread but also bulgur, wheat parboiled and then dried and cracked. This is a rather rice-like staple, found originally in the more remote, mountainous, and poor parts of the Empire, but now worldwide as an excellent and convenient dish. Bulgur could substitute for rice in pilafs, which reached a level of glory in Turkey, now officially Türkiye.

            A major class of dishes consists of stuffed vegetables and fruits, called dolmas, which is Turkish for “stuffed.” This is an old type of dish, native to the Near East rather than Central Asia, and well attested in Medieval Arabic cookbooks. The Turkish Empire brought it to full glory. Not only vegetables such as squash, tomatoes, eggplants, onions, peppers, and even carrots, but also fruits including quinces and apples, are stuffed, usually with a mix of rice, ground meat, pine nuts, and herbs and spices. A striking eggplant dish is a lukewarm or cold salad, with the hollowed-out roasted eggplant holding a mix of chopped eggplant flesh, tomatoes, garlic, onions, pine nuts, herbs, and whatever else seems appropriate, dressed with lemon juice and olive oil. This is known as “The Imam Swooned,” the Imam being the head of the congregation of a mosque; depending on what folktale you hear, the imam swooned with joy at tasting it, with sorrow at not getting it, or with horror at the expense of the top-quality olive oil required. 

Armenian food includes ghapama: pumpkin stuffed with rice, nuts, seeds, honey, etc., and baked. It can also be stuffed with the usual stuffing mix of rice, pine nuts, spices, herbs, and sometimes tomatoes.

The food of the Levant—the eastern Mediterranean coastlands—is broadly similar from Greece through Syria and Palestine. Palestinian food has been chronicled by Sami Tamimi in Falastin and The Gaza Kitchen, and Reem Kassis, The Palestinian Table.

            Georgian food is one of the miracles of the human spirit. This tiny country on the east Black Sea coast has its own language family, unrelated to any other. It has a fair claim to being the true home of wine. The wine grape and the relevant strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewers’ yeast) come from there. The wine tradition is ancient, and after pressure to go into lowest-level industrial wine production in USSR days, traditional winemaking has returned (Capalbo 2017). The wine is aged in huge ceramic jars known as qvevri, which develop a particularly rich flavor.

            The staple is bread, but wheat is also made into many other products, the favorite of which is khinkali, dumplings. These are the local variant of the standard Near Eastern and Central Asian tradition. They are stuffed with ground meat or cheese, appropriately seasoned. Otherwise, stews abound, some preserving the ancient mix of meat and fruit that characterizes the Iranian cultural world. Also similar to Iran is the near-invariable serving of fresh herbs, including tarragon, green onions, and others, with the food. This is an art of which I am particularly fond.

            Georgian feasts are memorable and unforgettable. They are chronicled by Darra Goldstein (1999), to say nothing of Georgian literature. Food and wine, and often vodka, keep coming until the diner has lost all track of time (and probably everything else). Toasts are offered, and must be accepted, which involves downing a glass. My introduction occurred at a wine pairing feast, comparing French and Georgian wines, to show the superiority of the latter. I lost count of the courses at ten; each was followed by a full glass of each nationality’s appropriate wine. I had not been so drunk since graduate student days. I managed to get back to our hotel, fortunately only a block away.

            An odd Georgian delicacy in rural areas consists of green pine cones boiled in syrup.

A Near Eastern food that has gone worldwide is qaliya. The word is Arabic for “fried” (root q-l-y), so it can mean anything. It has been borrowed into languages from India (for curries based on fried meat) and Tibet to Sicily (calia, roasted chickpeas). All sorts of spicing and cooking methods occur. (Tom Hoogervorst’s 2022 article on it is possibly the most mouth-watering article in recent history). Sometimes the meat starts by boiling and then winds up frying, as the fat cooks out of it and the water boils away. This medieval Near Eastern method seems to lie behind Mexican carnitas, if they are not an independent Native American invention, which is possible; in any case, they use that method.

Central Asia

            Among many myths about Central Asia is the story of nomads preparing meat by putting it under their thighs, on the horses’ backs, and eating it thus raw. This story goes back to Ammianus Marcellinus, and appears to be anti-Hun war propaganda rather than reality, in spite of its being retailed by Bernard de Joinville in his life of St. Louis (1928).

            A tomb of a noble woman in Mongolia in the 13^th century contained yak milk (Ventresca Miller et al. 2023).

Europe

Perhaps “as much as 20 percent of the Neanderthal genome” persists in modern people (Shipman 2015:29). A huge eruption of Campanian crater covered cent Eur w ignimbrite around 39,300 years ago (Shipman 2015:52). Neanderthalss lived on big mammals and preferred cold. They apparently withdrew from the Levant around 70,000 years ago, then reinvaded when it got really cold again, persisting till 42,000 years ago. They preferred big game whenever they could get it, though they were flexible when necessary. They had higher caloric needs than we do today  (Shipman 2015:55-83).

Pat Shipman (2015:215-16) notes that humans and wolves (and coyotes and jackals) have conspicuous whites of the eyes and thus can show gaze direction to others. Other social canids too, and/or distinct fur patterns around eyes to emphasize. Other primates, and loner canids, do not have this feature.

Modern humans arrived in Europe around 45,000 years ago. “A single founder lineage” accounts for all before 14,000. It broke into groups in different areas. Neanderthal genes declined steadily from 4.3-5.7% to current 1.1-2.2, indicating selection against some genes.

Food processing was already happening. People were grinding oats into flour in Italy 36,000 years ago (Lippi et al. 2015)—some of the oldest known flour in the world.

Complex population moves took place in western Europe around 14,000 years ago (Posth et al 2023). There were new lineages, and more mixing from central Europe into western genetic pools. After 14,000, there was more and more Near Eastern input, especially after agriculture spread into Europe. There was even some East Asian mixing, notable even in far western Europe (Fu et al. 2016).

               Around 7000 years ago, all were overwhelmed demographically by the Anatolian farmers moving in, and later steppe people probably bringing Indo-European languages. The western group was dark-skinned but with lightish eyes, the later eastern in-migrants had lighter skin but darker eyes. From 2000 BCE, people from the steppe-derived groups became still more prevalent in Iberia, with dominance of Y chromosomes proving it was mainly males.

From 7500 to 3500 BP, Neolithic migrants from the Near East came in relatively small numbers, mixed with local hunter-gatherers, and formed very persistent and rather isolated local population (Valdiosera 2018).

A “ghost lineage”—previously unknown, totally absorbed into the general population now—brought a new genome to Europe 4000-5000 years ago, more in Scandinavia and extreme northeast Europe, where it goes back to 8000. Timing and are right for this being the bearers of the Corded Ware culture. The genetics are similar to that of the Mal’ta boy from 24000 years ago in Siberia. Some of this genome also occurs in Native America, so spread in both directions (Reich et al. 2019).

Earlier genomes in Europe include people “among the first people to split from the modern human population that swept out of Africa ome 60,000 years ago” (1107). The hunter-gatherer group had blue (or light) eyes, dark hair, dark skin; the farmers had brown eyes, dark hair, and lighter skin [classic Alpines]. Nobody knows about the third group’s colors (Gibbons 2014; Olalde 2014). There was selection for lighter skin color after 5000 BP, give or take several centuries, and for lactase production. This was associated with agriculture, which drastically reduced vitamin D consumption as compared to hunting and fishing (Wilde et al. 2014).

Agriculture probably came to North Africa from Iberia about 7400 years ago. Farming people mixed with local hunter-gatherers. Then Levantine immigrants brought stockraising around 6000-6500 years ago (Simões, Luciana, et al. 2023).

There was much aquatic food in over 1000 pottery shards analyzed from one site on the way into Africa. Fishers learned from local hunter-gatherers. Dairying is also attested by residues on the pottery (Lucquin et al. 2023).

A spread of farming from Anatolia occurred in 7000-6000 BC, possibly as early as 7500. These Anatolian farmers spread rapidly across Europe, expanding at about a kilometer a year. They introduced farming in most areas. Local hunter-gatherers were sometimes quick to pic it up, but sometimes stayed refractory and distinct for centuries. This expansion has been thought to be due to spread of Indo-Anatolian and/or Indo-European peoples, but took place improbably early for the phylum to have risen, or at least become identifiable as the linguistic world we know. Possibly Basque is a last holdout of the original farming languages.

Anatolia developed “proto-industrial exploitation of copper, gold and salt,” after 4600. Nomads came from the steppes after 4500 BC, but some had probably come earlier, mixing with the locals.

Older Southeastern European villages fell around 4400-4250. They were soon replaced by the huge towns of the Cucuteni-Trypillia (Tripolye) culture, largely or entirely of the Trypillia culture during the middle period, flourishing by 4300-3650. These depended on wheat (largely einkorn and emmer), barley, legumes (peas, broad beans, vetches), and animal husbandry, with heavy use of dung for fertilizer. The communities were democratically organized in neighborhoods with assembly halls. Some towns held around 15,000 inhabitants, on spacious lots in beautifully organized and laid-out communities.

These towns maintained a striking amount of equality, as shown by houses and burials; there is little difference in possessions. Consolidation of political power and rise of inequality in later Typillia, as well as Yamnaya incursion, led to more dispersal and smaller settlements (Hofmann et al. 2024; Kirleis et al. 2024).

The Trypillia-related cultures stemmed largely from the diaspora of farmers from Anatolia at an earlier time. Expected mixing with local people occurred, but was slow to become important (Nikitin et al. 2025). These cultures, with their large and peaceful towns and settled farming and herding life, were transformed by the Yamnaya expansion after 3700. Marija Gimbutas famously saw this as patriarchal, ferocious chariot-drivers attacking and devastating settle matrilineal farmers (Gimbutas 1965, 1974). Possibly; evidence is thin, but enough to indicate that Yamnaya did indeed replace the peaceful villagers (Nikitin et al. 2025). It is also important to note, however, that in Europe as elsewhere, a sharp cooling and drying took place from 4200 to 4000 BCE. It had local effects: serious in China, spottily in Europe (Marshall 2022). The fact that it comes at about the time of Trypillia decline is surely significant.

Full-scale steppe herding societies flourished by 3300 BC. New techniques for working land, dairying, making arsenical-copper alloys, etc. arose during all this time. The Chernavoda and Usatove cultures transferred a lot of knowledge from Cucuteni and Trypillia eastward, ca. 4000-3200 BC. Dairying arrived with the first Linearbandkeramik people around 5400 BCE.

There was very little lactose tolerance at that time; it increased enormously in later millennia. There is no evidence for selection for lactase persistence at the time when dairying comes in and becomes important. Instead, it appears after hard times, when subsistence was stretched. Richard Evershed and colleagues (2022) conclude that famine and disease make digesting lactose important and, especially, failure to digest it often fatal. Mild diarrhea in good times becomes major fatal diarrhea in bad ones.

Dairying reached the British Isles and north and west Eur about 6500 BCE, getting common by 5500, by which time clearly a major food source all over Europe. Selection for lactase persistence started in the southeast, the home of intensive livestock production, and spread. In Finland dairy foods were not a major food source until the early 3^rd millennium BCE. Lactase persistence dates back to 4700-4600 BCE, but was rare until around 2000 BCE, becoming common from then on.

Significantly, milk words, including “milk” itself, go back to proto-Indo-European, and converge on the steppes. Possibly the Yamnaya culture brought them (Garnier, Sagart, and Sagot 2017). It was almost certainly an Indo-European-speaking radiation, and certainly depended on stockraising.

Dairying restored Europeans to Paleolithic size. There had been a steady shrinking in height and body mass since 33,000 years ago. It leveled off around 9000 years ago, reversed 6000 years ago, and brought Europeans back to Paleolithic bulk by 3000, but with some decline again since then. Dairying is clearly associated, possibly the whole cause. A growth factor in milk, destroyed by fermentation, made unfermented whole milk particularly significant (Stock et al. 2023). No such decline appears in the Near East.

The huge sites “suddenly disappeared and were succeeded around 3300 BC by fully established pastoralists associated with the Yamnaya cultural complex” (Penske et al. 2023:359).  These were genetically a wild mix. There was some continuity from much older Mesolithic cultures, lots of genes from the Anatolian farmer expansion, much ancestry from earlier steppe nomads.

Very little genetic diversity existed in southern Southeast Europe; people were largely of Anatolian farmer ancestry. There were, however, many genes from local preagricultural people. The great steppe expansion of the Yamnaya culture showed a complicated and locally-varying mix of steppe, Caucasus, East European, and other genes on the steppes around 3000 BCE. Moreover, there was “a resurgence of HG [hunter-gatherer] ancestry observed widely in Europe during the fourth millennium BC… This indicates the presence of remnant HG groups in various non-farmed regions, for example, highlands and uplands or densely forested zones and wetlands…” (Penske et al. 364).

In what is now Moldova and Ukraine, the Trypillia towns had up to 15,000 people by 6000 years ago. They covered up to 320 acres. These were the biggest settlements in the world at the time. Grain and peas were the staple foods. Livestock were penned; the dung was used for fertilizer, especially on the peas (Kiel University 2023), which fix their own nitrogen but can profit from the compost and mulch and get some additional nitrogen.

Dairying was basic to these communities, and one assumes that milk was prepared in many ways, including yogurt and cheese. The lactase-persistence gene was rare in these groups, so they had to do something. Cheesemaking appears in Europe by the 6^th millennium BCE, but was already in Anatolia by the 7^th, as shown by residues in pots (Salque et al. 2013). The earliest cheese in Central Asia comes much later, but associated with probable Indo-European speakers. In Europe it was extremely important from early times. A history by Paul Kindstedt, Cheese and Culture (2012), focuses on its importance in ancient Greece and later.

Meanwhile: “Genetic diversity in west Eurasian human populations was largely shaped by three major prehistoric migrations: anatomically modern hunter-gathers (HGs) occupying the area from around 45,000 BP…; Neolithic farmers expanding from the Middle East from around 11,000 BP…; and steppe pastoralists coming out of the Pontic steppe around 5000 BP….” (Allentoft et al. 2024:1). These trends were pan-European. West European, east European, and Caucasus Mountains hunter-gatherers were genetically rather different.

The Anatolian farmers spread to south Europe around 6700 BCE, reaching all Europe over the next 3000 years. The steppe people, associated with the Yamnaya culture (in a broad sense), had eastern European and Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestors. While expanding west, they also expanded eastward, begetting the Sintasha and Andronovo cultures in Bronze Age Central Asia (Allentoft et al. 2024).

The western hunter-gatherer groups largely disappeared, but genes from them are not rare among modern Baltic and Belarus populations. Eastern hunter-gatherers survive largely in the Central Asian mixes that followed Yamnaya. Caucasus hunter-gatherers did better, leaving a large genetic legacy in Iran. The Anatolian farmers make up anywhere from 60% downward in Europe today, with the steppe people supplying the rest (Irving-Pease et al. 2024). Lactase persistence increased especially after 3000 BCE. Heavy dependence on grain came earlier, with genetic markers. Lighter skin and hair color probably tracked need for vitamin D manufacture in skin as people moved into the foggy northwest and ate less animal food (which contains D) (Irving-Pease 2024).

In Denmark, Mesolithic hunter-gatherers depending heavily on fish were almost entirely replaced by Neolithic farmers of Anatolian derivation after 3900 BCE. This was a thousand years later than similar Neolithic invasion farther south. Then came the people of steppe origin (again with much Yamnaya ancestry) from 2600 BCE. After this, Denmark remained about half steppe by ancestry, near half Anatolian, and a small but stable bit tracing back to pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers. During this time, hair color got lighter, and blue eyes somewhat commoner; Mesolithic people were generally dark (Allentoft et al. 2024; Allentoft, Sikora et al. 2024).

Some of the oldest beer in the western world turned up in southwest Germany, ca. 2,550 years old, thus associated with Celtic people. It had lactobacilli as well as yeast, and probably tasted as the Romans said: “like a billy goat” (from a poem by Emperor Julian, ca. 400).

Beer has continued to be the drink of much of Europe, and later the world (Schiefenhövel and  Macbeth 2011).

The debate between water and wine achieved classic form in the Middle Ages, and persisted in countless forms, declining from scholarly poetry to folklore (Hanford 1913). Water leads by saying that wine drives men mad and they often kill each other or lose their wealth. Wine responds that water is full of garbage and sewage, and kills people through disease, showing that sanitation was a very real concern in the Medieval period. The best version may be the earliest (Whicher 1949:238-247). The corresponding Chinese debate is between water, tea, and ale, with similar arguments, but water wins by pointing out that the other two are made from it. Wine, of course, is not made directly from water, but from grape juice; the grapes do the job of cleaning the water in the process of taking it up through their roots.

Around 1200 BCE, the climate grew somewhat dryer after a wet period. There wa a major sociopolitical crash in the Aegean area and the Near East. Mycenean forts and cities fell, Hittites declined, and Dark Ages set in. There was decline in the Pannonian Plain, with large forts abandoned, and in Scandinavia. Outside of those areas, Europe kept on without much change It certainly seems that the climate does not explain the level of decline in the Anatolia-Greece axis (Molloy 2023).

            Major ancient sources on European food include Xenophon’s Oikonomos, the source of our word “economy” (Xenophon 1990, Greek original ca 300 BCE). Xenophon was a student of Socrates, and gives us a Socratic dialogue about farming. It is an excellent guide, as well done as a modern gardening manual. Xenophon also wrote about horses, Persian culture, and many other matters. The modern word “ecology”—“household study”—was coined from “economy,” literally “household naming,” i.e. describing the household. Around 330 BCE, Archestratus of Sicily wrote a poetic treatise on luxury that survives in fragments (Archestratus 2011). It relates the delights of fish above all.

            Another major source was the poet Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (1928, Latin original ca. 55 BCE). It is a very long poem on the universe—its creation and form.

            Later came Geoponika, a Byzantine-era farming manual made up of quotes from earlier sources (Dalby 2011). It reveals a mix of good advice and classical mythology. It explains Apollo’s link with the laurel tree by the laurel’s value as hot-burning firewood, which connects it with the sun and thus the sun god—an odd attempt to make sense out of a myth that originally had Apollo chasing the nymph Daphne until she prayed to be saved from his lust by turning into a tree. The book explains how to make many medicinal wines, including rose-infused wine, and claims one can grow medicinal wine by inserting medicine into the vine slip (p. 117). It quotes a story that Bactrian camels are born from mating a male wild boar with a female dromedary. In spite of such oddities, most of the book is actually excellent advice on planting and growing Mediterranean foods and trees.

            Popular in the Roman Empire was garum, a fish sauce made by allowing fish to autodigest in salt, like southeast Asian sauces such as patis, nuoc mam, and nam pla. Some fermentation took place in some forms. As in southeast Asia, there were many types of garum, made from various fish parts including entrails, and various species of fish, and by various methods (Grainger 2016).

            The Romans famously used spices heavily. Spices were medicinal, but also a way to show off wealth and ability to get rare, exotic trade goods. They were imported in enormous quantities from south and southeast Asia, many of them coming via the Egyptian port of Berenike. This town lay at the mouth of an east-flowing wadi that could be tapped for underground flow of water, and headed near a west-flowing wadi reaching the Nile, allowing for caravans to carry goods back and forth to that great river. Black pepper was basic to the trade, but cinnamon, cloves, and other foreign spices. Produced at home were fennel, coriander, caraway, celery, summer savory, black mustard, parsley, and dill. Of these, coriander and possibly caraway were native to the Near East, but the rest were Italian. They dispersed with empire to the rest of Europe, but shrank back again during the Dark Ages (Livarda and Van der Veen 2008).

            The Avars, known in China as Rouran, were defeated by Turkic and Mongolic peoples and chased from today’s Xinjiang in China in the 500s AD. They settled in what are now Hungary and Austria around 567-8, remaining a distinctive and independent people until conquered by Frankish troops around 800, after which they dispersed and are lost to history (Wang 2025). They were among many “wandering folk” of the period, known to German historians as the Völkerwanderung. They and others from the east introduced many foods, probably including varius dairy and dumpling preparations.

Knotgrass seeds were used for porridge in the Dark Ages. Seeds of gold-of-pleasure, Camelina sativa, were used for oil. White-leaved spear orach was used for food and purge. Yields of grain 2 ½ to 3 ½ times the seed sown (compare to hundreds for maize today). In 16^th-century Sweden, beer consumption was 40 times what it is at present, partly because so much food was salted. (The beer was weaker than today, probably quite a bit weaker.) 835 cal/day/person from beer was typical, from a total around 4000/d/adult. Early beer used myrtle, rosemary, costmary, etc. instead of or along with hops. In the Harz Mountains, a harvest ration of beer was 7 litres/day. Buckwheat came to Netherlands by 1394-5 (earliest documentation). (Slicher von Bath, B. H. 1963).

Less choice was the raw or undercooked fish of eastern Europe. It transmitted tapeworms and other intestinal parasites (Yeh et al. 2014). This was still a problem well into the 20^th century (Desowitz 1981).

Meanwhile, Spain was ruled by Muslim Moorish dynasties, who conquered northward from Morocco in the 800s. They declined slowly, as Christian states expanded southward at their expense. The conquest was completed with the fall of Grenada in 1492; the loot allowed Ferdinand and Isabela to finance Columbus.

An archaeological window into the time is provided by Sarah Inskip and colleagues (2019). In the small city of Ecija, people lived on wheat bread. Barley was used, and after about 1200, sorghum. Sugarcane had come by the high Medieval period. Meat was from sheep and rabbits. The domestic rabbit is native to Spain; by this time it had been introduced widely in western Europe.

Such a roster was typical. During the time, however, not only sugarcane but many other crops came with the Moors. Arab culture spread rapidly to northwest Africa after the Muslim conquest in the 700s. Morocco has become a center of cooking, much of which is based on styles of cuisine going back to very early times in Iran and Arabia. Some traits include use of fruit in meat dishes, sweet-sour combinations, and complex spice mixes based on coriander, cumin, black pepper, cinnamon, and other warm spices. Only some of this caught on in Spain, but more widespread were new foods such as bitter (and much later sweet) oranges, lemons, limes, and other citrus, as well as useful plants like cotton and alfalfa (Watson 1983). Foods like almonds, pomegranates, wine grapes, and the commoner spices were already well known.

The linguistic effects were enormous. Just in the last paragraph, we have seen several words that came to English from Arabic via Spanish: orange (naranj), alfalfa, cotton (qutun, qoton in Andalusian Arabic). Less direct is sugar, from French sucre, Arabic sakkar, Persian shakar, ultimately Sanskrit (or derivative) sharkara. We can add tapas, from Andalusian Arabic tapashur, “tidbit, delicacy,” in spite of the delightful folk etymology that the snacks were used to cover (tapar) wine glasses. Sephardic Jewish adafina for cholent, the stew set up Friday to cook for the Sabbath when cooking is forbidden, is from Arabic al-dafina, buried (Schwartz 2001).

Catalan Medieval food was recorded by one Joan Santanach in the Llibre de Sent Soví, recently translated by Robin Vogelzang (Book of Sent Soví, 2008). It too has many Arabic influences.

Famines struck Europe in the 14^th century, because of population growth colliding with the cold, wet weather of the Little Ice Age. There were huge rains in 1315-16, up to four or five times normal. These not only caused famine but often eroded the soil to bare rock all round the North Sea; maybe half the topsoil loss in all history there; about 5 to 12% of the population of northern Europe died between then and 1322 (Rosen 2014:110-133). France fell from 17-20 million people to around 10 million after 100 yrs’ war and then the plague. Incidentally, Rosen provides data on terms. assarting was the process of a group clearing land, taking it over, and cultivating it—parceling it out. An acre was, originally, the area “that could be plowed by one man behind a single ox in a single day.”  A virgate was that which could reasonably be plowed by two oxen in a season. A hide was four to seven virgates, and made a reasonable estate (Rosen 2014:150-155). forestalling was selling to new clients and thus depriving your regulars.

People ate 2000-2100 cal/day, a very low level, and much of it was beer (Rosen 2014:155-160).

Then disease hit hard. Not only did humans die, but rinderpest, a virus related to measles, struck the animals.  Anthrax (Bacillus anthracis), hoof-and-mouth (a viral disease), glanders (Burkholderia mallei), and liver flukes (Fasciola hepatica) all struck the livestock (Rosen 2014:185-275) at about the time the bubonic plague struck humans in 1346-48.

Ken Albala’s wonderful book The  Food History Reader provides short selections from the classic food writing of the world, from ancient Mesopotamia and China to modern classics. It samples Benedict’s Rule, Charlemagne’s Capitularies with incredible directions on what to grow in gardens (233), Al-Ghazzali on manners (251f), Avicenna (256f), Moses Maimonides (266-7), Islamic agriculture (272f), Taillevent’s instructions to Medieval French households (284f), the Menagier de Paris of the same general order (292f), Montezuma’s feasts as described by Bernal Diaz de Castillo (318f), More’s Utopia (332-3), Erasmus on good manners (very modern and proves they were as civilized as now, 339f), and dozens of other sources, down to modern times.

More odd terms and data come to us from Donald McDonald’s collection Agricultural Writers (1908), an anthology of early English texts. Aver was a cargo horse, as opposed to cheveau, a plow or riding horse; the name comes from haber,“to have” in Latin. The word can also refer to farm gear, and in this capacity it is the source of our word “average.”  Estates were very hierarchical—Lord, seneschal, then bailiff below him, then provost, then the various dairymaids (one was head), shepherd, cowherd, plowmen, etc. Yields were 1:3 or even worse. A typical sheep estate had around 400 wethers (castrated rams), 300 ewes, 200 hoggets (one- to two-year-old sheep), etc. (p. 99). Sheep that died of a murrain or the like were promptly skinned—saving the wool—and salted heavily. Herders were expected to sleep with their animals—grooms with horses, cowherds with cows, shepherd “and his dog” with the sheep, “dog boy” with the hunting hounds. They could not go home except on holidays (pp. 114-115).

Following that passage is a quote from John Worlidge, late 17^th century: “In several places in Germany whenever they fell a tree they always plant a young one near the place, and no young farmer is permitted to marry a wife till he brings proof that he hath planted and is a father of a stated number of trees” (p. 116). Clearly, the Germans had sense; no wonder they later became the guiding spirits of forestry in Europe. 

Among medieval writers was Walter of Henley (Lamond 1890).

A later writer, John Worlidge, commented in the late 17^th century: “In several places in Germany whenever they fell a tree they always plant a young one near the place, and no young farmer is permitted to marry a wife till he brings proof that he hath planted and is a father of a stated number of trees” (Lamond 1890:141). We desperately need this law.

            Among drinks were braggot: beer brewed with honey and sometimes spices (McGovern 2017:41-42).

            Wine arrived in France by 525 BCE, possibly introduced from Etruria (McGovern et al. 2013). At that time, it was preserved with pine resin, of which traces are found in the ancient jars. Modern Greek retsina maintains this tradition simply for the flavor.

            Spices came in Renaissance centuries to the far north. The first evidence of diverse spices in Scandinavia is provided by a wreck. King Hans of Denmark and Norway in 1495 sailed to a council meeting, hoping to play politics with the goal of taking over Sweden (Larsson and Foley 2023). His ship blew up (he was not on it at the time, but one suspects something…), preserving in deep water a record of the first saffron and ginger recorded in Scandinavia. There were also pepper, mustard, raspberries, hops, henbane, grapes, cloves, cucumber, dill, caraway, and a sturgeon, barrelled. High living.

            Early Scotland lived mainly on foods made from oatmeal and barley. They were usuallymade into bread, cakes (nonsweet), and porridge. Other, more mysterious, preparations included “sowens, lithac, drammack” (Bain 1973:20). Lithac is so obscure that it is not even in the OED, let alone in any online source. Drammock (sic) is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “raw meal mixed with water.” Surely this means parched grain, like tsamba; raw meal is inedible. Sowans turn out fascinating—the bran and husks from milling were saved, soaked, strained, and the resulting starchy stuff soaked with salt, which caused lactic fermentation, resulting in swat (the liquid) and sowans (the precipitate). Families would have a sowan-bowie (small barrel) for making and keeping it. Yule sowans was a custom. Apparently, the stuff was about as near to gourmetship as old Scotland could offer (Bain, Robert, 1973, with additional information from Wikipedia).

Problems of modern management are well described by John McNeill (2003). The superiority of older ways are well described by Grove and Rackham (2001). Replacement of sound management by capitalist exploitation devastated many of the mountain regions, and many lowlands.

Bread was the staple food of all Europe in early times, and is still so today in some areas. Jim Chevalier (2019, 2020) provides a detailed history of bread and baking in France. >GO FILL THIS OUT< Chevalier (2021) has also reconstructed the foodways of early Medieval France, before the days of heavy Italian influence. The food was, unsurprisingly, much like that of the late Roman Empire. Polenta (grain gruel; maize was not there yet) as well as bread were staples. Wine was the drink of choice, but beer and water were common. Olive oil was common in the far south, but elsewhere animal fats were used.

Nutritional medicine followed Galen, but his work was far from well known. A great deal of it had been lost in Europe, to be discovered later in Arabic translations and re-translated into Latin in the late Medieval period.

Nuts, fruits, and some vegetables were widely available. Presumably people did a great deal of foraging for wild foods, as they did in England and elsewhere. Enough folksongs turn on the dangers of women out in the forest harvesting nuts and wild fruits to show that this was a common thing but did expose women to raiders.

Pasta evolved in western Asia and south Europe independently from that of eastern Asia. (The stories of Marco Polo introducing it are fiction.) Early terms include the Iranian lakhsha for possibly for pasta in general, and rishta for long, thin types (noodles). These terms are still used, and lakhsha has been borrowed as far as Indonesia and China, where it fused with China’s own pasta dishes to beget laksa mian with southeast Asian spicing.

A worthy case study to illustrate many points about food history is A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce, by the Italian food historian Massimo Montanari (2021), profitably combined with the classic work Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food,by Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban (2002). All these authors are outstanding food historians of long experience.

Flat dry cakes were called laganon in ancient Greek, which became lagana in Latin (Montanari 2021:31). Another Latin word, tracta, appeared later, from trahere, to pull (Montanari 2021:32). Finally, a widespread word, itria (variously itrium, tria, tri, etc.; Arabic itriyya), appeared in late antiquity. The Arabic word fidawsh appeared in early Arabic society. It has spread into European languages, e.g. Italian fedelini (Montanari 2021:36). Spanish uses a straight borrowing, fideos, reflecting an Andalusian dialect of Arabic, which, like many Arabic vernaculars, converted short a to e and w (or short u) in o. It continues to be standard Spanish for thin noodles, and is often taken wrongly as a plural form. By Medieval times, pasta came into use as a general term in Italian, and macharoni for the dried types (Montanari 2021:40-43). More and more terms for specific types appeared. Spagho applied to “a wire for piercing the dough,” and did not give its name to spaghetti until the 19^th century (Montanari 2021:43).

Pasta was normally eaten with cheese, and often butter. Of course, it still is; for many, no pasta dish beats cacio e pepe, pasta with just salt, pepper, and the classic cheeses. In Sicily, primarily during the Arab reign (ca. 800-1100), the dish of macaroni and cheese evolved, strikingly similar to the modern form—one of the oldest dishes in the world. They also seem to have invented lasagna. Recall that Sicily was Greek before it was Arab, and laganon was a known word. Interlayering lagana (the plural)with cheese was an obvious idea. Toasting cheese on bread was also an easy thing to image, evolving into ancestral pizza. Pizza is apparently an Italian form of the widely used east Mediterranean term pita for bread or pie. Greece invented tyropita, cheese pie, pastry stuffed with good Greek cheese (tyically sheeps’ cheese). I recall staying in Greece many decades ago on very limited money and living largely on tyropita.

Being hot and slippery, string pastas called for forks, which were brought in as table ware probably for that very purpose in the Renaissance (Montanari 2021:57-58). Previously, they were large and heavy, their purpose being for cooks’ use to fish hot meat from stew. In ancient Ireland, cooks had their own flesh forks as prized possessions, but eaters used their hands.

Pasta became a staple food in Naples in the 17^th century; the rest of Italy joined on much later. Naples was identified as pasta country. Pasta machines and high costs of meat combined to produce this change (Montanari 2021:62). This may also have been the time that people took to cooking pasta a short time, to leave it al dente (Montanari 2021:65-67).

At present, a single factory in Parma, Italy, produces a wondrous 93,200 miles of spaghetti per day (Benton 2024:107).

One major advantage of pasta is that it is made of hard, protein-rich durum wheat (a form of emmer, not of bread wheat). It is thus slow to digest, resulting in a low glycemic index, much lower than such foods as potatoes, white bread, or white rice. It is relatively safe for prediabetics.

Tomato sauce, of course, had to await the exploration of Mexico. Tomatoes and chiles came in the 16^th century. Chiles were quickly accepted as spice, fitting into the pepper niche, but tomatoes were feared, being nightshades and similar to eggplant—a disliked vegetable regarded as unhealthy or worse (Montanari 2021:73-89). The revisionist idea that tomatoes were not regarded as poison is shown wrong by several quotes from the 16^th century (Montanari 2021:74).

The long-standing claim that tomato sauce is first noted in Italy, as “Spanish sauce,” is correct: it occurs in “Scalco alla Moderna (The Modern Steward) by Antionio Latini,” who had worked for a Spanish family. His sauce used tomatoes, roasted and skinned, cut up; chiles, onion, thyme, salt, oil, and vinegar (Montanari 2021:78-79). This is recognizable Mexican salsa (tomatoes, chiles, onion) converted into a salad. Later sauces are similar; more herbs were gradually added, from rosemary to—finally—basil. Garlic and other ingredients came soon. Montanari found no clear origin point for spaghetti with tomato sauce. It is an obvious enough thing to invent. It may have had multiple origins.

The meatball so identified in America with Neapolitan-style spaghetti and tomato sauce is an American addition, though likely by Neapolitan immigrants. Heavy immigration from Naples shaped American ideas of Italy and Italians, from food habits (pizza, spaghetti with tomato sauce) to songs, stereotypic costumes, and cusswords. Many of us born in mid-twentieth-century America got our introduction to Italian food from Chef Boy-ar-dee cans; Chef Boyardi was a real person, an Italian-American, and his canned food was not that bad.

Most of Italy is wheat country, but the central Po River Valley is rice country. Mile after mile of rice paddies occupy the horizon. Towns are devoted to rice; they are bare, stark places where finding a restaurant, even one specializing in rice dishes, is surprisingly difficult. Risotto is the local dish. It is apparently derived from pilaf, being based on rice fried in butter and then boiled in stock. The classic risotto rices, Carnaroli and Arborio, were developed in Italy surprisingly recently: in 1945 and 1946, respectively. Mussolini had pushed for growing more rice. Unlike most of his heritage, this was advantageous and persisted (Moyer-Nocchi 2015).

Pizza, the other world-famous carbohydrate dish, was a Naples specialty, with a low reputation (Moyer-Nocchi 2022). It was considered an unclean, disreputable street food, associated with cholera-ridden Naples (Nowak 2014). Workers bought slices of it as quick bites. Eventually, quality pizzas appeared, and the pizzeria got some degree of respect. But when I was in Italy as recently as 1988, pizza was despised outside of the Neapolitan area. My then-teenage daughter asked for it in northern Italy and drew scathing contempt for such an order. I warned her it wouldn’t be very good, and it wasn’t. Pizza’s conquest of the United States was also a matter of swimming upstream. When I was young and living in Lincoln, Nebraska, it was regarded as a lowly Italian food of dubious merit; a letter in 1954 to the local paper said that it was foreign and therefore Communist and therefore should be banned. Its success had much to do with the fact that the pizzeria filled an empty niche for a place for quick, filling food, relaxation, good times, eating with the hands, and generally unwinding. Even hamburger joints had become too staid for the rising younger generation. We of my generation thus betook ourselves in our teenage years to pizza joints and submarine sandwich shops, subs being the other great Italian introduction in the post-WWII era. It was part of the liberalization that gave us rock’n’roll and other abominations to our elders.

Like many Italians, Montanari casts a somewhat askance eye at “the Mediterranean diet,” noting there is nothing remotely close to one Mediterranean diet, and the various things that non-Italians mean by the term were assembled late and from various sources. Possibly more sensible is the folkloric division of Europe into “potato Europe and tomato Europe,” the line being roughly similar to the divide between north-draining and south-draining rivers (plus Iberia), though one notes that most of the Alps are potato country whichever way the rivers run. And a Hungarian would surely protest “We love both!

Wine and beer have a long and distinguished history in Europe.

Lager beer resulted from a cross between a German brewers’ strain, Saccharomyces pastorianus, apparently a hybrid of S. cerevisiae and S. eubayanus, this apparently taking place in Munich, where the original lager apparently originated at the original Hofbräuhaus, between 1602 and 1615 (Gibbons 2023). It involves a long cool storage (lagering) process during which the beer matures and develops flavoring.

Champagne was an ordinary though good wine till the 18^th century. It rarely had gas bubbles. Then English taste, English access to corks, and English superior glass conspired to move it to the bubbly. There were three French gourmets in the 17^th century who would drink wine from only Champagne slopes (Van Dyk 2015; see esp. p. 84).

A whole class of fermented products occurs in Albania (Quave and Pieroni 2014). These include fruit drinks and other products as well as a range of dairy products. Many are regarded as medicinal.

British food has a somewhat unfair reputation for blandness. It was spicier in the past. It also had many vegetables from early on (Thick 2014), in London and other areas with relatively wide-ranging tastes, even Scotland.

The British Isles developed a dish notable for tastiness, “Welsh rabbit,” cheddar (or similar) cheese on bread, toasted together. No rabbits; the word was originally “rare bit.” This was long a staple food in our house, my older son depending heavily on it during teen years. It is sometimes flavored with Worcester sauce and the like, but he and many others prefer the pure form.

That great Scottish dish, the haggis, was originally English and more varied and good than now. Many variants existed, with cream, eggs, currants, spices, and more. They were all in a stomach of some kind but not all with lungs or other innards used in the proper Scottish classic. That form today consists of finely-chopped lungs, liver, heart, and possibly other bits, in a matrix of oatmeal, steamed in a sheep’s stomach. It nested in Scotland at some unspecified early time but did not become the Scottish national dish till Burns immortalized it and England dropped it (Brears 2015). It is traditionally served with Scotch whisky (note there is no “e” in Scottish spelling), sometimes flambé in it but always consumed along with it. Some say a good deal of Scotch is necessary to make it palatable. Actually it tastes like a meatloaf, with quality depending on the cook.

The potato was soon introduced to Europe after being encountered in the western hemisphere, but did not catch on quickly. Contrary to myth, it was not widely rejected because it looked leprous or was not in the Bible (Earle 2020); the problem was that the original potatoes are tropical, and could not adjust to Europe’s exceedingly long summer days and short winter ones. The spread of the potato awaited introduction of potatoes selected by the Mapuche of Chile to flourish under such temperate regimes (Salaman 1949). Chilean potatoes reached Europe before 1700 (Knapp 2008). Chiloe Island was, and remains, the great source of temperate-zone potatoes. The Mapuche and mixed-ethnic farmers of Chiloe continue to grow a vast variety of potatoes, because the people and potatoes are routinely sought out by breeders needing new genes for resistance against potato blight and other diseases.

Nevertheless, there was initial resistance to an unfamiliar crop (Salaman 1949). Parmentier established a seedbed and put heavily armed guards around it—the guards instructed to ignore anyone trying to steal planting stock. Soon the garden was heavily looted, and potatoes were growing more and more widely in France. For this he became the nominate individual of many potato dishes in French cuisine. Supposedly (but dubiously), Catherine the Great wore wreaths of potato flowers in her hair.

Acceptance finally came with a rush. By the 1840s, the potato was the staple food of the colder, wetter parts of Europe. Then came the even colder and wetter weather of the 1846-48 years. Crops failed everywhere, and the potato was devastated, especially by late blight carried by Phytophthora infestans. This plant is usually called a “fungus,” but is in fact a seaweed; its closest familiar relative is kelp. It thus depends on water, and thrives only in very wet weather when the potato beds cannot dry out. A strain from Mexico (Goss et al. 2014) reached Europe and proliferated. By 1848, it had killed hundreds of thousands and driven millions to desperation, often migration to America (Lang 2001; Salaman 1949; Woodham-Smith 1962). England stood by, providing some relief (grain and more potatoes; see Geber et al. 2019) but very little, on the assumption that the “free market” would lead to plentiful supplies. This failed to occur, and Ireland never forgave the English, breaking away in independence in 1921. Today, in one of history’s more amazing ironies, Ireland has the highest per capita income in the world, far exceeding that of the UK.

Not only Ireland, but also all of northern continental Europe, was devastated. This had much to do with the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848, which inspired the Communist Manifesto and the whole Marxist movement. The United States was demographically and culturally transformed by thousands—ultimately hundreds of thousands—of Irish and German immigrants. There are now many times as many people of Irish descent in the United States than there are in Ireland. Latin America also received heavy immigration, the linguistic unfamiliarity offset by the familiarity of the Catholic religion. As late as 1916, potato blight led to 700,000 hunger deaths in Germany, war having taken the copper used for fungicides (Walters 2017). The blight continues to devastate crops in Asia.

The potato continues to evolve and develop. The domestic plant is tetraploid, making it hard to breed, so diploid varieties have been bred. Europe long remained the center of potatoes, but they are now more important in Asia (especially montane areas) and North America (Stokstad 2019). Ironically, they are possibly least important in their South American home, where they have never overcome an identification with the Indigenous people, who until recently were despised, oppressed, and as thoroughly ignored as possible in that continent.

Faroese food runs heavily to meat and fat. Among the delicacies are fermented mutton. Skerpikjøt is wind-dried mutton, raestkjøt the fermented form. These have a very complex bacteriology, but Lactobacillus is the key to preserving and providing taste. A gourmet tourism is now featuring it (Svanberg 2021, 2023). One recalls pinikjøt, dried sheep’s thorax, a delicacy I have enjoyed in Norway.

Michel De Certeau’s fascination with everyday life has led to some wonderful food ethnography in Lyon, France (De Certeau et al. 1998). Bread is still respected to almost sacred level. Wine is of course the complement, routinely consumed. White wine is sometimes flavored with blackcurrant liqueur, but not to the point of a Dijon Kir or a Lyonnaise Communard (red wine and blackcurrant mix).

            Russian food history is its own universe, covering a vast tract of Eurasia. It was a realm of scattered hunter-gatherers until agriculture slowly spread north and east via the Caucasus and the Pontic steppes. Stockraising nomadism developed in what are now Ukraine and Kazakhstan in the 3^rd and 4^th millennia BCE, as horse domestication progressed. Horses were first kept for meat and milk, then for pulling carts, finally for riding, and with that invention the steppes were open for long-range nomadism. Indo-European speakers were in at the birth of this, and spread the new technology rapidly into a land inhabited by Uralic, Turkic, and various less-known and distinctive langauges such as Ket and Yukaghir. Reindeer were domesticated possibly in the upper Yenisei drainage, possibly in far north Europe; either way, they were evidently domesticated in imitation of earlier domestication of livestock, and probably by people who already had herds (Vainstein 1980). Reindeer are thoroughly domesticated in those areas, but as one moves northeast, the reindeer are less and less domesticated, until in the extremely remote wilds of far northeast Siberia the Chukchi and Koryak try to manage wild or almost-wild herds.

            Early agriculture was, as elsewhere in west Eurasia, based on wheat and barley, with legume crops. By 2000 BCE, broomcorn millet was moving into central Asia from China. Between about 2000 and 1000, it became a staple crop, since it can tolerate drought and cold better than the western crops. It was the main crop in northern Russia until the early Medieval period.

            In the early Medieval centuries, the Vikings, locally called Rus, moved via rivers from Scandinavia to the Caspian Sea, and set up local states. Kiev became the main capital, and the country took the name Russia.

Arab travelers from the 10^th and 11^th centuries, notably Ibn Fadlān, report millet as the main crop, and introduced some superior strains of it (Ibn Fadlān 2012). They also note the making of birch beer from birch sap, in such a confusing way that the suffering modern editor concluded they were describing palm wine far from its real home. (Ibn Fadlān’s description is, however, perfectly clear to anyone familiar with the region; Ibn Fadlān 2012:34.) Ibn Fadlān and others were fed some hilarious tall stories. One was told that beavers keep enslaved weaker beavers, consigned to lower parts of their lodges, and this explains mangy skins; also that Christianity was better than Islam because it allows wine but only one wife, and women weaken but wine strengthens (Abū Hāmid in Ibn Fadlān 2012:83). The Arabs, and later writers (Goldstein 2020), report enormous numbers of beehives in the forest, and thus great consumptioin of honey. Bees, and honey-hunting bears, were common enough to be a danger. The Russians share the widespread fear of calling bears by name, and thus the word medved, “honey-eater,” came to be standard (Goldstein 2020:65ff).

Russia soon found rye to be superior to millet, leading to the rapid increase of the former at the expense of the latter. Darra Goldstein’s superb history of Russian food is even titled The Kingdom of Rye (2022). From her we learn that rye took over after 900—evidently considerably after, given the Arab accounts. It became the major food crop in the colder parts of Russia, though wheat and barley were grown as luxuries and continued to dominate the warmer south. Later, the Russians, and Germans in Russia, developed the extremely cold-tolerant wheats that took over much of the steppes. These are hard red wheats, superior for bread making. Many of the Germans were religious minorities, especially Anabaptists, encouraged by Peter the Great and Catherine the Great to come to Russia, escape intolerance at home, and introduce modern farming practices. They moved in large numbers to the Plains of North America in the 19^th century, and thus the hard red cold-loving wheats came to dominate wheat production in the Dakotas and the Canadian Prairie Provinces.

They also introduced the “mammoth Russian” sunflower, which now dominates vast acreages in the Plains—an ironic case of a plant “not without honor save in his own country” (as Jesus said), since the sunflower is native to central North America and was domesticated there and in north Mexico, but was perfected as a major crop far away in Russia and Ukraine, and then returned from that distant realm to its native home. (A good deal of the above is from narratives I heard in youth; I was raised in Nebraska and went to school with many children of Russian German families, and later learned more about their stories.)

Bread was the staple, and was considred sacred, as elsewhere. The Russians picked up Near Eastern bread types, and with them the widespread taboo against letting a crumb fall and be stepped on. Bread, however, was a luxury in really hardscrabble areas like Belarus in the old days. Grain porridge and potatoes were daily fare (Bolotnikova et al. 1979).

Then as now, river fish were important, often the main source of protein. Some in eastern Russia are anadromous, living in the Pacific and running up rivers to breed. Huge runs of sturgeons formerly ran upriver from the Caspian Sea. These included the enormous beluga or huso (Huso huso), which could weigh over 1500 kg. Female sturgeons produced up to hundreds of pounds of eggs, and given Russia’s pickling culture, caviar resulted. It was at first a local staple food; it became a luxury in urban Russia, and then a super-luxury when rich Russian landlords and nobles introduced it to France in recent centuries. Alas, its popularity was its destruction. Sturgeon fishing soon went out of control. Now, the rewards of poaching in Russia, Iran, and other bordering countries, as well as for Pacific sturgeon in eastern Russia, are enough to tempt poachers to ignore high risks, and wild sturgeons will certainly be extinct in Eurasia before 2100 unless a miracle happens. The beluga is critically endangered. Sturgeons survive in North America, in tiny fractions of their former numbers, but the only real hope for caviar comes from sturgeon farming, perfected at the University of California, Davis, and catching on worldwide as disease problems are addressed.

Beyond sturgeon, many forms of carp, pike, and sander (Sander spp.) occur, as well as other more obscure species. Catfish grew to enormous size in the past. The wels or sheatfish (Silurus glanis), found in major rivers throughout eastern Europe and into Central Asia, may grow to almost 3 meters in length. It too is getting rare.

Cabbages grow well into the far north, producing enough vitamin C to sustain life. Vitamin C also comes from wild forest foods. The forest produced not only greens, berries, and medicinal herbs, but game and protein-rich mushrooms; hunting and gathering were thus often necessary to life in the old days. Fireweed was an important source of greens rich in vitamin C (Goldstein 2022:39), as in North American Indigenous societies.

Potatoes came in the 18^th century but still met resistance in the 19^th (Goldstein 2022:49). They were inevitably accepted, and became a staple food, necessary to survival in the many subsequent famines.

            Another cold-tolerant crop was the beet, which prospered in the warmer southwest. Russian cooking depends heavily on the sharp, intense flavorings that manage to grow in a cold climate: dill, horseradish, celery, wild greens and mushrooms. Also, fermentation comes into its own, to make those sharp intense flavorings out of ordinary foods. Sour cream, sourdough bread, pickled cucumbers, pickled mushrooms, pickled beets, pickled fish, and anything else easily fermented by Lactobacillus provide much of the flavor of Russian and East European food.

            One of the ferments is kvass, basically bread beer. Bread, or some similar cooked grain food, is left in water, sometimes with a starter, and kept warm. It produces a sour, slightly alcoholic drink. Far more serious is vodka, usually made from grain in spite of the legend that it is made from potatoes. (It can be, but rarely is.) Vodka (“little water” in Russian) is essentially unaged whiskey. Basically raw alcohol cut with water (some), it usually has no taste, but is often flavored with anything from chile peppers to lemons. In Poland, the traditional flavoring is buffalo grass, more or less similar to American sweetgrass. Yorsh, vodka and beer (Goldstein 2022:26), resembles the American boilermaker (whiskey with beer either mixed in or as a side shot).

A final alcoholic drink is mead, brewed from the honey that abounds in eastern Europe. It was a major indulgent before vodka entered the picture. Other drinks include a wide range of nonalcoholic fruit and honey drinks, to say nothing of pickle juice.

            Russian dumplings clearly derive from the Iranian-Turkic universe, but they have local names. Pel’meni comes from the Komi-Perm language, an obscure tongue related to Finnish, and means “dough ears.” Vareniki derives from an old Russian root, var-, for boiling (Goldstein 2022:27, 36). Kreplach is the Yiddish word, going back to older German krapfe “pastry.”

             The Tatars, a Turkic minority widely distributed in Russia and locally in Finland and elsewhere, have their own dumpling, pärämäts or peremech. It is a flat, circular dumpling with the usual variety of stuffings—meat, mushrooms, cheese, berries, and so on—which is baked or fried. Like dumplings throughout the Turkic, Russian, Chinese, and other realms, they have an enormous cultural significance (Ståhlberg and Svanberg 2025). They are a symbol of home, family, and good times, and thus have become major ethnic markers in the multiethnic world of the Tatars. As with pel’meni, and as with Chinese jiaozi, they are made in large quantities by the whole family or even groups of neighbors. Rolling out the dough, making the stuffing, and finally pleating the dough to make the necessary folds on top, is a good-time activity. The whole cult of dumplings and the good times that families and groups of friends have in making them together is a major part of life in central Asia and areas influenced from it.

Ukrainian cooking is like Russian, but with more ingredients, and fairly luxurious use of some that were scarce in Russia. and Ukraine. Borscht centers in Ukraine. It not always made from beets, but typically is. There are probably more borscht recipes than there are Ukrainian and southwest Russian cooks; everyone seems to have their own favorites, not just one favorite. My Ukrainian cookbook (Georgievsky et al. 1975) includes 24 borscht recipes, and a couple for holodnik, more or less borscht without beets. Varenitzi is the dumpling word.

            An example of how a culinary myth can begin and propagate is provided by the word “brunch.” For decades, the invention of this word and concept was credited to one Guy Beringer in 1896. Hannah Reff (2016) finally ran him down, and found he existed only in a short story in the British humor magazine Punch. Someone took the story seriously, probably from a joke reference, and the same line with the same attribution was solemnly repeated from author to author for decades. Reff found that the word was actually invented by English college students at about that time; Oxford blames Cambridge and Cambridge blames Oxford.

            This is all too typical of what passed for culinary history before recent decades. The claim that Marco Polo introduced spaghetti to Europe also originated in humorous fiction. French food history is full of myths, most of them enthusiastically propagated in the 20^th century by the Larousse Gastronomique, a food dictionary. It has taken much effort to run down and correct these stories.

            I have personally watched a few errors creep into the literature through mistranslations of Chinese. The Chinese, like other people in this world, oten named foreign crops after their own local equivalent. Just as English has “Tahiti apple, “rose apple,” and for that matter “pineapple” for fruits nothing like an apple (or a pine cone—“pineapple” originally meant “pine cone”), Chinese named the pineapple the “foreign jakfruit,” guava the “foreign pomegranate,” asparagus “foreign wildrice-shoot,” sunflower the “foreign mallow,” and so on. These tend to lose the “foreign” qualifier over time, and then westerners think the plant was found in China centuries before it could have been there.

Africa

            Africa is the home of humanity. We evolved from ape ancestors there, over the last two million or more years. Most of the action seems to have taken place in east and south Africa, but conditions for preserving fossils are poor in the central and west, so expect exciting results from those areas someday.

Africa still has large numbers of people dependent on hunting and gathering. Most are genetically different from cultivators around them.

The most famous groups are the San (variously named locally) of southern Africa, the “Bushmen” of past colonial naming. They have been made famous by the work of Richard Lee (1979) and many others. Also famous are the Hadza, a tiny group that still hunts in the wild, rugged, and difficult country east of Lake Eyasi and west of Lake Manyara in Tanzania. Most are now settled, but a stalwart group of a few hundred refuses to give up their free lifestyle. They live largely on meat, wild roots, and on honey from wild bees, which are smoked into calmness and seem used to being robbed.

Herman Pontzer’s wonderful book Burn (2022)provides a great introduction to the Hadza. His own introduction was dramatic enough: in their tents, he and other researchers new to the area heard lions growling and scuffling around their tents. The researchers cowered in fear. When morning came, they were treated to a wonderful fresh meat breakfast by their new Hadza friends. “You guys heard th elinons list night, right?….Well, we figured they were up to something, so we went and checked it out. Turns out they had just killed this kudu…so we took it” (Pontzer 2022:5). People who think nothing of taking a fresh kill from a pair of lions are definitely tough. I have watched hyenas try to do it and be terrified into retreat.

I have never met the Hadza, but I had a strong sense of homecoming when I first went into their country, coming down to Lake Manyara. It is high enough to be pleasantly cool compared to the burning plains of much of Africa. It is a large fresh lake, surrounded by marsh, swamp, riparian forest, and grassland. You reach it by dropping from a high plateau through savannah country with grass and scattered trees. The whole picture is exactly the sort of mixed ecosystem where you would expect humans to evolve. We re-create such landscapes in gardens and parks, from Japan to Renaissance Italy and from old Persia to modern California.  Most of the land on the high plateaus above Manyara was Maasai country when I was first there, and I have spent some time with the Maasai. Cultivation is now rapidly encroaching on the Maasai and Hadza, as Tanzania’s population rapidly expands. One hopes for a bearable future.

In spite of getting a lot of meat, the Hadza live to a large extent on roots and on honey. An odd bird, the Indicator, whose scientific name is Indicator indicator, often leads them to beehives, and then eats the larvae and wax—it can digest beeswax. I have had the experience of being led in a beehive direction by an indicator bird; it is a rather surrealistic experience.

Rainforest areas of central Africa have their own hunter-gatherers, in the richest forests. They are small people, adapted to a world where protein is largely unreachable in the treetops. They preserve genetic differences from the cultivators around them, who moved in from the northwest in the last few thousand years. Connectivity of hunter-gatherer populations in the forest zones diminished during ice ages, but got back to current levels between. They have been around for at least 120,000 years. Connectivity increased around 105-110 thousand years ago, again at 68-87 thousand, and yet again at 17 to 12, because of drastic reduction in forest range due to the Ice Ages. This reduction forced them into small areas and brought them into more contact with settled farmers. The current population of hunter-gatherers in central Africa is about 200,000 people (Padilla-Iglesias et al. 2022).

            The San (with their Khoi or Khoekhoe relatives, who herd livestock) and the Hadza both speak isolated languages without surviving relatives. Both stocks are click languages, making phonemes by implosion, unlike all other world languages. San is also extremely phoneme-rich. One suspects many such languages are long lost.

            Outside of these, modern Africa has only three great language phyla: Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Niger-Congo. These are all native to the continent. Afro-Asiatic has a center of diversity in the southern highlands of Ethiopia, and I am fairly sure it developed there. Its most famous branch is Semitic, which probably started in the central highlands of Ethiopia, where Amharic and several relatives survive, but soon reached the Near East and differentiated there. Babylonian and Assyrian go back more than 4000 years, and the Semitic languages were probably already in the Near East by 5000 BCE. Sumerian, their predecessor language in Mesopotamia, was completely replaced by Semitic languages, which soon gave rise to Hebrew, the Arabic languages, and relatives. It has occurred to several that the Biblical Eden is a paradise surronded by desert and watered by four rivers draining north, east, south, and west—a perfect description of the Ethiopian highlands, with the rivers being the Awash, Webi Jubba, Omo, and Blue Nile.

            The Nilo-Saharan phylum goes back more than 10,500 years, to an ancestral language somewhere near Lake Chad or in the southeast Sahara. Most of the Nilo-Saharan languages are incredibly obscure, spoken by small groups in remote areas. The best-known groups to the outside world are the Maasai and their cattle-herding neighbors in interior East Africa.

            The Niger-Congo languages center in west Africa, where a fantastic diversity exists from Senegal through Nigeria. 2000 to 3000 years ago, one branch, the Bantu, grew in one of the most amazing expansions in linguistic history. Within a few centuries, the world from Nigeria to South Africa was speaking Bantu languages. Swahili is the one best known to the world. I have some experience with both ends of the phylum, knowing a tiny bit of Wolof from the far west, and having studied Swahili briefly in the far east.  

            Agriculture apparently did not begin in Africa, but it acquired wheat, barley, chickpeas, lentils, and other major cultigens from the Near East almost as soon as those were domesticated. Nilo-Saharan does not have a shared agricultural vocabulary, but its main branches do (especially for livestock; these are herding peoples), showing that agriculture came about the time they were differentiating, some 10,500 years ago (Ehret 2017). Afro-Asiatic has many shared terms going back at least that far. Niger-Congo’s earliest agricultural words appeared about the same time, around 5000 BCE (the proto-language had a word for fonio [Ehret 2017:72), but it was probably gathered wild). Agriculture moved rapidly into the African world. By the time the Bantu began their epic migrations, they had words for oil palm, groundnuts, goats, gourds, yam, and black-eyed peas (Ehret 2017:76), among other things.

The Nile Valley of Egypt became the heartland of African agriculture, and served as a corridor for it to move rapidly south. As the Ethiopian highlands were reached, new crops were domesticated at some uncertain but probably early time. Beer spread with the Near Eastern crops (Arthur 2021). A beer in Nubia around 3000 years ago proved to contain terramycin—the mold was one of the fermentation agents—and the people of the day were presumably healthy.

            In general, northern Africa was populated from Europe, northeast Africa was always more or less part of the Near East demographically, and sub-Saharan Africa was a different world genetically, with intergrading only in Ethiopia and along the Nile. Little is known about the Sahara, now largely uninhabitable. But in the early Holocene, it was all woodland and grassland, except for a small area of desert around the Nile. Lake Chad was as big as Germany.  Recently, two mummified women who lived 5000 years ago in Takarkori, in the middle of the Sahara, were genetically analyzed. The two are representatives of a lineage known previously only as a mysterious component in the genomes of a few individuals from Morocco. It is not related to sub-Saharan people, and only distantly to Mediterranean populations (Salem et al. 2025). By this time sheep and goats were herded there, but they were ordinary Near Eastern ones.

Herding appeared by 5000 BP in Kenya. It was highly specialized, with heavy milk dependence and probable lactase persistence gene, by 3000 BP. In 5000 BP the cattle were largely for meat, though milk was used. Milk dominated by 3000 (Grillo et al. 2020). The timing is similar to that for central Asia and a bit later than that for eastern Europe. 

Ethiopia and neighboring areas were characterized by agro-pastoralism from 1600-900 BCE, then agriculture. The usual Near Eastern crops appeared: emmer, barley, flax. Tef, millets, and possibly sorghum had also appeared by then (Beldados et al. 2023).

Chief among these was tef (Eragrostis tef), a species of weeping lovegrass that is adapted to the cold, moist climate there. It became the staple food, which was fortunate, since it is high in iron, otherwise desperately short in many African diets. It is made into injera, a large sourdough pancake. Food is placed on this pancake and eaten by hand with further injeras. A bite of food picked up by a small piece of injera is a gursha in Amharic, and gurshas are exchanged between family members as a bonding ritual. New barley varieties suited to the climate also emerged. An oilseed, Guizotia abyssinica, was developed and remains important. A range of minor crops appeared. Ethiopian food, in sharp contrast to most African food, is one of the great gourmet cuisines of the planet.

Injera at its best is as good as any bread on earth. It is eaten with highly spiced stews of beef, mutton, goat, and chicken, as well as many leguminous crops, green vegetables, and other foods. Spiced butter, extremely hot chiles, and a range of spices from the Near East and India add flavor; turmeric, cumin, cinnamon, and black pepper are widely present. A unique touch is provided by red onions sliced very thin and slowly caramelized in a dry pan.

Shiro flour is made of yellow split peas, often with fava beans (of which Eth is the world’s 5^th biggest exporter), grass peas, field peas, and spices. (Favas are called by the Arabic name of fuul.) Mitin shiro has vetch, garlic, ginger, salt, and chile powder and other spices, and is used in shiro alich’a, yellow split pea stew. Shiro powder can include all sorts of spices, incl black cumin, hell (whatever that is), coriander, kemune (unident.), onion, sunflower, nutmeg, long pepper, thyme, etc. They have chem analyses. The commoner spice powder is berbere, blazing hot with chiles, but also including bishopsweed, fenugreek, cardamom, basil, garlic, rue, rosemary, cumin, cinnamon, etc., to taste. Enkulal firfir is scrambled eggs with berbere. (Zeru et al. 2023).

            Farther south and in hotter climes, a range of heat-adapted grains developed. Sorghum (Sorghum biocolor) was the most important, going worldwide by 2000 BCE as it spread through Egypt, Ethiopia, and India. Its weedy relative S. halapense (Johnson grass) is a hated weed, but sometimes used for forage and erosion control.

            All along the Sahel—Arabic for “shore”—the Sahara grades slowly into the cultivatable lands of rainfed Africa. The Sahara is the province of camel nomads. The Sahel is disputed, or sometimes cooperatively managed, by stockraisers dependent on cattle and by cultivators dependent on tough, drought-resistant millets. One, the bulrush millet Pennisetum americanum, can grow on four inches of rain. It is a tall, beautiful, impressive plant that deserves more attention. The name comes from its superficial similarity to cattails (bulrushes in England). Fonio, a domesticated crabgrass (Digitaria exilis and the less appealing D. iburua), is comparably tough. Finger millet (Eleusine coracana and relatives) is slightly less drought-resistant, but high in yields. These are now promoted as “ancient grains,” which they are, but to me they taste rather like dust. The Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam has enthusiastic words about fonio in his cookbooks (Thiam 2008, 2015), but I am less than excited.

Their great limit is their susceptibility to birds. My experiments with growing bulrush millet in desert California ended summarily when house finches and goldfinches discovered the seed heads. The African equivalent is the red-billed quelea (Quelea quelea), which occurs in millions and can be almost as devastating as the locusts that also infest the Sahel. Bulrush millet remains the staff of life in regions too dry for anything else. Bulrush and finger millets and sorghum reached India by 1700 BCE. Fonio has stayed in West Africa.

            Also domesticated about 2000-4000 years ago were the Bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea) and the similar Hausa groundnut (Macrotyloma geocarpum), which like the peanut plant their fruits in the soil—the flower grows downward and into the earth.

            In tropical Africa, a whole suite of plants adapted to hot, wet conditions was added. The major ones were yams, lily relatives of the genus Dioscorea—similar to, but not related to, the tuber-bearing morning glory from South America that was assimilated to “yams” by enslaved Africans and still bears the name in the United States. Dioscorea of many species—Asian as well as African—still grow in the Western Hemisphere tropics, but are rare in U.S. markets. Less well known in the African pumpkin or ash gourd (Telfairia occidentalis), grown for its large and highly nutritious seeds rather than for its flesh. It has enormous potential, but somehow has never caught on anywhere outside of west-central Africa. (On all these crops, see the wonderful accounts in National Academy of Sciences 1996, 2006.)

            Finally, and much more hopeful from a gourmet standpoint, was an independent domestication of rice that took place by 2000 years ago in the Niger River valley, especially the internal delta in Mali. This is a different species (Oryza glaberrima) from Chinese rice, not close enough to hybridize easily, though hybridization is now under way in a search for resistance to pests and other problems. It was grown widely in interior and coastal West Africa. Carried to the New World by enslaved people, it spread widely (Carney 2001).

            James Webb (1995) describes the interaction in his book Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600-1850, and makes it sound very much like Mongol-Chinese relations in north China in old times, and Roderick McIntosh (2005) has made the comparison. Interesting is that in some parts of the zone “white” meant herder, “black” meant farmer, as if skin color sorted with lifestyle—which it does not. The old Chinese classification into “barbarians” and “civilized” is quite comparable.

            More wide-ranging is Tadeusz Lewicki’s major work West African Food in the Middle Ages According to Arabic Sources (1974). This book stresses the importance of the native rice and millets, and of livestock, and the lack of other foods, though indigenous spices were important not only in food but in trade. Grains of Paradise (a native cardamom, Aframomum spp.) was a major staple of international trade, largely replaced in later centuries by Asian cardamom and other spices. It continues to have some medical use.

Roderick McIntosh (2005) gives a striking account of the interior delta of the Niger. This is a vast tract where the river is obstructed and spreads out in a huge channeled wetland. The soils arepoor and most areas are either too dry or too wet or flood-prone for much agriculture, but there enough wet channels and marshes for cultivation. The area has had some bursts of serious urbanization with high culture including Jenne-Jeno which rached 42,000 people or more in 1200-1400 CE (McIntosh 2005:210), but no large citadels, monumental construction, or huge sculptures. Dense and close-spaced settlements cultivated fonio, bulrush millet, sorghum, Guinea millet Brachiaria deflexa, Bambara groundnut Vigna subterranea, and African rice, which very possibly was domesticated there (McIntosh 2005:80-94). 80-84, climate history; complex, only broad outlines same as elsewhere. Ethnic groups specialized in the old days: Marka raised the rice, Bozo net-fished, Somono fish big channels, Bambara (who invaded in the medieval period) farm millet, Tuareg and Fulani herded. Jenne-Jeno and area ca 1200-1400 covered 190 ha and had some 42,000. McIntosh intriguingly talks of a high philosophic tradition in the Mandingo world, but says very little about it.

Rice dominates the far west coast from Sierra Leone north to Senegal. This became known as the Rice Coast. Today, the true African rice is rare, being replaced by the Asian species. Most of the area was once dominated by the Mandingo Empire. The Mandinka language and the empire’s high culture are still widespread. A great range of languages, distantly related but often strikingly different, is spoken, and people tend to be multilingual. Our principal friend in Senegal was fluent in his own language (a tiny minority speech), Mandinka, Wolof (the country’s lingua franca), French, and English; we can vouch for his near-native-speaker competence in the last two. He was learning Spanish.

The empire excelled in music. The traditional, highly distinctive music of this area not only survives and flourishes today, but it developed into the blues in the United States. It contributed the banjo (bania in Mandinka) to America and the world. The blues, the old-time ring shout, and United States gospel music are derived from this musical world, with various contributions from Europe, and in the case of the guitar from Mexico and the Caribbean. The reason that only the United States had the blues (originally) was that American plantation owners had trouble growing sugar north of Florida, switched to rice, and needed enslaved people who were experts at growing it. These introduced not only rice technology but also okra and watermelon, among various natives of their homeland. Watermelon has recently been discovered to have been developed by local people in the central Sahel. the rest of the story is told below in the North America section.

Senegal can stand as an example of the foodways of the region. Since most of the population lives along the coast or along rivers, rice and fish are staple foods. The fish is often smoked, producing a characteristic pleasant scent throughout markets and along shorelines. In the dry interior, the millets take over. Animals are largely sheep and goats; the area is largely Muslim. Cattle are common in some areas. The Fulani, a nomadic or seminomadic herding people, herd vast flocks of sheep, goats, and some cattle over the dry grasslands where agriculture is shaky or impossible.

A signature dish that more or less anchors the cuisine is thibou djenn (variously spelled tibu jen, etc.), fish stew. It consists of large chunks of sizable white-fleshed fish boiled with okra, carrots, onions, tomatoes, eggplants, and sometimes greens and herbs. Rice is cooked in the broth and served separately. Thibou yasa is stewed meat, similar except that the rice is not usually cooked in the stock. Thibou yapp is the lamb or goat version. Mafé is food stewed with ground peanuts, a very common and widespread technique all over West Africa. Black-eyed peas, niébé, are common, often added to stews and soups, or made into the universal West African fried dumpling known as akara, more or less a falafel made with blackeyes instead of chickpeas. A notable vegetable of the region is “sour tomato,” actually a local species of eggplant with a wonderful sharp flavor, somewhat like the round green eggplants of southeast Asia.

The French colonial regime had its main headquarters for all of northwest Africa in Dakar, which is now an extremely sophisticated, vibrant, active, and lively city. French bread, pastries, and salads are universal. Senegalese food is not highly spiced, but has distinctive and rich flavors from the local greens, herbs, and grains.

Gambia, a small country completely surrounded by Senegal except for a small coastline, is said to be the home of Jollof rice, a dish of rice cooked with chicken and/or shellfish and the usual vegetables. It is the ancestor of jambalaya. “Jollof” is a variant form of Wolof, associated with the old Wolof state, and “jambalaya” is Wolof for “mixed grain stew,” so the ethnic base of this dish are clear. In the New World, it added tomatoes and chile pepper—typically cayenne—and these have made it back home, to become part of Jollof rice. In New Orleans, it acquired French herbs and sausages.

More general and basic is red rice or Spanish rice, rice cooked in tomato stock with various vegetables, and usually with sea food or sausages or bacon. Usually the stock is made first, then the rice is cooked in it. It is a Caribbean development of rice cooked in stock, typical of the Rice Coast. Various forms have spread throughout the Caribbean, Mexico, the United States (especially the south), and elsewhere. Typically, red rice is simply rice in tomato stock, but elaborate forms verge on or become identical with jambalaya (e.g. Cross and Crawford 2023:163-164). Rarely, the rice is fried, then the stock poured in, as is the case in some forms of pilau; I assume this technique was learned from Indian immigrants.

Moroccan and other Arab influence shows itself in the very widespread use of cumin ni all these dishes, and the frequency of cinnamon, black pepper, and coriander. Coriander greens (cilantro) are widespread. The most famous native West African spice is malagueta pepper, also known as Grains of Paradise, alligator pepper, and various other names. It was once universal in the southern part of the region and influential throughout. It is a local species of cardamom (Aframomum melegueta). It even spread to the Mediterranean and became important and widespread there in Medieval and Renaissance times. It was often used medicinally as a stimulant. It has been largely replaced by chiles and black pepper, but it has not gone totally away. Medieval medicine and cooking re-enactors know it as Grains of Paradise, and seek it out by mail-order.

West African staple foods from farther south than the Rice Coast are largely root crops. Whether you depend on rice, millets, or roots is ultimately driven by what grows best in your area, but cultures institutionize one or another as staple. There is rumored to be a place where two rivers join, dividing three ethnic groups, each dependent on one of those staples—but none eating all of them. The roots, traditionally local yam (Dioscorea) species but now usually manioc, are pounded into a soft, gooey mass known as fufu. It is consumed in bits called “swallows” in English. These are picked off the main lump and dipped in stew or otherwise combined with a relish. They are insufferably bland and stodgy to some outsiders, but there is a connoisseurship of swallows in their native home. They may be “soft, stretchy, and fluffy (pounded yam) to slightly gritty [maize cooked down to a solid, like polenta], chewy (tapioca starch) and sticky [rice cooked down]” (Sokoh 2025:211).

Foods eaten with the staple include egusi, a stew of goat, tomatoes, garlic, ginger, and sometimes other spices; puff puffs: doughtnut-like fried dough; eforiro, a Nigerian dish with greens and smoked fish; and dodo: bits of soft, cartamelized plantains. Moi moi or moin moin is the Yoruba word for a black-eyed pea puree.

Nigerian food is ably introduced to the world by the chef Ozoz Sokoh, from the Yoruba southwest corner of the nation. Her book Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria not only provides recipes and stunning photographs, but provides a whole ethnography of foodways in that large and diverse country. Spices include Monodora myristica, ehuru. Oil bean is Pentaclethra macrophylla. Xylopia aethiopica are grains of Selim or uda; uziza is Piper guineense. Telfairia seeds are important, as egusi. Ogbono are seeds of local mango species, ground. A range of local greens, some spicy and flavorful, is described, but not always identified. Moringa, basil, and squash leaves are among the identifiable. A linguistic note is that “sweet mouth” has the same double meaning that it has in United States Black English, showing a very likely origin for the American usage (p. 287). Her Jollof rice adds tomato paste early, then tomato stew base later, for a truly tomato-rich dish; it does not include meat or sea food, allowing improvisation.

Farther southeast, in Central Africa, Cameroon (Leypey 2018) is typical in depending on root crops, often made into fufu, a paste created by beating cooked roots until the starch turns unctious and slippery. Slippery textures are enjoyed widely in Africa. Palm oil from the fruit and kernels of the oil palm (Elaeis guineense) is the standard oil. Palm wine is a standard drink. The sap of the oil palm or other palms—many species are used—is fermented quickly.

            Meanwhile in East Africa, the Swahili coast became a major distination for trade. Even the Chinese came to call, in the massive voyages of Zheng He in the early Ming dynasty. The Swahili traded all manner of foods, as well as ivory and other African commodities. Medieval Swahili towns became prosperous and refined, with good food. Excavations by Quintana Morales and others (2022) in a town in southern Tanzania revealed stone houses and simpler wattle-and-daub ones. People in the stone houses ate better than those in daub. Millets, bananas, coconuts, rice, fish, sheep, and goats appeared, but fish were more of a staple. Some people ate turtles and dugongs, shakily legal in Islam. They note that Ibn Battuta recorded the food of Mogadishu (Somalia) as involving rice cooked in ghee and topped with stews of meat and chicken, fish, etc., plus bananas and “chillies”—a plant unknown in Africa at the time, and clearly a mistranslation, possibly for long pepper.

Persian traders were settling in large numbers, marrying into the community, and leaving many descendants. The old Swahili trading communities of the  island and port cities of Kenya and Tanzania in medieval times had Persian male ancestors and African female ones, as shown by recent genetic research. The African women appear to have been mostly Makwasinyi, already a mix of “pastoralists” and (mostly) “Bantu,” which I assume means they were a mix of possibly Nilo-Saharan herders with Niger-Congo (largely Bantu) farmers. The Persians did not get south of central Tanzania. South of there, genetics reveals some late Arabian mixture and slight Indian mixture, though not in the farthest south. The Kilwa Chronicles, Swahili texts long dismissed as legend, stated that the Swahili were a Persian-African fusion. Swahili has about 3% Persian loanwords and 16-20% Arabic. Modern Swahili, compared to the medieval ones are much more African on paternal side, over 50% vs only 17%; they are essentially the same—basically African—on maternal side (Brielle et al. 2023).

Outside of the ports, though, East Africa is no gourmet paradise. The staple in most areas is ugali, originally (and locally still) millet or sorghum mush, but usually maize mush cooked solid. It was memorably described in an old Lonely Planet guide to Kenya: “it weighs on your stomach like a royal corgi.” (The reference is to the Pembroke corgis traditionally raised by the British court; they wax exceedingly fat.) It is flavored with whatever is at hand: milk, berries, wild fruit, bits of meat or fish, anything. It is rarely in a class with grits or corn meal mush, let alone polenta. It also accompanies Vitamin B3 (niacin) and mineral deficiencies, because the phytic acid in the grain is not processed away.

Most of the land is under grazing, with local cattle. Food is milk, usually soured, often with astringent tree bark that acts as preservative and health-giving addition. Meat is eaten by traditional herders only when an animal is sacrificed for a major ritual occasion. It is then distributed so widely that few get more than a bite. The Maasai traditionally do not eat anything they do not raise themselves. Thus, Maasai country was once a vast game refuge; in fact, the famous African refuges, such as Ngoro Ngoro Crater and the Serengeti, were Maasai country (sometimes used by others). Alas, today, the Maasai have been pushed off much of their homeland to establish hunting parks for rich tourists—the ultimate hurt and insult to a noble people. Moreover, population growth on their remaining lands has been harder and harder on the wildlife, which can catch diseases from domestic stock. Overgrazing, formerly controlled by very rigid—indeed model—standards, is now inescapable (the above from my personal research and from friends).

Other herding peoples of East Africa have been hit by drought as well as population increase, and have entered into more and more savage wars with each other, leading to tragic desolation.

            Genetic engineering may yet save Africa from some of its worst problems. Crispr-editing is introducing resistance to witchweed (Striga hermonthica), a terrible plant parasite, from wild sorghums into domestic strains. Similar attempts may soon make maize more resistant, pearl millet flour spoil less fast, groundnuts resist the aflatoxin fungus, and cattle do better in Africa’s heat and dryness (Ledford 2024).

            Chocolate is native to the New World, but now West Africa produces most of it. A great deal is produced by child labor, often under slavery-like conditions. This has been an open scandal for decades. Cadbury and Hershey used to produce slavery-free chocolate, but now the giant corporations wink at the situation. In Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire, 2.1 million children work on some 2 million cocoa farms. Wages of $400 a year are considered good. These countries produce 2/3 of the world crop (Pilling 2020).

            Wild foods are extremely important in Africa. In Tanzania, nibbling on wild foods as one works in the fields is a major source of vitamins and minerals, which abound in the wild foods but are far too sparse in the daily ugali (corn meal or similar mush). Moving to town and eating higher-status food can thus cause malnutrition (Sakamoto et al. 2023).

South Asia

            South Asia was settled from several directions, with groups entering from the west (including African influence), the northwest, and the northeast. The main northwestern influence has been from Indo-Iranian language speakers; Sanskrit and its modern descendants such as Hindi and Bengali are from that family. The Dravidian languages, which are completely unrelated, may also have come from that direction, emerging in southern Iran while the Indo-Iranian family was developing in the Russian and Kazakhstan steppes. The northeastern influence is largely associated with Tibeto-Burman langauges, which originated in northwest China and spread in all directions.

Finally, the mysterious Munda languages, spoken by very large “tribal” communities in central-eastern India, are included in the Austroasiatic phylum. It may have originated in India, but a strong argument has recently been made by George van Driem that the phylum originated in the general area now mostly included in Myanmar, with the Munda being very likely a mix of Austroasiatic speakers with speakers of lost, unknown languages (van Driem 2021). The languages of the Andamans may be related to these, but are quite distinctive.

Van Driem has received spectacular confirmation from genetics: a distinctive genetic profile has been discovered in central Yunnan in remains of persons who lived around 5000 years ago, and, with increasing dilution from in-migrants from northern and eastern China, until today (T. Wang et al. 2025). This “Central Yunnan” variant of the broad East Asian spectrum is conspicuously present in Austroasiatic minorities all over southeast Asia (though not the Munda). It is also found, somewhat more mixed with recent Northern East Asian and sometimes Southern East Asian genomes, among neighboring Sino-Tibetan and Thai-Kadai groups. It is clearly a marker of Austroasiatic heritage, and dramatically confirms van Driem from a quite independent line of research. 

Genetics loosely tracks languages, with gene flow from the relevant directions quite clear, and the linguistic groups showing vague but discernible correlations with languages spoken (Basu et al. 2016; GenomeAsia100K Consortium 2019). In general, the subcontinent shows influences from almost everywhere: Africa in the south, southeast Asia in the east, China in the northeast, Iran and the steppes in the northwest, and so on. The Andamans are extremely different genetically from the mainland.

            Naturally, the food reflects this diversity (Acharya 1998; Antani and Mahapatra 2022). Many varieties of wheat and barley came from various parts of the Near East and central Asia. Foxtail millet and also domesticated rice, came from China, the rice hybridizing in India with native rices that may already have been somewhat cultivated (Clift and d’Alpoim Guedes 2021). By 1700 BCE, African millets and sorghum were coming in, probably via Iran but also directly by sea; we have no evidence of the millets in the Near East.

            Rice diversity is threatened, but is being maintained by the heroic efforts of people like Deb Debal (2019), who are saving and growing out heritage varieties—small, local equivalents of the vast International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, with its hundreds of thousands of rice varieties.

            Dairying is attested by the mid-3^rd millennium BCE (Chakraborty et al. 2020), but was surely far older. At that particular site, cattle were killed only when old, indicating they were used for dairying and work; sheep were killed young, for meat. 

Indo-Aryan tribes depending on herding, including dairying, came in soon after.

Alcohol in India has been covered in an outstanding book, An Unholy Brew by James McHugh (2021). It began with ales (grain brews) of various kinds, called surā. Sugar cane ferments were very common from early times. Honey, fruit, and other sweets were also brewed into alcoholic drinks, but not distilled. Madhu, from the Indo-European root for honey (cf. “mead” in English), was used not only for mead but for these various sweet drinks, also called āsava. These were consumed in the usual settings, from weddings to the equivalent of Saturday nights. Drunkenness was not particularly downvalued in early centuries. Young women were considered sexy and appealing when a bit high. Plays and poems attest to this. Moralists, on the other hand, were sour about such goings-on.

Meat was slowly but surely erased from cookbooks and food writings over time. An extreme case is The Delight of the Mind, a Sanskrit record of court culture in poetic form, ascribed to King Somesvara III (r. 1126-1138) and released in 1131 (Gutiérrez 2024). It records cooking and eating everything from hedgehogs and curlews to water monitors and tortoises. A fine recipe for barbecuing bandicoot rats is included. As a king, of the kshatriya caste, Somesvara would have eaten a lot of meat and enjoyed highly spiced dishes (as the recipes show). Over time, editions, summaries, and later works lost more and more meat recipes, as upper-caste Hindus were more and more influenced by vegetarianism. Recent summary and encyclopedic works on medieval food eliminate meat totally.

A 17^th-century work records medical and food traditions of India at the time (Pandey 2014).

By far the major external influence on South Asian food, over time, has been the Near East. Persian is closest and thus the most important source. The basic staples, such as wheat, barley, chickpeas, and lentils, came via the northwest before 2000 BCE. Herbs and vegetables presumably came about the same time, but leave less record. Later, the rise of sophisticated cuisine in the ancient and Medieval Near East quickly affected India.

Meanwhile, foods came from China; first were apparently foxtail millet and japonica rice, by about the same time. India duly domesticated its own native indica rice, and that quickly hybridized with Chinese, though they are genetically different enough to present some initial problems. Today, most rice is hybrid. Pure or fairly pure japonica remains the rice of Japan, and of California, where cool and often dry growing conditions favor it; it also dominates much of Korea, and sticky forms of it are used for many purposes all over east Asia. Otherwise, the hybrids dominate. India and Pakistan have a particularly distinctive group of rices, the basmati rices, growing in the Punjab and neighboring Himalayan states. Basmatis are fragrant, with a wonderful grainy scent, and cook up to a very long grain. India and Pakistan had a hard fight protecting the name, which is a somewhat vague descriptive term rather than an actual genetic variety; American growers were trying to pass off their local rices as “basmati” in spite of lacking the true qualities (see Shiva).

Today, the subcontinent has a whole range of dishes with Near Eastern names. Colleen Taylor Sen lists their origins: “Arabic (halim, harissa, halwa, sanbusa), Persian (kashk, shirbirij, pulao, zard birinj, dampukht, bandijan) and Turkic (qutab, qima, boghra, shulla)” (Sen 2016:185). We can add briyani, now a rice dish with stewed meat mixed in or cooked with the rice, from a Farsi word meaning “roasted” (Sen 2016:185). To unpack these somewhat, harissa is meat stewed with grain, a rather stodgy dish; halwa is anything sweet and cakelike; sanbusa became samosa, stuffed dumplings, deep-fried; pulao (pilaf) is rice cooked with various spices and anything else the cook feels like adding; dampukht is a word for stewing; qima is minced meat; shulla is a rich grain dish. 

Much of the most recent and sophisticated fusion was done at the courts of the Mughal emperors. “Mughal” is a derivative of “Mongol,” and the Mughals did have a very slight degree of Mongol ancestry, purportedly from Genghis Khan himself, but in fact they were Central Asians of largely Turkic and Persian ancestry. They thus favored a classic Persian-influenced cookery. It was established in the early Medieval period in the northwest; it did not spread to Bengal until the 1300s, and then only slightly, becoming more popular after 1700 (Sengupta 2023). There and elsewhere, it slowly became Indianized, with many more spices but many fewer fresh green herbs than in Iran. Thus “the blatantly exogenous became prototypically authentic” (Sengupta 2023:146).

This cookery was increasingly confined to local royal courts under the British raj, but it emerged into the world limelight when Kundan Lal Gujral opened the Moti Mahal restaurant in Old Delhi in the mid-20^th century (Sen 2016:282-284). He revived the classic cuisine, and added his own inventions, such as butter chicken. His signature dish was tandoori: meats marinated and then cooked in a tandur. I managed to dine in the Moti Mahal in 1978. It was a large, cavernous, barnlike structure, with fairly basic tables, chairs, and other appointments, but the food was superb.

The Moti Mahal was imitated worldwide. In the United States, the vast majority of Indian restaurants recapitulate its menu with considerable fidelity. (If they are Punjabi, it will be less spicy than the original; if south Indian, more spicy, and probably with some southern dishes added.) The UK, with its very heavy Indian and Pakistani immigration, has a greater variety and more originality in its Indo-Pak food, but still shows considerable Gujral influence.

New World crops transformed India after 1500 (Mazumdar 1999). The Portuguese were probably the main introducers. Chiles may have been the most transformative to the food. They were enthusiastically accepted and incorporated into every type of spicy dish. Over time, potatoes (especially white), maize, peanuts, squash, beans, and other staples made far more contributions to calories and health, but chiles remained the most visible and tasteable New World contribution. In India there arose an apparently spontaneous hybrid of habanero and tabasco chiles, the ghost pepper, which was even hotter than its parents. It has been bred to new heights of incandescence, as breeders vie to create the hottest pepper.

Indian food actually varies greatly in spiciness, especially in its use of chile. There is a rough cline from northwest to southeast. Punjabi food is straightforward and relatively simple, with less spiciness than most other traditions. At the other extreme is Tamil Nadu, in the far southeast, whose foods can be beyond even a hardened chile-lover’s ability to consume. Andhra Pradesh is also high in fire. There is a scurrilous and highly dubious rumor that this has something to do with invitational feasts and stingy feast-givers. If the food is too hot to eat, not much will be eaten, but of course the eaters try to develop a high tolerance level.

A major exception to the north-south gradient is the use of some of the world’s hottest chiles in the Himalayas. The akubari chiles of the Bhutia of Sikkim (the peppers are dalle khorsani in Nepali) are habaneros, or a cross of habanero and Tabasco chiles. They are the parents of the ghost and Carolina reaper chiles of the United States. They are regarded by the Bhutia as kinfolk (Bhutia 2024), other-than-human persons who are actual relatives.        Controversy continues to surround the coming of Green Revolution palnts to India. They certainly allowed an enormous increase in grain production, saving countless lives, but they also led to enormous increases in use of fertilizer, pesticides, machinery with its fossil fuels, and other modern inputs. The costs of these ruined many poor farmers. Ironically, the pesticides proved all too available for suicide, and many farmers in desperate economic straits died. The question of local improvement vs. imported technology with expensive inputs remains a vexed one, not helped by a government that is more concerned with Hindu supremacy and Muslim suppression than with feeding the people.

            It turns out that even the super-productive new wheat, maize and rice varieties of the post-Green Revolution era do not outproduce millets and sorghum under some of the more difficult Indian field conditions (Davis et al. 2019). An international center for developnig these “coarse” grains has been established, by parallel with the International Rice Research Center in the Philippines and CIMMYT in Mexico.

            An apotheosis of curry recipes is found in Raghavan Iyer’s 660 Curries (2023). This amazing encyclopedia contains, indeed, 660 recipes, all superb and many gathered from his family and friends. A major sorrow of my life is that will not live long enough to work my way through all of them.

Rajasthan food, as found in the vegetarian Bhookhe restaurant in Artesia, California, is heavily dependent on chickpeas. Gatte ke sabzi is a thickened soup with chickpea flour (besan) dumplings (like veggie franks); kadhi pakoda is a thickened yellow vegetarian soup with more chickpeas; bati are hard whole wheat dumplings to break up in dal. The food is accompanied by very hot and good chile-onion-oil chatni. Dahi (yogurt) came with cooked chickpeas, fried onions, and wondrous spices in it. Sweets were bland.

The breadstuffs are interesting. Corn chapatis resemble thick tortillas. Bajri roti (pearl millet tortilla) is tasteless and dry.

Kashmir has pink tea—boil green but fermented tea w soda and it turns red; then milk, salt, chai spices.

East Asia

            Pottery was invented first in East Asia. China had it by 18,000-16,000 years ago, Japan by 15,000 (Lucquin et al. 2018). It spread almost immediately to northeast China and thence to Siberia, and westward to Europe and the Near East. It was independently invented in the Western Hemisphere later, but it seems to have been invented only once in Eurasia.

            Widely throughout the world, there is a word for “staple food” and another word for “things to eat with the staple.” In Mandarin Chinese, fan is staple cooked grain: rice, millet, locally barley and others. Cai, pronounced “tsai,” means “vegetables,” but by extension it means “cooked dishes,” and by even further extension it means “stuff to eat with fan.” In Cantonese, fan is also the staple and essentially always means cooked rice, but there is a special word, sung, for anything eaten with the rice as topping or accompaniment. Korean (CHECK…).

            Elsewhere in the world, the same distinction is made. Ancient Greek sitos meant the staple: bread, porridge, meal cake. Opson (or hopson; it begins with an aspiration) meant cooked food to go with the staple. American dialectic English has usages like “potatoes and with-it.”

Culinary nationalism has grown in eastern Asia and elsewhere (King 2019). Countries are increasingly proud of their distinctive foodways, and increasingly eager to sell them. Flashy restaurants and huge world trade fairs are only one result. More and more books, articles, and prideful cooking programs appear all the time. The relevant foods can even be moral (Leung and Caldwell 2020). Rice as staple, milk as superfood (the west having convinced Asians to use formula and cows’ milk), and other items take on moral qualities.

Rice may become better for the planet; a gene brought in from barley allows it to grow with less methane production (Su et al. 2015).

The Chinese, throughout history, got fatty acids from meat, fish, grains, and seeds, including soybeans. In spite of the last, the Chinese generally got a good balance, since they used the soybeans for bean curd and fermented products, not for oil. Most food oil came from lard and other animal fats or from mustard and cabbage seed oils. Over time, as farming got more intensive and animal meat more expensive, more and more fat came from the mustard seeds. This was equivalent to our modern “canola oil” (canola is a mustard), overwhelmingly made up of monounsaturated fatty acids.

            Korean food is as dependent on grain staples as other East Asian foods. Rice was traditionally the prestige starch, but was a luxury everywhere, the more so as one went north from subtropical Jeju Island to the subarctic cold of the northern mountains. Usually, people depended on barley, millets, and buckwheat, in various combinations. These often became noodles. Lacking gluten, they were variously prepared; I assume they were often forced through a sieve into boiling water, as in China.

            Rice is pap (or bap). Food to accompany the grain staple has its own special word, as elsewhere. Side dishes with a meal are served in small separate plates and known as banchan. A meal is bapsang (bap for rice of course), soup kuk. Jang is salted side dishes. Chopped spices and herbs as banchan are yangnyom.

A main meal will have about seven of these—less for a minor occasion, more for a feast. Meat was a luxury in the old days, but was consumed in large quantities when available, and today Korean food is meat-heavy. Do-it-yourself barbecue on metal cones over a live fire is overwhelmingly popular, and has gone worldwide. Hot pot, noodle dishes, and various dumplings are also extremely popular. The dumplings betray Central Asian origin by their Turkic name, mantu or mandu.

            Korean food depends heavily on fermentation. Kinchi, pickled Chinese cabbage with chiles, is the most famous (the following information on it comes from Surya and Lee 2022). It involves Lactobacillus fermentation, heavy salting being used to prevent spoilage. Kimjang is the process of making it, specifically the huge fall rush. It is most often made from baechu, white cabbage. Sea food in kimchi is jeotgal. In 2021 a Chinese pair of characters was invented for it, pron xinqi. Chile was introduced about the time of the Imjin wars, Japan’s attempted conquest of Korea around 1592. The Korean word for chile is gochu, but that term is found in older texts. so must have been used for some other plant. Kkakdugi is kinchi with white radish, chonggak includes the variety called ponytail radish, yeolmu is the product from fresh young summer radish. Tongbaechu uses whole cabbages (mak is the usual cut-up one), yangbaechu green cabbages. Pa is made with green onions, gat with mustard leaves, buchu with garlic chives, kkaenip with perilla leaves. Green pepper and cucumber stuffed with chopped carrot and chives make gochu sobagi and oi sobagi. Dongchimi and nabak use more mul—water, brine.

Kimchi is often used in stew, kimchi jjigae. Kimchi in pancakes gives us kimchi buchimgae. Kimchi soup is simply named kimchi guk, guk meaningsoup  Kimchi fried rice is kimchi bokkeumbap. Gochugaru, red chile powder, generally gets into kimchi. Over 16 bacteria species, plus yeasts etc., are involved, including Lactobacillus kimchii and Weisella kimchii. Even Leuconostoc and Candida get into it. There is even a philosophy of kimchi, which includes the usual East Asian ideas of yin and yang, the five elements, balance and harmony, beauty, filial piety, and patience. In short: Bogi joeun tteogi meokgido jota, “what looks good tastes good” (Surya and Lee 2022).

More complex is jang, the Korean form of the Chinese word jiang and the item it describes: fermented soybean paste. Not only Lactobacillus, but a large number of other bacteria, as well as yeasts and other fungi, go into the various forms of jang. The beans are steamed, dried, and then fermented in brine. Ground with chiles, they become gochujang, the famous Korean sauce for many purposes. It has a strong soy paste flavor as well as varying but often high levels of capsaicin “heat.”

            Pickles, generally Lactobacillus ferments, often with other agents, accompany, or used to accompany, every Korean meal. They still appear at every major occasion among the banchan.

            Dependence on pickles for vegetables during the harsh Korean winters was associated with high rates of stroke (cerebrovascular accident); Korea long led the world in this cause of death. Cold storage and good transportation reduced the need for pickles, and the stroke rate has rapidly and steadily dropped.

            (On Korean food, see Maangchi 2019.)

            The national distilled drink is soju, monographed by Hyunhee Park (2021). It is a low-alcohol vodka, made from grains and distilled fairly gently, and often diluted, so its alcohol content is usually closer to 20% than true vodka’s 40%. It has gone worldwide, its popularity spreading outward from Korean restaurants. The best forms have the advantage of a pleasant grain taste along with lower alcohol than hard liquor. Samsu (from Chinese sanshu, “triple-distilled”) is stronger, more directly comparable to vodka, and is often made from sweet potatoes instead of grain. A drink whose popularity is still largely confined to Koreans is makkolli (makgeolli), a mild rice beer, carbonated and wonderfully flavorful. It is the perfect soothing and cooling accompaniment to Korean food fiery with chiles. I expect a boom in its popularity soon.

            Japanese food has been chronicled in the west by Eric Rath (2010a, 2010b). HERE ADD

            Like the rest of eastern Asia, Japan depends heavily on pickled foods, though far less than in the past. Within living memory, remote parts of northern Japan, especially the “snow country” of the northwest, had no other way of obtaining vegetables in winter. The vegetables were cut up and heavily brined, then fermented by Lactobacillus and other microorganisms into tsukemono. As in Korea, depending on such heavily salted foods was associated with high incidence of stroke, and also with stomach cancer. Modern cold storage and shipping led to precipitous decline in these conditions in recent decades.

Japanese food has substantially conquered the world (Stalker 2018). Japanese restaurants are everywhere (Farrer and Wank 2023). Sushi and sashimi have run well beyond the restaurants, and are borrowed freely by non-Japanese eateries. Most dramatic of all is the spread of instant ramen (Gewertz et al. 2013). The original ramen is a Japanese version of Chinese la mian; the Chinese original is often extremely spicy, and variously flavored but always dramatic in taste, though the simple base of beef-noodle soup is simple enough. The Japanese version cut down the spice considerably, and of course the international instant form has little beyond a lot of salt and soy powders. But all it requires is hot water to convert it into a meal, so it is the starving students’ food worldwide.

Southeast Asia

            Homo erectus reached southeast Asia about a million years ago, flourishing and populating the region widely, as shown by huge choppers and chopping tools made from large hard-stone cobbles. These were presumably used not only to kill and cut up animals, but to prepare more specifically targeted and designed tools from wood and bamboo. The specialized stone tools of the western world never developed in erectus days; apparently wood was more versatile. Homo floresiensis, the hobbit-like people of Flores, may be derived from this early migration. Later, Neanderthal and Denisovan genes reached southeast Asia early. The Denisovan genes fall into two groups, one in the Australia-New Guinea axis, the other in East Asia. People managed to get as far as the Solomon Islands by 42,000 years ago, showing astonishing seafaring ability (O’Connell et al. 2018).

            Homo sapiens is first recorded, so far, from Laos, about 77,000 to 86,000 years ago. Small, dark-skinned people moved in early, with groups widely scattered, surviving on islands and remote uplands. Later migrations from Africa along the coasts are evident. This hunter-gatherer substrate remains genetically detectable, particularly on islands (Lipson et al. 2014, 2018).           A series of very early skeletons, analyzed for genetic relationships, showed contacts literally all over the map. By several thousand years ago, influences from all directions were already visible (McColl et al. 2018). A trend of migration from west to east, and another from north to south, was established, and continued into historic times, reaching the most remote islands. Only central and southern Australia remained uninfluenced.

Once eastern Asia was fully populated, north-south movement became important, and dominated the demographic history of eastern southeast Asia as China became the regional superpower. Chinese first displaced other groups south, thus adding to a tendency already evident for groups like the Thai to move in that direction.

            Then in historic times the Han Chinese themselves moved down. They reached northern Vietnam early, and traded widely for 2000 years, but came to the Philippines and Malaysia largely after 1400 CE, when trade and commerce led to massive immigration.

            Southeast Asian agriculture has been summarized as “root, fruit and shoot.” The roots are taro and related tubers and corms, of which more below. The shoots are largely from bamboo, but many local species provide theirs. The fruits are an amazing riot of food, ranging from protein-rich coconut to starchy breadfruit to sugary mangosteen. The extent of southeast Asian use of plants is shown in the vast compendium of local products assembled by I. H. Burkill for British Malaya (1966). Hundreds of crop and wild plants are detailed. Agriculture reached a stunning level of sophistication and complexity, with ordinary farms growing dozens of species.

            The widespread cooling and drying period around 2200 BCE hit southeast Asia hard (Griffiths et al. 2020). It must have stressed what agriculture was there, but also induced people to put more effort into it, to keep food available.

            Agriculture reached southeast Asia from China and India before 2000 BCE. I suspect strongly that root agriculture was very long established. It certainly was in New Guinea, where we have evidence going back many thousand years. The mainland was surely not far behind, but we have no record so far.

Once it came, there were periodic lulls in development, around 1200 BCE and 300-500 CE (Chew 2018). Millet was in Yunnan by 2600 BCE, in Thailand by 2300. Bronze reached Thailand by the late 2^nd millennium BCE (D’Alpoim Guedes et al. 2020; Higham 2021). Rice was there by then, but possibly not earlier; wild rice occurs widely, so one cannot be sure. When clearly domesticated rice appears, it is the Chinese japonica form. Pomelos, tangerines, citrons, various legumes, and other crops appeared. The earliest rice in Indonesia occurs at 1500 BCE, but it is far out in Sulawesi, and rice must have reached more accessible parts of the archipelago long before that.

Chickens were domesticated in southeast Asia (possibly including what is now south China). The oldest clearly domesticated ones so far are from Ban Non Wat, Thailand, around 1650-1250 BCE (Peters et al. 2022), but it is impossible to tell early domesticated chickens from the wild Red Jungle Fowl, Gallus gallus, that is their parent. Many of us who were in upcountry southeast Asia a few decades ago will probably remember the indeterminate birds that scratched around hill villages—self-taming jungle fowl, or chickens little removed from that status and constantly mixing back with their parentage. I am sure this situation existed for hundreds or thousands of years before the Ban Non Wat birds. Significantly, Thai has a shared word, kai, for chickens, but it probably was used for jungle fowl long before true domestication. The word has traveled: it was borrowed straightforwardly into Cantonese, spread to Mandarin where it is now pronounced ji, and then traveled farther to produce a wide range of “chicken” words throughout Eurasia.

Joris Peters and his group traced out the travels of the chicken (Peters et al. 2022). The Ban Non Wat site was a large site with a defensive moat, showing much sophistication for the time. Over 95% of bird bones were chicken, making it clear that they had been domesticated for a long time. Grave offerings witho pigs, dogs, and bovines also appeared (“bovines” because several species of cattle occur in southeast Asia, all domesticated at some point). In India, chickens about after 1500-1200. In northern China, they are clearly present only by late Shang, around 1100 BCE. In Japan they do not occur until the Yayoi culture moved in from Korea and then nativized, around 100 BCE-100 CE. Central Asia shows no certain evidence till 800-500 BCE. In Oceania, chickens reached Tonga, the Solomons, and Vanuatu by the early 1^st millennium BCE, Hawaii by 1200 CE. They had reached the Near East by 1200 BCE, and are often mentioned in the Bible. They got to Ethiopia around 800 BCE, but elsewhere in Africa not until many southeast Asian crops came, around 200-300 CE. They reached West Africa by the mid-1^st-millenn BCE. In Europe they were widely present by 800-600 BCE,

Details of climate, climatic history, and early agriculture have been meticulously detailed by Peter Clift and Jade d’Alpoim Guedes (2021). The region is dominated by the monsoon, but is tropical enough to show much less seasonality than India or China. Basically, winter is a bit cooler, especially in the north. Spring heats up, leading to a sharp and blistering-hot dry season in May and June—longer in the dry center of Myanmar and some other areas. Summer is wet, with huge thunderstorms. Typhoons sweep the region in fall, hitting the Philippines especially hard. Global warming has increased their number and ferocity.

The pervasive rain allows rice to be the dominant crop everywhere. It is usually paddy-grown, but the rain is so heavy that even dry rice does perfectly well on hills and uplands, though it yields only 500-1000 pounds per acre at most, as opposed to 2500 (traditionally) to 10,000 and more today in wet fields. Even dry central Myanmar has no lack of water, from streams draining nearby mountains, and thus irrigation allows rice to be the dominant crop. In early times—and still in many areas—Chinese foxtail millet was the major crop of uplands. Root crops such as taro and yams (Dioscorea spp.) grew in moist lowlands and hills. An incredible variety of minor crops supplemented these.

On the other hand, grain agriculture peters out in far eastern Indonesia, and is absent from New Guinea and Oceania. The limit coincides with the limit of highly reliable rainfall, necessary to rice (Dewar 2003). There are clearly cultural factors at work—Oceanic people love their root crops and fruit trees—but rainfall sets a firm limit. On small islands, there is the additional factor that typhoons and storms regularly sweep over, destroying any and all grain in their path. Only the toughest trees and the safely-buried root crops survive.

Maize was a major addition to the roster, allowing intensive cultivation of hills and mountains—and thus devastating soil erosion over time. Sweet potatoes revolutionized New Guinea agriculture after 1800, and contributed to farming everywhere. More interesting was their introduction from South America by Polynesians who reached that continent well before 1400. Bringing back the kumara (from a native South American word), they introduced it to the Polynesian islands, where it became the staple food of the New Zealand Maori. It remains very important there, with dozens of varieties.

Traditional agriculture in southeast Asia was highly successful, adapted to local conditions, and sparing of inputs. It usually surpassed traditional European agriculture in yields and variety, produced highly nutritious foods, and was easy on the environment (Marten 1986). Rice production involves serious risks in this environment, with heavy rains, droughts, typhoons, blights, and other dangers. Farmers are highly competent at calculating and managing risks without the need of computers, mathematical simulations, or other modern arrangements (Roumasset 1976). Their religious dedication to the crop is one reason. Knowledge is part of sacred lore. In addition to risk awareness, saving good seed is religiously constructed. Among many groups, the spirit of the Rice Goddess is a beautiful young girl, sometimes seen hovering over the ricefields on misty nights. She plans her reincarnation every year by moving into the rice heads at harvest time. These heads are identified by their superior beauty, productiveness, and healthiness, and are thus saved for seed instead of being eaten like the rest of the crop (Hamilton 2003). This belief has minimized risk and selected for better and better seed stock over thousands of years.

Throughout southeast Asia, there is ongoing complementarity between wet-field farmers, growing rice and water-demanding root crops like taro, and the dry farmers. The latter are usually swiddeners, cutting a field, burning the cut vegetation, cultivating for a year or a few years, and moving on. The old English word “swidden” was introduced to anthropology by the Swedish ethnography Karl Izikowitz, who used it to describe the agriculture of the Lamet of Laos (Izikowitz 1951). The field may be abandoned if the soil is particularly infertile, but very often a large number of fruit trees and other useful perennials are established, and these are tended, often carefully, as the forest grows up. Depending on soil fertility, local taste, and local strength of tenure over many years, a former swidden will range from total abandonment to careful and regular management, with everything in between being attested somewhere.

Swidden fields range from purely rice, in wet and fertile hillsides, to wildly varied farms that reproduce to a limited extent the multispecies and multilayer structure of the tropical forest. Vegetable fields in the lowlands do the same, with dozens of crops growing, and a multilayered structure. Emergent trees include coconut and durian. Below them is a layer of medium-sized trees: citrus, mangosteen, and many others. At sunny edges, there will then be a layer of tall shrubby plants, such as guavas and the smaller citrus. Finally, annual and herbaceous plants grow near the ground, though they cannot grow in the shade of a full two- or three-layer grove. Where they are intended to live, only a high layer of coconuts and sometimes other species is usual, though shrubs are often interspersed with them (on these matters see Conklin 1957; Spencer 1966).

Swiddeners are notoriously independent. James C. Scott (2009) has even idealized northern southeast Asia as Zomia, a home of freedom-loving or even anarchist people who reject the state to live in blissful liberty. This is a bit romantic, but sober research confirms the general picture (e.g. Wang 2013). Jean Michaud, for instance, agrees that the Hmong try to maintain freedom, disagreeing even over use of scripts to write their languages. They maintain they once had writing and books, but during a famine they had to eat these, thus losing writing but acquiring superb memory (Michaud 2020). Edmund Leach showed in a famous study that many parts of that area oscillated back and forth over time between small states and kinship-based chiefdom systems (Leach 1973), which fits well with Scott’s model (in fact, Scott relied heavily on it). However, resistance to the state may be due to sheer fear. The Semai and Temiar of Malaysia are famous for nonviolence (Dentan 1979), but this is explained by their need to flee slave-hunting (and in the past, head-hunting) Malays and others. Resistance may also be simply a function of moving frequently. Whole communities have to move at regular intervals, sometimes for long distances. Independence leads them into frequent conflict with lowlanders (see e.g. Dentan 1979; Geddes 1976; Hickey 1982).

Another factor is the exquisitely careful management of resources practised by many of the swiddeners. The image of the wasteful, destructive swiddeners who burn down forests for a few bushels of rice, without care for the biota or the future, is not entirely wrong. I have seen it in remote parts of the world. However, it is almost totally wrong for southeast Asia, so far as my observations and readings go (see Conklin 1957; Dove 1985; Pinkaew 2001; Spencer 1966; Wang 2013; Yos 2003, 2008). Some up-country groups are models of managing forest farming and regrowth (Pinkaew 2001 on the Karen and Wang 2013 on the Akha are really exemplary). The rare exceptions are groups that have moved as refugees into new and often already-occupied areas. They are forced onto marginal land, often high-altitude and very fragile, and they are often forced to move rapidly to escape tensions (Geddes 1976 describes Hmong in this situation). Long-established groups like the Akha (Wang 2013; Yos 2003) are model land managers.

The first know city was Oc Eo, which once covered some 2500 ha in the Mekong delta. It depended on sophisticated paddy rice agriculture, fairly new in that area at the time.

A recent study revealed early curries there. A footed spice-grinding slab from about 300 CE still retained starch grains. This type of slab was widespread in India and SEA since around 500 BCE (W. Wang et al. 2023).

The grains include relics of turmeric, ginger, fingerroot (Boesenbergia rotunda, a ginger relative), sand ginger (Kaempferia galanga), clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, galangal (Alpinia galanga), and, no surprise, rice. Several of these also show up in the sites noted just above (D’Alpoim Guedes et al. 2020).

The authors of the study provided a brief history of early spices in south and southeast Asia. Turmeric was known from Harappan sites from 2000 BCE or earlier. Ginger was found there, and in Warring States and Han sites in China. There is no archaeological record of galangal, but lesser galangal (Alpinia officinalis) is in the Mawangdui tomb from ancient China. Cloves go back to early Han China; they appear a bit later in Rome, a bit earlier in India. Nutmeg goes back a few centures BCE in India, and known much earlier from its native Banda Ids, back to perhaps 1500 BCE on Pulau Ay. An actual nutmeg was found in Oc Eo, dating 120-248 CE. Cinnamon was known widely by 1000 BCE. Previous southeast Asia research had revealed long pepper, cardamom, black pepper, mustard seed, clove, and nutmeg before Oc Eo rose.

Slightly earlier, two sites in far south Thailand were occupied around 400 BCE-20 CE. Rice, foxtail millet, and, fascinatingly, finger millet (eleusine, originally from Africa) were found. Also found was the oldest known pomelo (at both sites). Mung beans (green and black), grass pea, pigeon pea, horse gram (Macrotyloma uniflorum), rice bean (Vigna cf. unbellata), occurred, along with cotton and sesame. All this indicates major contact and trade with India. The reach of African eleusine, long known in India, had extended itself surprisingly far (Castillo et al. 2016).

The great Khmer civilization in Cambodia flourished from early Medieval times until the 15^th century. The main occupation of Angkor Wat and the great cities was the 11^th to13th centuries. Some lasted till the 14^th and 15^th centuries, and even into the 18^th, but by then the communities were only the barest shadows of their former selves. Changes were slow and erratic (Carter et al. 2019).

The coming of chaotic weather with the Little Ice Age probably had much to do with its decline and the abandonment of the great cities. The Intertropical Convergence Zone shifted south (Buckley et al. 2010; Day et al. 2012). Droughts became frequent, being particularly extreme around 1400. Floods also occurred. War with Thai and Vietnamese spreading southward was also a major problem. The Vietnamese conquered the Cham, who had adopted a Khmer-inspired culture, and then went on to conquer the Khmer in the Mekong Delta.

In all these matters, southeast Asia was a single region. Victor Lieberman’s superb history (Lieberman 2003, 2008) shows that the effects of the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, and other climatic events were similar from Myanmar to Vietnam, and of course had influences worldwide. Moreover, from the Roman Empire onward, Eurasia was tied together by trade and communication. Political and social developments were increasingly related over time. The effects of the Little Ice Age in the 17^th century, for instance, were felt throughout, and the responses of different polities were not made alone. Responses at one end of the Eurasian system influenced the other ends. The Khmer cities were dispersed, with trees and probably rice paddies among the buildings. Such dispersed cities existed from Sri Lanka to Indonesia, and they all went down then the dorughts came (Lucero et al. 2015).

Trade in the Indian Ocean has been the subject of rapidly increasing research in the last 150 years. The Indian Ocean proves to have been an enormous highway, involving southeast Asia in world trade to a far greater extent than anyone thought in the early 20^th century (Beaujard 2009, 2012; Chaudhuri 1985; Reid 1988, 1993). This trade led to rapid adoptions of introduced foods, from rice in earliest times to chiles and other American crops in the 16^th century. The region proved open to influences, taking the old name “Indo-China” from the mix of Indian and Chinese cultural developments that local people added onto their already rich cultures.

Medieval contacts brought Indian and Chinese foods to Southeast Asia (Wheatley 1961). In particular, dairying and yogurt making came from India (Wheatley 1965), and in northern Southeast Asia from Tibet. This led to a striking extension of yogurt to unexpected places. Most of Southeast Asia shares the Chinese aversion to dairy foods, but yogurt persists in remote areas. I found it among the Toba Batak in Sumatera, who normally do not use dairy products, but still make water buffalo yogurt as a luxury.

Widely in Asia, trees are worshiped. In south and southeast Asia, the banyan (Ficus religiosa) is especially venerated, as the tree under which the Buddha was enlightened. Other similar trees, such as the small-leaved banyan (F. microphylla), substitute where Buddha’s banyan is not present.

However, sanctity is not confined to banyans. Any tree, especially any large old one, is venerated. This has enabled conservation movements in modern India and Thailand to designate local shade trees, groves, and even whole forests as sacred, to save them from the axe. In India sacred groves abounded already, but in Thailand, Buddhist monks have led the movement to designate new groves, for ecology. Susan Darlington gives a thorough account of this movement in her book The Ordination of a Tree (2013). Leslie Sponsel (2012) has written extensively on religious protection of the environment in Thailand and elsewhere, and has consequently launched a movement of spiritual ecology to try to involve more religious effort in the cause.

Farther upslope, the Akha are a typical case of hill people who regard forests as the domain of protective tree spirits. Forests range from sacred ones that cannot be disturbed to ones available for swidden farming, with intermediate cases (Wang 2013; Yos 2003, 2008). The woods are the realm of forest spirits, the gardens and villages are the domain of domestic ones. This is a pattern very common among southern Chinese minorities. It encourages a pattern of respect for the land (Wang 2013). Such respect is religiously taught, and is very widespread in Asia, from the Near East to Siberia.

In the 19^th century, the British took over Burma (now Myanmar), and did very little with it. They governed it indirectly, via local kings, and treated it rather as a lost stepchild of the Indian Empire. This neglect has handicapped the country to this day, but it had one important effect: it released the restrictions on settlement that had kept farmers from developing the vast Burma Delta. This was an enormous swamp where the Irrawaddy, Yangon, Sinang, and Salween Rivers and minor side streams all pour sediments into the sea. It swarmed with tigers, crocodiles, and poisonous snakes. Even so, thousands of farmers poured in, turning the delta into a huge rice bowl (Adas 2011). This was one of the greatest settlement moves of all time, comparable to—if far less extensive than—the opening of the American west at the same time. It is the ultimate proof that traditional small farmers can take the initiative in development, face enormous risks, and prevail. Nothing comparable was undertaken by the British or by post-Colonial governments. Small farmer initiative did all.

Throughout Southeast Asia are highly spiced pastes used for flavoring foods. These go by the Indian name of sambal in Malaysia and Indonesia. They are rich in chile peppers, and often involve fermentation. Countless forms exist, with local variants of each (see Surya and Tedjakusuma 2023).

Vietnam has a long history, closely connected with China’s (Kiernan 2017). It is, in some sense, the modern incarnation of the Hundred Yue of ancient Chinese history, later subjected under the Kingdom of Yue in the 3^rd century BCE. This became modern Fujian and Guangdong. Viet is the same word as Yue, subjected to different changes in pronunciation over time, and “Vietnam” (Yuenan in modern Chinese) means “southern Yue.” The Vietnamese people, presumably originating among those Hundred Yue, speak a language basically close to Khmer in the Mon-Khmer language family, but so influenced by Thai and Chinese that it not only consists largely of loanwords, but it has borrowed the Thai tone system. (Khmer and related languages are not tonal.) Vietnam was formerly inhabited by Cham people in the center; they were conquered and absorbed in the Medieval period. Khmer occupied the south, and many still live there. A large range of groups, speaking languages in the Thai or Mon-Khmer families, live in the mountainous interior.

The name was given to the country in 1804 by the Nguyen Dynasty, the emperor recording that it meant “southern Yue” rather than the alternative interpretation “south of Yue” (Dutton et al. 2012:258-59).

Vietnam, at least the northern part, spent a great deal of time under Chinese rule. It became independent when China was weak, and then permanently independent after the Ming Dynasty. It is worth recording, from the country’s checkered history, that there appeared in the 10^th century a white dog with black spots on his back that were interpreted as spelling out the characters for “Heaven’s Son,” implying a new emperor was at hand. Indeed, the Le Dynasty gave way to the Ly Dynasty (Dutton et al. 2012:61).

The Medieval Warm Period brought good rain, “rice from the sky,” but the Little Ice Age brought disastrous drought (Kiernan 2017:153, 177).

Vietnamese life in the early 19^th century is recorded in a fascinating document. One Cai Tinglan, a Chinese official, was shipwrecked in the dangerous waters near the border of China and Vietnam, and welcomed by Chinese and local people in the latter country until he could make his way home. He recorded with care and sensitivity the modest affluence of the country, including details of food and farming (Cai 2023). For instance, along one main road, “jackfruit trees were planted on both sides. There was one tree every ten paces. Their leaves and branches intertwined…. People cultivated bamboo all around their houses with many banana and betel plants….” (Cai 2023:70).  Bandits would sneak poison into travelers’ food in one wild disctrict. “The antidote is foreign ginger. (Also called chili pepper, the seeds are from Holland, the flower is white, and the stigma is green, when the fruit is cooked it turns bright red. It is filled with spicy seeds. One can eat it with the hull. Some are long and ponited, some are round and slightly pointed.) People add them to their food to guard against poison” (Cai’s italics; Cai 2023:89). He notes their fondness for raw or rare meat and fish (p. 123).

Later, the French took Vietnam, more because of nationalist urgings than because it wsa of great value to them. Peters (2012) finds that famines and mismanagement ensued. Pho was invented when the French took so much of the beef that people were left with bits and pieces to flavor their noodle soup; the classic form includes tendons, bones, and other odd bits. It was invented in Hanoi, where the classic beef form survives robustly. Elsewhere, more and more variety has entered.

Modern Vietnam has managed not only to feed its incredibly dense population, but to become a food exporter, by an adroit combination of communist services and overall planning with relatively free enterprise on the farm (Avieli 2012). It logs 875.4 people per square mile, according to the World Almanac for 2024, which makes it about as dense as an American suburb (Riverside, CA, where I live, has 3953 per square mile). Much of Vietnam is too mountainous for intensive farming; most farming is in coastal river valleys and deltas, especially the deltas of the Red and Mekong Rivers. Typical Vietnamese farms are about the size of Riverside city lots, yet the country exports rice and other agricultural products. Pierre Gourou (1955) described traditional farming on such tiny plots; rice covered the ground, fruit trees extended production into three dimensions, animals lived in and around the paddy fields, and everyone worked all the time. The situation was similar to that described by Geertz for Java (see below). Bamboo is exceedingly important, and is the subject of detailed modern study (Hieu and Poisson 2023).

One notably pleasant feature of traditional Vietnamese food is the garnish of fresh herbs once served with almost everything. Leaves used include mint, perilla, Vietnamese/Thai basil, rau ram (Polygona odorata), and sometimes tender young collards, mustard greens, Peking cabbage, mizuna (a beautiful Japanese mustard-green variety, and other herbs. This custom is, alas, disappearing. One is lucky now to get mint and basil. Persian and Georgian food also comes with fresh garnishes, but they are totally different and the custom seems unrelated.

Even so, food insecurity and anxiety inevitably exist (Ehlert and Faltmann 2020). Policy overshoot and sheer pressure of people on resources—especially wild-caught fish—cannot be avoided. Farming fish has become common, as elsewhere in eastern Asia.

            Feasting is a huge part of traditional Southeast Asian and Oceanian society. Feasts are given for every occasion (see Hayden 2016 for summary account, but every detailed ethnography of the area describes them). They are highly ritualized. In many of the small-scale societies of southeast Asia, this involves drinking beer from the same pot, using straws, an idea that may come from ancient China. The main dish is usually a pig or water buffalo, but can be anything. Small feasts involve chickens, domesticated in southeast Asia, in an area probably including what is now south China. The chicken was probably taken into domestication partly for feast use. In parts of Oceania it is a human; cannibalism is occasional in New Guinea and known as far as Fiji and Tonga.

The general purpose of ceremonial commemoration of ancestors or great events affords the occasion, but the actual social importance includes group solidarity, and most certainly display by the feast-giver or givers. In Melanesia, “big men”—local leaders—must give feasts to show their generosity, reward their backers, and indicate their wealth and power. They gain followers and support, partly by showing how many contacts they have and can use to gain resources.

The Philippines were settled from both north (via Taiwan) and south (via mainland southeast Asia and the Indonesian islands). They acquired rice very early, and eventually became famous for the rice terraces of Luzon, among the wonders of premodern agriculture. Involving countless hours of work and irrigation canals miles long, these were constructed in societies where kinship was the only organizing institution. No states were needed.

Fishing has always been important, and involves exceedingly complex and sophisticated decision-making (Randall 1977).

Among fruits, king of all is the durian (Bahasa Malaysia for “thorny one”), a huge thorn-covered fruit born on a gigantic rainforest tree. Fresh off the tree, its large, meaty arils have a heavenly flavor of peaches and chestnuts. Within a few hours, it takes on an oniony flavor. In a day or two, it was memorably described in early British Colonial times as smelling like “a sewer full of rotten onions.” True durian addicts learn to love it even in that stage. Various preserving techniques convert into tempoyak (dried and fermented) and other preparations, which have the spoiled-onion aroma.

In the late 20^th century, one Tan Eow Chong snitched a graft from a lady with superior durians and brought them back to his farm on Penang Island. Now the trees are mature, and he managed to attract the attention of Stanley Ho (the gambling billionaire of Macau) and Li Ka-Shing. Tan became successful, and sells countless durians in China (and elsewhere). He called the variety Rajah Kunyit (“turmeric king”), but: “Growers on the Malaysian mainland developed an identical hybrid, but called it the Musang King, which means Mountain Cat King. The latter name stuck” (Pierson 2019; the musang is actually a civet, not a mountain cat).

            Bali’s rice terraces are famous for their beauty, but also for their efficient agriculture. The island is one huge volcano. At its 10,000-foot top is a crater lake. From this lake drains the basic water supply of the island, augmented by heavy but seasonal rains. The water is allocated by the priestly hierarchy of Bali, headed by the head priest of the main water temple at the high outlet of the crater lake. In one of the best-known projects in cultural ecology, J. Stephen Lansing showed by a succession of computer models that the water allocation is close to ideal, not only for distributing water fairly to the many cultivators, but also for suppressing insect pests. Draining the fields at specific intervals disrupts their life cycles (Lansing 1991; Lansing et al. 2017). Bali’s traditional government consisted of small kingdoms that often fought and rarely managed anything very thoroughly. Clifford Geertz called them “theatre states” (Geertz 1980), since they indulged in magnificent shows of art, music, and drama, but seemed to do little else. This was rather unfair, since they did fight and collect taxes and otherwise do what governments do. They heroically resisted the Dutch colonial takeover in the early 20^th century. But they sensibly left the irrigation system to the priests.

            Java’s intensive rice agriculture led to rapid population growth under the Dutch colonial regime, and later in modern Indonesia. The Dutch repressed modernization and change, for their own reasons, which forced the rice farmers to work harder and harder on smaller and smaller plots to produce enough rice to feed the growing population. This led to what Clifford Geertz memorably called “agricultural involution” (1973). The concept has been widely misinterpreted as “blaming the victim,” since Geertz’ extensive account of colonialism and its effect—and his citation of Dutch scholarship that made the point even more strongly—was widely ignored by readers. In any case, the term has been widely applied elsewhere, to forced intensification without progress or benefit. Independence changed the situation somewhat, with modern factor inputs moving in rapidly. The situation is being slowly ameliorated, also, by falling birth rates. The whole issue is discussed with real brilliance by James Wood in The Biodemography of Subsistence Farming (2020).

            Farther out, in Sumatera, land is more easily available, and agriculture can be more extensive. The Toba Batak of the Lake Toba area, however, intensify, because they must terrace their steep crater-wall habitat to farm it. Lake Toba is a huge crater lake. The explosions that created it occurred about 73,000 years ago, autoclaving a good deal of southeast Asia and blanketing much, if not all, the world with dust. The human species was concentrated in the areas affected, and was reduced to a small population. Fortunately for us but unfortunately for the rest of the world’s biota, people survived in less affected zones. The ultimate result included extremely fertile soil around the lake. This allows the Toba Batak to cultivate rice and other crops with great success. Labor is organized by patrilineages, a striking example of simple kinship literally moving mountains. The old nonsense that a state is required to organize large-scale and highly sophisticated irrigation works is disproved by this case (Lando 1979), and by many others in southeast Asia. In fact, if anything, the reverse is true: irrigation there was traditionally organized along local kinship lines, which could be patrilineal, matrilineal (as among the Minangkabau), or cognatic (drawing on all sides of the family). Vast irrigation works from Thailand to Luzon were done this way.

            In Borneo, the Punan Batu are now one of the many groups in the Punan ethnicity, but they show evidence of a different and strange history. They retain a ritual language, found only in songs and chants, very different from the Punan language. They also differ genetically from other inhabitants of Borneo (Lansing et al. 2022). Their affiliations remain unknown.

            A signature food of southern Sumatera, especially of the Minangkabau people, is rendang, beef cooked in coconut cream and spices. The true rendang is blistering hot with chiles, enough to deter even those used to other Indonesian food. It has been the subject of a major monograph by Fadly Rahman (2020), who sees Portuguese influences in its heavy-duty meat focus and its spicing; the Portuguese introduced chiles to the area.

            The Philippines were evidently the first place settled by Malayo-Polynesians radiating out from Taiwan. They were, however, not the first people there. A little-known small hominin, Homo luzonensis, predates Homo sapiens there. Later, modern humans related to the dark-skinned peoples of the Andamans, Nicobars, and Melanesia reached the islands. Some of their ancestry survives in the “Negrito” populations. Other groups from parts of the mainland came also (Larena et al. 2021). The Malayo-Polynesians arrived a few thousand years ago.

Southeast Asia produces edible birds’ nests, very popular in soup in China. They are the nests of the swiftlet Collocalia esculenta and its relatives. That species produces the best; lesser species produce nests not entirely edible. (They are not “swallows’ nests.” The mistranslation is due to the Chinese language having one word for swifts and swallows.) They are tasteless, but absorb flavors of the soup and provide a wonderful succulent texture. The claimed reason for eating them, however, is their alleged health value. They are an easily digestible protein, produced by the birds’ salivary glands, with a fair amount of calcium, and thus quite nutritious, though far too expensive to be much of a medical source. They are eaten largely as a status food, obligatory—at least in the past—at formal banquets. In the late 20^th century, this led to overcollecting. Previously, conservation had been strictly enforced, but it crumbled in the face of skyrocketing demand. One response has been to set up artificial nesting venues (Thorburn 2014).

            Malaysia’s and Indonesia’s foodways include a highly distinctive tradition, the “Nonya” cuisine developed by Chinese settlers from the 16^th century onward (Oh et al. 2019). “Nonya” is an old Bahasa (a.k.a. Malay) word for a Chinese lady (i.e. a woman of some substance). Much of the vocabulary is derived from Hokkien (Southern Min), specifically the dialect spoken around Xiamen. This city, known as Amoy (long a, and moy nasalized) or Emng in Hokkien, is the main port in southern Fujian, and was the port of embarcation for many Chinese headed for the Nanyang (“south seas”).

Hokkien so dominated the Nanyang that Hokkien literary readings of Chinese—based on court pronunciation over a thousand years ago—became the learned language. Speakers of Mandarin were often surprised to find in Singapore and Penang that what the local people thought was formal official Chinese had no resemblance to Mandarin. This old tradition died in the late 20^th century. The Amoy region sent out most of the Chinese who reached the Nanyang from the 1500s to the late 19^th century, but after that large numbers of Hakka, Cantonese, and Teochiu (the last speaking a dialect of Hokkien). Among Chinese, Amoy Hokkien remained the language of general trade and communication until Mandarin and English took strong hold in the 21^st century. However, the Nonya cooks usually spoke Bahasa Malaysia/Indonesia as a first or second language.

Food words were widely borrowed from Hokkien into Malaysian and Indonesian languages. Thus fermented soybeans are tausi, bean cake is tauhu, spring rolls are po pia (the –ia strongly nasalized), fish sauce is ke jiap (the source of English ketchup), noodles are mi (with nasalized i replacing the –ien of other Chinese languages), and so on.

            The food is flavored with soybean ferments: soy sauce, fermented beans and pastes, and the rest. A unique Indonesian contribution is tempeh, a cake of boiled soybeans inoculated with a fungus starter that makes them into a delicius cake. It has the great advantage of being rich in vitamin B12, lacking in vegetable foods but found in fungus and yeasts. Other popular flavorings include ginger (of course), rice and palm-sap vinegars, white pepper,

            Otherwise, the food is a blend of Malaysian, Indonesian, and Hokkien traditions. Rice is the usual staple, but noodles are exceedingly important, often outranking rice on some days. Vegetables are basic. The usual cooking oil in the old days was lard, making the food inaccessible to the majority of Malaysian and Indonesian people, who are Muslims, but from very early there were vegetable-oil alternatives.  Noodles fried in lard with bits of vegetables (mi goreng) are a popular food. 

            One staple is kueh, Hokkien kue’, sweet cakes. These are made of sticky rice and sugar, variously flavored. Traditionally, a major flavoring was Pandanus odorifer, sweet pandanus, a treelike spiky-leaved succulent native to the region. Sugar was often raw sugar from palm sap, but from very early times, sugar from sugar cane was also available. Cultivated sugar cane is native to New Guinea and possibly Southeast Asia. Countless varieties of kueh are available (Karuzaman et al. 2020). They have a most unfortunate effect on many children. They are constantly available and cheap, and young children cry for them. They become a major part of childhood foods. The combination of sticky rice and sugar makes them stick to the teeth and cause tooth decay, which in turn spreads through the system. Dental care being sporadic at best for the less affluent, this leads to disastrous effects on health in general. They also are pure calories of the most easily assimilated forms—sugar and white rice starch—and thus lead to obesity and metabolic syndrome. Diabetes rates skyrocket in areas with many kueh.

            Coffee is kopi, as Bahasa Malaysia/Indonesia has no f. It is made with strong coffee, condensed sweetened milk, and a spoonful or two of added sugar, and is thus sugary enough to be almost a solid. Asking for kopi o kosong—unsweetened black coffee (o is Hokkien for “black,” kosong is Bahasa for “empty”)—was once not only necessary but very difficult to achieve, since people usually assumed that foreigners who asked for such a nightmarish drink were simply making a verbal mistake. Traditionally, coffee was made and sold by people from Hainan Island, an island in China’s deep south whose language is a dialect of Hokkien quite different from Amoy’s.

Cynthia Fowler studied burning on Flores (2013). Flores is seasonally dry, and controlled burns are used to create fields (swiddening) and to open the forest up and drive away poisonous animals. The Komodo Dragon, a huge monitor lizard with a poisonous bite, still survives very locally on Flores, and is not the sort of animal one would like to meet in the woods.

Nearby, the island of Roti is also seasonally dry, to the point of being hopeless for rice, taro, or most grains. Some millet and large quantities of beans are grown, but the staple food in traditional times was palm sugar, made from the sap of local palm trees. This unusual diet should have been incredibly unhealthy, but no bad effects are recorded. The island was the subject of an outstanding ethnography by James Fox (1977), who moved to Australia and trained a couple of generations of Indonesian anthropologists, enormously influencing social science in that country.

Michael Alvard with David Nolin studied cooperation in Lamalera, a whale-hunting village in Indonesia. They hunt sperm whales, and face all the horrors portrayed by Herman Melville in Moby Dick. Cooperation is so vital, since crews have to work as a near-perfect team or die. They thus test well above any other population studied anywhere in the world for sheer cooperation, interpersonal generosity, and sharing.

Oceania

            Oceania was settled from Asia, but by different groups at different times. Early humans (Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis, others) managed to reach quite remote islands early. Homo sapiens got as far as New Guinea and Australia at least 60,000 years ago. These were dark-skinned people, ancestors of today’s Melanesians and Australian Aborigines, and they had a fair amount of Denisovan admixture, of a different branch of that group from others known from genetic traces. Later migrations clearly occurred, but are obscure until East Asians began to move down from Taiwan—and surely from other places—by 2000-1500 BCE. The results are unclear. Taiwanese-derived Malayo-Polynesian languages are now spoken throughout Indonesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia, except for New Guinean (Papuan) languages of several families on New Guinea and a few neighboring islands.

Genetically, there has been more mixing than this linguistic uniformity would suggest. Even the linguistic uniformity is only relative, since the Malayo-Polynesian languages are exceedingly numerous and diverse. Micronesia’s small population derives from at least two distinct migrations from the Philippines, another from the south but still clearly Malayo-Polynesian, and a couple from Melanesia (Liu et al. 2022)’ there is surely yet more to learn about this, let alone the more complex migrations elsewhere. People speaking Malayo-Polynesian languages range from looking like Chinese to looking like southeast Asians to looking like New Guinea and Australian people, and genetics shows this has a migration history.

Australia has its own unrelated language families. Most of the continent spoke languages of the Pama-Nyungan family, which seems to have radiated from the east about 3500 years ago. It has mixed enough with other languages to make its history and radiation unclear. Indeed, the old conventional wisdom of dark-skinned people coming early and Malayo-Polynesians coming later has been made more complex by genetics (Choin et al. 2021). Other, virtually unknown migrations appear in the record.

            Falling and rising sea levels importantly affected the spread of people, since many of the island groups sink under water during times of high sea level (Sefton et al. 2022). Whole island nations are threatened today by global warming. Kiribati, Tuvalu, and many Micronesian island groups will disappear.

The islands of the western Pacific have produced a highly disproportionate number of the best ethnographies of food and agriculture. The most famous studies of the Pacific islands in anthropology are the early classic ethnographies by Bronislaw Malinowski, who went from Poland to England, and his New Zealander student Raymond Firth. Their documentation of the Trobriand Islands and Tikopia, respectively, are the most thorough and intensively analyzed ethnographic records from the early period of anthropology (Firth 1936, 1940, 1959, 1961; Malinowski 1961 [1922], 1935).

This was a world of root crops. The Trobriand Island staple was the greater yam, Dioscorea alata. Other yam species occurred in the region. Taro (Colocasia antiquorum) was a widespread staple, originating from the southeast Asian mainland. The Trobrianders vied to produce the biggest yam. Malinowski’s book Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935) has a romantic title, but consists of a meticulous record of agriculture in the islands, including the many magical practices used in hopes of getting the yams and other crops to grow bigger and better.

Many more recent works are at least as good in ethnographic quality, though much less extensive in terms of sheer documentation. Among these we may single out Hanunoo Agriculture by Harold Conklin (1957), a classic of ethnobotany and of studies of shifting cultivation.

Another notable work is The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo by Michael Dove (2011).

Paul Sillitoe’s From Land to Mouth: The Agricultural “Economy” of the Wola of the New Guinea Highlands (2010), is less well known and deserves some special note. Sillitoe examines the degree to which our economic concepts transfer. “It is an indisputable fact of life—even for navel-dwelling postmodernists—that all human beings are mortal, and that for everyone (Wola, Inuit, English, or whoever) there are no more or less than twenty-four hours to each of our days” (p. 253).though he admits that hours are a western concept and time can feel longer or shorter depending on whether one is working the field or relaxing with friends. He goes on to say that people economize it in different ways, and some have plenty of spare time, but still there is a single limit.

The Wola were still using stone tools when he started to work there.  Stone vs steel did not make much difference (contra early, wrong claims by Salisbury and others); they just cut fewer trees with stone, and then and cut them up less. It was horribly hard work making a garden. However, they likde it, and he quotes a more extreme earlier New Guinea team (on p. 361) that a New Guinean’s “attitude towards his gardening is more like that of an amateur rose-fancier” than a commercial one.

Burning released nutrients but they quickly leached, so first-year crops usually do best. Crops included the vital staple sweet potato (fairly new in New Guinea), Nasturtium schlechteri, amaranths of three species, squash, Chinese cabbage, taro, maize, and Setaria palmifolia (pitpit), grown for shoots. The area has returned to local autonomy and self-sufficiency with the decline of local governance. People exchange garden produce all the time, with taro and pandanus figuring especially. Taro was hard to grow and hedged with taboos and spells. Also, it crops all at once instead of being harvestable daily on a land-to-mouth basis as sweet potato was (Sillitoe 2010:399).

Polynesia was the last area on earth to be settled before modern European expansion after 1450. Voyagers reached Hawaii and New Zealand around 2000 years ago or less. In New Zealand, the classic tropical crops such as taro did not flourish south of the northern parts of North Island (Prebble et al. 2019). People lived by fishing and hunting, exterminating the moas in the process, and by eating fern roots, not a great diet. The sweet potato, introduced from South America a few hundred years before Columbus, revolutionized agriculture there.

Rapa Nui (Easter Island), known for its enormous stone sculptures, was in contact with South America by 1,000 years ago. Obsidian blades revealed starch grains from taro and yam (known there historically), breadfruit, ginger, and Tahiti apple (common in Polynesia but not previously documented from Rapa Nui), and, much more interestingly, manioc, sweet potato, and achira (Killgrove 2024). These are South American root crops, not native to Asia or occurring there before contact. Sweet potato was known all over eastern Polynesia and as far as New Zealand, where the Maaori depended heavily on it, well before modern European contact, but manioc and achira were not known from ancient Oceania before.

Chickens spread through most of remote Oceania along with the Melanesians and Polynesians. They are a distinctive breed, or group of breeds, characterized by unique haplotypes. These are not shared with South America, a bit of evidence against the long-debated question of whether Polynesians introduced chickens there (Thompson et al. 2014). Chicken breeds known among the Mapuche in Chile have fairly clear Southeast Asian input, but it probably came via the Spanish after 1500.

Central America and Mexico

            Mexican agriculture is famous for its incredible inventiveness in pre-Columbian times. Most important was its invention of the crop combination that became known as the Three Sisters: Maize, beans, and squash. Maize (Zea mays) was domesticated in Mexico, a brilliant and creative development from teosinte, a most unpromising-looking wild grass. Beans of several species were domesticated, with the common or frijol bean Phaseolus vulgaris becoming the world success. Several species of squash were also created, with winter squash Cucurbita maxima, butternut squash and kabocha C. moschata, and cushaw C. mixta most important. The most important one worldwide today is C. pepo, pumpkins, summer squashes, and ornamental gourds. Butternut squash in many forms is more successful in the tropics, and is thus the squash or pumpkin throughout the tropical world and northward throughout eastern Asia.

            The Three Sisters are a perfect combination. The maize provides the calories, the beans the protein, and the squash the vitamins and minerals—especially if you eat the flowers and tender young stems, as Mexicans do. Chiles, really a fourth sister, also exist in several species, and provide further vitamin and mineral enhancement. The beans grow up the maize plant and fertilize the whole field by fixing nitrogen. The squash kills pests by shading out weeds and by chemically combatting insects, weeds, and predators; the cucurbitins that make wild gourds too bitter to eat are powerful insecticides, to the point of being occasionally used commercially.

Even underground they all complement each other: maize has shallow roots, beans medium-length ones, squash very deep ones. My Maya farmer friends would test the soil with a digging stick to see how deep it was, and thus what they could plant. This was especially valuable in the soil-filled pockets in Yucatan’s limestone landscape. A shallow pocket would grow maize, and so on. Deep, rich soil would grow not only the Four Sisters, but papayas, eggplants, tomatoes, and other necessities. The best soil was saved for these mixed plantings.

            One problem for ancient Mexicans was getting salt. Salterns along the coasts are well known (Andrews 1983). A Maya city got rich by controlling the salt trade from the salt stream by the city (Woodfill et al. 2015).

            Two species of chile peppers (Nahuatl chilli; Capsicum annuum, ordinary chiles and bell peppers,and C. frutescens, Tabasco pepper) were domesticated in Mexico, and at least two more in South America (C. chinense, habanero, and C. pubescens, rocoto or manzano). They are ancient domesticates, at least in Mexico, probably in South America as well. They appear to have been independently domesticated in both continents. The North American ones spread south, especially C. annuum, the ordinary common chile. It gave rise to many less hot varieties, eventually being bred into the heatless and greatly enlarged bell varieties. The South American varieties spread north early. The habanero spread through the Caribbean islands, hence its name connecting it with Havana. The rocoto reached west Mexico at some indeterminate point, and remains focused there as well as in the Andes.

Their active ingredient in causing pain is the oleoresin capsaicin, which exists in at least five forms in chiles. It directly stimulates the heat receptors in the body. The capsaicin is there to kill fungi—it is particularly defensive against fusarium wilt, a major problem for peppers (Tewksbury and Nabhan 2001; Tewksbury et al. 2001). Chiles in less fungal parts of the genus’ range have less of it (Haak et al. 2008). It is, however, also useful to keep mammals from eating the fruit, and to increase rapidity of throughput in digestion, to speed delivery of seeds. Like many berries—chiles are berries, technically—these plants depend on dispersal by animals that eat the fruit and then excrete the seeds packaged in fertilizer. Birds are not susceptible to capsaicin, and thus eat the fruit happily (Tewksbury and Nabhan 2001). As noted elsewhere, they are loved for their flavor and stimulant quality, not for the pain they produce. Eaters quickly habituate to the pain, and confine their eating to varieties to which they have habituated.

They appealed to Europeans right away. Columbus thought them a spice of the Indies, which he continued to maintain he had reached. Spanish and Portuguese took them around the world. The Portuguese suppressed them in the homeland, to maintain their black pepper import business, but propagated them widely in Asia, as a substitute for black pepper—they could thus lower the price of black pepper and import more of it (Tripodi et al. 2021)!

            The plague that devastated the Aztec Empire before the Spanish, and made it easier for them to conquer, was called cocoliztli, and now turns out to be Salmonella enterica var. Paratyphi, which also decimated Europe at more or less the same time (Warriner 2022). The Native Americans also had to contend with tuberculosis, apparently brought to them by migrating seals long ago—it is a a different strain from European one, which may be from cattle. Meningitis (Neisseria menigitidis) and gonorrhea (N.

gonorrhoeae), there and elsewhere, are both from a harmless oral-cavity N. lactamica (Centeno et al. 2023).

A wonderful description of life among the Nyahnyu people of Mexico was provided by local teacher Jesus Salinas Pedraza (Bernard and Salinas Pedraza 1989).

A modern problem of some importance is the rise of sun-grown coffee at the expense of shade-grown. Coffee is best grown in the shade, which has the side benefit of preserving natural cover and wildlife. Sun-grown coffee is inferior in quality and a biological desert. A good discussion by Perfecto and Armbruster (2003) has the advantage of showing (p. 163) a shade-grown plot in Chiapas that is so similar to ones I have studied there that I suspect it is in fact one of them.

The dreadful role of sugar in American history is all too well known. The plantation economy brought slavery by the early 16^th century. It peaked in the 18^th, with importation of millions of enslaved Africans. Poverty continued in much of the old sugar region and in the later realms of cotton, rice, and other goods produced by enslaved labor. These areas become dependent and peripheralized, economically subservient to urban importing countries—first western Europe, then the American states (Beckford 1972; Mintz 1985).

Cooking and identity is as much an issue in Latin America as elsewhere (Ayora-Diaz 2016, 2019, 2021). Traditional cooking technology is part of this; definite regional and local styles exist. (Ayora-Diaz 2016). Grinding on a metate or in a mortar is widespread, especially in Mexico and (formerly) North America generally. Grinding in a lava mortar, molcajete, is a Mexican art, and the final dish—after grinding and adding anything needed—is often served in the molcajete itself.

Manioc is ground to meal, made into bread, and baked, allowing it to be detoxified. Heat drives off the poison as a gas, so well-cooked—especially ground and baked—products are safe. The large (sometimes huge) tubers are used. They and the old leaves are high in cyanogenic glycosides, which become deadly hydrocyanic acid on damage of the root. Though “sweet” (nonpoisonous) strains exist, people have actually selected over millennia for even more bitter (poisonous) ones, since these are immune to predation and are easily prepared. In parts of Africa, the roots are not quite totally detoxified, since it turns out that a small amount of cyanide in the blood discourages malaria organisms.

Sometimes the young leaves are used, the old ones being poisonous. They are much more used in Asia and Africa where the plant was taken by colonial Portuguese and others in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.

Mexico received a great deal of its modern cuisine from the Arabic conquest and 800-year occupation of much of Iberia. The reconquista was finally concluded by the conquest of Grenada in 1492. The loot from Grenada financed Columbus’ voyage.

Irredentist Jews and Moors were expelled, and went to Morocco, Tunisia, and the Turkish Empire, but countless conversos remained—Moorish and Jewish families that had converted to Catholicism, sincerely or for survival. (Their cooking and survival are described by Hélène Piñer, 2021 and 2022.) The “Catholic sovereigns” Ferdinand and Isabela grew increasingly repressive; the conversos rebelled; this led to more distrust, more oppression, and more rebellion. Ultimately the Spanish Inquisition became really deadly, murdering perhaps 200,000 people over the next 200 years. More charitably, a very large number were expelled, or allowed to migrate, to New Spain. (The same thing occurred in Portugal, with Brazil as destination.) Many were relocated in the most remote parts of empire, including New Mexico, where a surprising amount of Medieval Iberian Moorish and Jewish culture survives to this day (Gary Nabhan and Carlos Velez-Ibañez, personal communication over many years; see Nabhan 2014, Velez-Ibañez 1996). Traveling in New Mexico years ago, I was surprised to find classic Arabian dishes in a local cookbook compiled by Cleofas Jaramillo (1981, orig. 1942). Gary Nabhan ran it down, and found that the Jaramillo family did indeed descend from converso ancestors (Nabhan 2014:13).

Many, however, managed to stay in the central core, perhaps especially Puebla. Here they fused classic Arab cuisine with New World ingredients (Pilcher 1998). One result was the famous mole poblano, a well-known Moroccan chicken dish with Aztec chile, tomatoes, and chocolate added in a perfect blend that is one of the world’s great dishes. Another blend is chiles en nogada: Poblano chiles—named for the region—stuffed with a thoroughly Levantine mix of fruits, nuts, and spices, with chile sauce over all. The spicing in this cuisine—black pepper, cumin, and coriander seeds and leaves—is classic Arabic.

Among other odd introductions is the tandur oven, a big ceramic jar buried in the ground or in a stove setup (Magaña González 2016). It was probably invented in ancient Mesopotamia, and has gone everywhere that Iranian and Iran-influenced civilization has gone, from China to America. It is found in Oaxaca under the name comixcal, probably an earlier word for an earth oven. The thick tortillas known as totopos and gendarmes are stuck to the walls, and then taken off with a peel (a long-handled paddle), as in a regular tandur.

A fascinating story concerns the vita-migas of Tepito (Hernández 2009). Tepito is the old poverty district of Mexico City, south of the old urban core. Migas means “crumbs,” but is much more; it is a Spanish development of the classic Arabic dish tharīd, bread soaked in meat stock, supposedly the Prophet Muhammad’s favorite food. The good citizens of Tepito took to making cheap migas by salvaging bones from butchers and restaurants and cooking them into stock, then making migas with stale bread and tortillas. With inevitable chilango (Mexico City resident) pride, this got idealized as a marker of the tough, resourceful Tepito chingón (politely translatable as “tough guy”), and thus called “vita-migas.”  The Tepito motto is comer bien, coger fuerte, y enseñar los huevos a la Muerte (eat well, fuck hard, and show your balls to Death), a typical Mexican rhyming refran.

Possibly the best single book about a single nation’s food is a classic monograph on the food of Jamaica, by B. W. Higman (2008). He documents at enormous length how Indigenous Caribbean Island cookery was combined over historic centuries with European food, and above all with African food introduced by enslaved Africans and foods of India brought by indentured laborers. The result includes many cases of Indigenous foodstuffs used in African ways and then often adapted to European and Indian dishes or tastes. Sweet potatoes were assimilated to the unrelated African yams and then used for European pastries. Indigenous butternut squash became a replacement for African and European gourds and pumpkins, and then was made into soup flavored with Indian spices; the result has gone worldwide now in expensive restaurants. Indigenous beans and peanuts were used in African, European, and Indian dishes, all of which blended into each other over time. Indian chicken curry picked up Caribbean chile peppers and other spices. The many Indigenous fruits were used in all possible ways. An extreme of Jamaican fusion is jerking: preparing meat for storage. It is smoked over the barbacoa, a wooden frame used by Indigenous people for smoking and roasting, but is previously (and sometimes also later) marinated in a fantastic mix of spices from all over the world. Higham tells the story of every ingredient and dish, with full historical documentation. A darker note is the horror of the sugar industry, from slavery days to modern poverty and malnutrition. Jamaica also faces the loss of its once-lavish fishing industry, with overfishing depleting stocks and global warming wiping out the corals that once were the home and refuge of the fish and shellfish.

South America

            Native Americans of greater Amazonia have inspired much of the best research on human food. Much of this is due to the work and theorizing of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962, 1969) who did research in the wilds of Brazil in the early 1930s. He found that the local people, mostly speakers of Ge languages, differentiated humans from nonhumans by the human use of cooking. Ants had much more impressive societies; leafcutter ant nests can have over a million workers, integrated into a model social order. The Bible saw clothing as the great watershed, but the Ge people wore little or none. Only cooking was uniquely and indisputably human.

            This insight had a bit to do with inspiring Richard Wrangham’s long-standing study of cooking as a critical aspect of, and even driver of, human evolution (see above). Lévi-Strauss went on to theorize that roasting was more “nature”-like, while boiling modified the food more and thus humanized it more. This idea has not stood the test of time.

Native Americans in the Amazon rainforest sometimes increased forest areas, possibly into areas previously deforested by fires (Bush et al. 2021).  More often, they increased the number of useful trees, including araucarias, yerba mate, all sorts of fruits, and various palms. Palms were often cut and left to grow larvae; up to 5 kg. of edible larvae could grow in a metre of rotting palm trunk (Silva Noelli et al. 2022).

Planted trees like Brazil nut, Inga, Pourouma cecropiifolia, Pouteria caimito, and chocolate (cacao) trees are all over the Amazon. Planted-type trees are most diverse near the Peru border but most numerous in the center. Levis and colleagues (2017 mapped the whole Amazon Basin and found enormous evidence of human planting and/or management.

            Deforestation in tropical South America peaked in the late 300s CE, followed by reforestion, especially after 750 and then, dramatically, after 1500, when violence and introduced diseases reduced the Indigenous population by 90 to 95%. Abundant pollen of Cecropia, an invasive tree of open spaces, shows that the reforestation was real, not an artifact of surveying. Maize pollen was not particularly abundant before or after the 300s, showing that people were relying on a mixed farming system with heavy reliance on root crops and fruit (Bush et al. 2021).

In the Llanos de Moxos, Bolivia, archaeologists detected extensive networks of canals and fields in pre-Columbian times. This turned out to be far more extensive and impressive than first expected. Here the Casarabe people flourished from 500 to 1400 CE. They “built hundreds of monumental monds interconnected by canals and causeways across a flat forest-savannah mosaic landscape dominated by seasonally flooded savannahs, with forests restricted to non-flooded…levees” (Lombardo et al. 2025:119). Maize was the main crop and the field crop. They grew manioc, lleren, squash, gourds, and other crops. They lived in large settlements on forested levees along rivers draining otherwise marshy fields, and grew maize in the marshy level areas, draining them with canals and irrigating in the dry season from ponds. The canal system was enormous, with small tributaries leading to large ones and then one giant canal into Lake Francia. Even the small canals were 4 meters wide and 25 cm deep. The next level up was 8 meters wide and 70 cm deep. The enormous canal into the lake was fully 14 m wide and 1.8 to 3.2 m deep, deepening as it came closer to the lake. This is a literally monumental achievement for a society lacking metals, the wheel, or draft animals.

One Native invention is cassareep: boiled-down manioc press liquid, becoming thick and black. It has the umami taste from glutamates (Balston 2020). In Venezuela it is heavily dosed with chile. In Guyana it goes into pepper pot with clove and cinnamon.

The Enawene, a tiny group in central Brazil, depend heavily on this manioc drink. They never drink unboiled liquids. From this beginning, researcher Chloe Nahum-Claudel (2020) went on to a brilliant study of the role of fire and cooking in humanizing food (following Lévi-Strauss’ ideas), and the importance of cooking in human evolution (following Richard Wrangham). Indeed cooking makes us human.

Among South American hunter-gatherers, the Ache share food on the basis of reciprocity. So do the culturally similar Hiwi, who have to hunt long and hard for food (it repays effort) The vital important of reciprocity says much about human evolution and society (Gurven 2006).

The usual Native American attitudes toward conservation—protection and wise use based on respect—are amply documented in South America (e.g. Reed 1995, 1997; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971, 1976, 1996).

Modern Brazil relies heavily on fermentations (Mayrink Lima et al. 2022). There is a great variety of local cheeses, using many little-known local microorganisms. Marajo Island, a huge island at the Amazon mouth, produces cheese from water buffalo milk. Italian influence shows up in Lactobacillus-fermented meats, such as socol, local to one city, made from pork loin. Charqui (jerky) is brined, salted, and dried, with some important salt-tolerant microorganisms. There are several fermented manioc products: paste, flour, fermented juice, and others.

Aluá is a beer made of most anything (grain or fruit), is of African origin. Other local beers include calugi, tarubá, and yakupa, Indigenous beers (mostly made from manioc). Caiçuma is an Indigenous peach palm beer. Cauim and caxiri are more manioc or grain or sweet-potato beers. Tiquira, distilled manioc beer, is an Amazonian delicacy.

The common Brazilian rum, cachaça, is actually based on a very complex ferment of the sugar mash. They use the same terms we do, heads and tails, for the throwaway of distillation, and keep the “heart” (coração).

A number of wild berries are commonly used in Chilean and Argentinian Patagonia: Calafate, Berberis microphylla, superb and widely used for drinks and jam; murtilla, Empetrum rubrum, chaura, resembles cranberries and crowberries; Gaultheria mucronata is a close relative of the salal berry (G. shallon) of the Northwest Coast of North America.

Peru, inspired by the success of tequila and mezcal, is producing chawar, a new agave drink.

Guinea pigs, generally known by the Quechua name cuy, are a standard food in Peru and neighboring Andean countries. They have about as much meat as a very small chicken, and tend to be rather tough. They are eaten roasted or stewed, often in a spicy yellow sauce. They achieved artistic fame when Marcos Zapata in 1753 painted a Last Supper for the Cuzco cathedral, with the disciples eating a guinea pig instead of a lamb and drinking from Inca-style qero cups (personal observation, Cuzco, 1997; see Benavente Velarde 1995:139-140). This is part of a significant trend in colonial Andean art to show the victimized apostles and saints as Indigenous and, often, their persecutors as Spanish.

The Spanish did manage to introduce the characteristic European Easter bread. It is known as t’anta wawa, “baby bread,” and is made on All Saints and All Souls’ Days in memory of babies lost. It takes the shape of babies, with baby faces sometimes added (GastroObscura, online, Aug. 29, 2019).

An important article on local crops has a self-explanatory title: “Semi-Domesticated Crops Have Unique Functional Roles in Agroecosystems: Perennial Beans (Phaseolus dumosus and P. coccineus) and Landscape Ethnoecology in the Colombian Andes” (Locqueville et al. 2022). The vines live 3-6 years and climb up into the trees. They need no annual sowing, produce in the worst years, and are good eating. Both are called cacha (Locqueville et al. 2022).

The Cashinahua, or Hunikuin, “real people,” are one of a number of groups that believe that peccaries and other game animals can reincarnate as people, and that people reincarnate as these animals. Zeca, a Cashinahua thinker, recognized different views of reality, and could hold forth to ethnographer Cecilia McCallum (2014) about skepticism, alternative views to keep in mind since we don’t know which is right. He understood cultural differences, personal differences, ontology vs ontologies, epistemology and epistemologies, and differences in standpoints. Zeca appears one of the sharper minds in anthropology.

Similarly, dogs dream the future, among upper Amazon groups, and their owners are very surprised when the dogs die, since they should predict and avoid their fate (Kohn 2007).

North America

            Most of North America lacked agriculture at the time of contact. The north and the Great Basin west were lands of hunting and gathering.

The Arctic and Subarctic are too cold and wintry for agriculture; most of that land is unfarmed even today. People lived by following caribou herds, or by fishing, or by hunting various animals. Gathering provided berries, mushrooms, and locally other foods, from lichens to nuts. Food was often preserved by storing it in cold places, which of course were abundant. Warm weather led to thawing and fermentation, often producing monumentally aromatic or maggot-infested results, which were eaten with relish. This is also true in Siberia (Yamin-Pasternak et al. 2014). They are definitely an acquired taste.

A survey of these shows that many could potentially carry pathogens of various sorts (Stemmelmayr and Sheffield 2022), but people of the region understood this, and were usually careful to avoid the dangers. Sealed and stored salmon eggs in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, were called “stink eggs” with good reason, and could potentially kill, but rarely did in traditional times when people knew how to assess dangers.

            Along the Pacific Coast, lack of agriculture did not mean lack of cultivation. Wild plants were widely tended and managed. Tobacco was the only domesticate, grown by the Haida, Karuk (Harrington 1932), and many other local groups, but plants like camas (Camassia quamash) were semi-domesticated—so intensively cultivated by digging the roots and replanting them that they became used to human management. Trees and bushes were transplanted to new areas. Groves of Oregon crabapple (Malus fusca) and other native fruit trees are found at former habitation sites in the Northwest Coast forests.

            Much of the continent was managed by fire. The far north, high mountains, deserts, and Northwest Coast rainforests do not burn, or burn only locally, but other regions were burned at fairly regular intervals. Much of the lore is lost, because of the incredibly foolish custom of suppressing all fires. This idea was introduced in the late 19^th century and peaked in the mid-20^th. It led to fuel buildup and senility of brush and trees, so that when fire did come—as it must, thanks to lightning if not human carelessness—forests, brushlands, and grasslands were devastated. Previously, regular burning occurred thanks to lightning, and Native Americans increased the frequency by deliberately firing small patches to open the landscape. This was especially done for berry and nut stands. Many of these bushes and trees are naturally fire-followers, especially the berries. They require fire to keep them growing and to prevent encroachment of less useful but more shade-loving trees.

            Many of these berries and fruits deserve more attention. Serviceberries (Amelanchier alnifolia)—basically tiny wild plum-colored pears—are grown as dooryard fruit in Canada, and you can find selected varieties there; few fruits are better. The southern species (A. utahensis) is good eating too, but has not been cultivated or selected—another potential garden fruit.

The native California plum (Prunus subcordata) has evolved an exquisite variety in the Warner Mountains of the California-Nevada-Oregon tripoint, and this plum has been grown in orchards near Lakeview, OR, for preserves, jam, and wine. It is unsurpassed for all these purposes, narrowly beating out the beach plum of New England (at least to this observer, but no New Englander would ever admit their beach plums are less than the finest, and they have a case).

A vast wealth of wild currants, gooseberries, blackberries, raspberries, huckleberries, blueberries, bush cranberries, and other berries gives almost year-round harvests in the more temperate areas. The thimbleberry, a wild raspberry (Rubus parviflorus), is often as good as any domestic raspberry. I once found an abandoned patch of domestic raspberry that had been invaded by wild thimbleberries. I spent a long time eating; it was the best berry feast I ever had. Wild strawberries are also wonderful, and I have grazed happily on them in many a forest. We in California have all the domesticated species as wild plants: Fragaria chiloensis, F. vesca, and F. virginiana. F. vesca extends to Europe, and is cultivated there; ordinary commercial strawberries are hybrids of the other two, which occur very widely in the Western Hemisphere. The wild ones are a very great deal better than the tame ones, which have been bred for size and appearance and have lost almost all flavor.

Root crops other than the Jerusalem artichoke have been much less popular with settlers. Camas is the highline root, and is very good eating. “Wild carrots” (Perideridia spp.) and countless species of Lomatium (sometimes called “wild parsley”) are widespread, and eaten when available. They and other roots are often baked in earth ovens. They are rather tasteless and woody. A range of bitterroots, balsamroots, wild lilies, and other root, bulb, tuber, and corm crops are enthusiastically consumed. For the record, a bulb is a layered thickening of the base of the stem. Lilies and onions are are typical. Their Chinese name “hundred together” describes their appearance. Tubers are underground stems, like potatoes (white and sweet), and have no such structure. Corms are underground or ground-level swollen stems, resembling bulbs but lacking the layered or scaled structure.

Berries and roots are eaten all over the Americas, but roots are particularly important in the interior Northwest—the Columbia Plateau and the vast high areas around it. There, they are the staple food. A wondrous variety exists, so there can be harvesting in many places at many times of year, and people can enjoy different eating experiences.

Nuts include a vast range of acorns from oaks of many species. Chestnuts were one of the most abundant trees in eastern North America before introduced blight from Asia killed virtually all of them; a few resistant ones survive, and are being bred in hopes of restoring this important crop. The walnut family supplied not only walnuts from many local species, but also hickories and pecans. Pinyon pines supplied vast amounts of seeds in good years. Native Americans propagated nuts locally and burned forests (at least near their villages) to preserve the health of the nut trees by eliminating competition, killing pests, clearing brush, and reducing the danger of bigger fires. Thus the nut groves of America were managed to various degrees, often quite intensively. Debate continues on how much was managed at this level, with anthropologists emphasizing intensive management at significant scales (K. Anderson 2005; Delcourt and Delcourt 2004) and biologists often casting a skeptical eye.

            North America received its agriculture largely from Mexico, but probably began experimenting independently from a very early time. A range of crops appeared in the Mississippi drainage, including sumpweed (Iva annua), goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandierii, especially var. jamesii), and others. Sunflowers were domesticated in North America or nearby northern Mexico. So were pumpkins (Cucurbita pepo, orange pumpkins and ornamental gourds, as opposed to winter squash).

Some of the minor crops of the Americas deserve further looks (Minnis 2014). The chenopods and other seed crops, and the many Indigenous-domesticated root crops, are particularly promising. The Jerusalem artichoke, a species of sunflower that has nothing to do with Jerusalem or artichokes, is probably Mississippi Valley domesticate. It produces huge stems and incredible numbers of tubers on very poor soil. Research at the University of California at Davis showed it to have enormous potential for producing biofuel—free fuel from poor land. The tubers are edible after long cooking at high heat, but their starch is mainly inulin, which causes acute indigestion if not thus broken down. They were traditionally prepared in earth ovens.

The Iroquois and their neighbors took up maize agriculture rather late, but came to depend heavily on it. Their fields were extremely productive and could be cropped repeatedly, because they cultivated the best soils and allowed a large number of nitrogen-fixing plants, cultivated and wild, to grow among crops or between cropping years. They grew plants in mounds, which protected the seedlings from early freezes; the seedlings did not break out of the ground till late, and the mounds were above the coldest air at ground level. This allowed permanent cultivation that was as productive as European agriculture of the time, if not more (Mt. Pleasant 2015; Mt. Pleasant and Burt 2010). They processed corn into hominy by using wood ash. A common food, cooked in pots, was sagamité, “hominy corn pounded into meal, boiled in water, and enhanced with meat, fish, berries, or oil if available” (Taché et al. 2025:168; Campanella 2013).

Native American environmental morality is now well known as a major contribution to the world. Respect for animals and plants, knowledge of the resources, and ability to set and enforce limits are vital. Also vital is a real grasp of ecology. Native Americans are generally quite aware of food webs, networks of mutual dependence, predator-prey relationships, and, in generqal, the broader picture. They conserve resources as part of awareness of the wider world (Anderson and Pierotti 2022; Brandt 1953; Davis 2000).

            Native American conservation ideas influenced the United States from the late 19^th century. George Bird Grinnell, a top-notch pioneer ethnographer, was well connected with the New York elite, and managed to convince them of the need to conserve and the wisdom of Native American ways to do it. Among his converts was Theodore Roosevelt, probably the most strong conservationist among American presidents. Also influenced were George Shiras, father of the Migratory Bird Protection Treaty of 1918, which has saved migratory birds ever since—though they are now succumbing to pollution and global climate change. Yet another was William Hornaday, long head of the Bronx Zoo and the New York Zoological Society, who wrote a passionate and fiery work of conservation, Our Vanishing Wild Life (1913).

North America today

            United States farm subsidies are an international scandal and an international tragedy. Huge industrial farms are paid vast sums to plant, or not plant, sugar, soybeans, wheat, maize, cotton, and one or two other items. The environmental effects of this are appalling. Sugar, for instance, is grown by a few huge industrial farms in Florida, who take the water that should go to the Everglades to keep that unique ecosystem functioning. The firms pollute the water heavily with dangerous chemicals before releasing some of it. The sugar is farmed solely for the subsidies; it does not make money by itself.

Reforms in 2014 failed to stop flagrant abuse. At least, subsidies are no longer paid to nonfarmers with no crops. However, inflated prices led to oversupport. Now around $9 billion is spent on commodity subsidies. Most of the money goes to the rich agribusiness companies, not small farmers. The top 1% of recipients got an average of $116,501 in 2016, the median ones got only $2479 (Britschgi 2017).

This applies worldwide. The world subsidy level is at least $700 billion a year, possibly over a trillion. Only 1% of this money is at all good for the environment. Most goes for cattle, deforestation, and heavy use of fertilizer—about the most environmentally destructive things humans do. Some 75% goes to farmers, 15% to research, the rest for other purposes (Carrington 2019, using data from International Food Policy Research Institute and Food and Land Use Coalition). Interestingly, these revelations come from a right-wing and a left-wing journal, respectively; nobody likes farm subsidies except giant agribusinesses.

Food insecurity in the US is astonishingly high, around 12% of households. It rose in the 2008 recession and did not drop back for years, only to rise again in the COVID-19 epidemic (World Almanac 2025:161).

US food consumption changes since 1970 reflect a startling drop in consumption of oranges, peaches, spinach, lettuce,veal, and potatoes, and a huge increase in avocados, broccoli, garlic, high-fructose corn syrup, and chickens (World Almanac 2025:161). Beef consumption has increased only 15% since 1910, but chickens have gone up 520%; butter is down, pork slightly up, fish way up (p. 164). Most crop production is up, but oats have crashed even since 2000, as horses become less prominent. Cotton is somewhat down. Maize production has doubled even since 1980, but wheat and barley are down (p. 165). Soybeans have doubled in production. Beans are down but dry peas are up (165).

Sweet drinks are the major source of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup; sandwiches are the major source of saturated fasts and salt (p. 162).

Restaurants are also in trouble. “Of the nearly 647,286 restaurants in the U.S., chains account for 301,183,” (Peterson 2020). Independent restaurants are squeezed by costs and by local factors. The chains can absorb local failures by compensating from other locals that succeed. The bland, unhealthy food of the chains is a total abomination from the points of view of both taste and health, but they succeed by consistency, flashy advertising, and having all too well-known images and brands.

            Teenagers notoriously eat badly, but do not have to. Most of them realize the food corporations are making huge profits selling junk food, and they resent being suckered by the slick ads and taste sensations. This can motivate them to avoid such food (Bryan 2016; Burris et al. 2020). Many are terribly food-insecure, however, coming from troubled or impoverished households. They often lack easy access to good food when they need it.

Teens need enormous amounts of food. Peg Bracken, in her wonderful I Hate to Cook Book (1960), memorably ended a recipe for a hearty casserole with “Dinner for six, or an afternoon snack for a teenage boy.” All of us who have raised teenage boys will understand.

Ethnic Food Cultures

            Stamdard American food is, after all, an ethnic culture, a synthesis made by white European-ancestry settlers from many sources. One fascinating story is that of ketchup, traced by Claudia Kreklau (2025) in an extremely thorough and well-referenced article. She takes it from its roots in Fujianese fermented fish sauce (ke tsiap) to a mixed anchovy-based category of sauces in 18^th-century England. It led to Worcestershire sauce (vinegar, sugar, spices, onions, garlic, anchovies) and even more fascinating mixes—walnut ketchup had walnuts, anchovies, shallots, mace, pepper, cloves, and garlic, and was then combined with cayenne, soy, etc. in some applications. These spread in due course of time to America, where ketchup generally meant the walnut form. Meanwhile, thanks to spread from the New World to the Mediterranean countries, tomatoes got more and more popular. Tomato ketchup was invented. It then spread over central Europe. Then the migration of Anna and John Henry Heinz from Germany to America brought a new enterprise. Their son Henry John (1844-1919) went from a humble start to spectacular success. He started making ketchup on a large scale in 1876, with more sugar, vinegar, and pulp than others. The recipe changed and simplified over time, becoming the now-universal commodity.

North American Anglo food was heavily influenced by religion, often highly deviant cults, as most recently chronicled by Christina Wang in Holy Food (2023). Most of these banned, and still ban, alcohol, tobacco, and hot spices. Many ban meat and encourage consumption of whole grains and beans. The Seventh-Day Adventists, a particularly successful group, are one such, though most now eat meat and processed grains. They also consume very high amounts of sugar (personal observation), neutralizing some of the advantages of their diet, but they have a noteworthy life expectancy.

The United States forms of African American food have been mentioned above in the Africa section. It is a wildly creative and complex mix. The pies, cakes, breads, and most of the ordinary “made dishes” are British Isles transplants. So are chitlins (chitterlings), traditionally eaten with mustard in England, but presumably intestines were eaten in Africa too. As most people know, African Americans were forced to learn to use the “odd bits” of animals, because the slaveowners took all the good parts. Neckbones was as good as it got, for Blacks in the old south. “Nose to tail” eating was universal in the British Isles, Europe, Africa, and pretty much everywhere at the time. No one could afford the choosiness of modern diners, who reject even excellent “body parts” like liver, oxtails, shanks, and sweetbreads.

A fondness for greens, especially strong-flavored ones, persisted from Africa. Turnip greens and collards were English in background, but filled the bill, and became identified with African American culture: “Corn bread and pepper sauce and good old turnip greens” (in one song). The greens were cooked with bacon or salt pork, if you could get any, and often a chile or two. The pot liquor was delicious, sopped up with the corn bread.

Maize was the staple food in the United States, for southerners of all backgrounds. Native processing into hominy has been noted. Corn bread with white flour was an English invention.

Beans of many sorts were critical to life. The classic African dishes were made with black-eyed peas, an African native. Most famous among these is the thoroughly African dish Hoppin’ John: blackeyes cooked with rice, spiced with chiles to taste, and made with bacon or salt pork if available. No one knows where the name came from. One of many origin myths refers to a lame vendor in old Charleston, whose wife or relative, Limpin’ Susan, gives her name to a rice and okra dish (Cross and Crawford 2023:160-165). Hoppin’ John is traditionally eaten with collards or similar greens on New Year’s Day for good luck, a tradition I religiously maintain. (I am a small but significant part African American, and keep the foodways going.)

Blackeyes are usually cooked in mixed stews or made into falafel-like fritters in Africa, and are used in soups in the United States. Pigeon peas are another African import, possibly originally from India. They have become definingly important in the Caribbean, but remain largely tropical. More common were Native American beans of all possible colors and patterns, with white “Navy” beans probably most common. They were acquired from the Indigenous people immediately, and became the protein staple of the poor and even the middle class of all “races” throughout the old south and southwest, and even as far as Boston with its famed white baked beans.

The other member of the Three Sisters, squash, was adopted immediately, due to its similarity to gourds and to the native West African pumpkin Telfairia occidentalis. In the United States, the native species, Cucurbita pepo, was the source of pumpkins, summer squash, and ornamental gourds. In the Caribbean, the “pumpkin” was butternut squash, C. moschata. The famous Jamaican pumpkin soup is thus “butternut squash soup” on United States menus.

Barbecue, probably the signature African American food complex, is originally Caribbean, but has come a long way since the Arawak and Carib peoples set up simple wooden frames for roasting, smoking, or drying meat over an open fire. The frames were the original barbacoa. Another word for it, boucan, produced the buccaneers—people who may have been pirates when opportunity offered, but normally lived by hunting, fishing, and foraging, cooking their meat on a boucan. They often smoked and dried it and sold it to ships.

In the Caribbean and then in the United States, the term “barbecue” quickly spread to meat cooked over an open fire, grill or no, and then to the pit-cooked meats well known in both African and Native American cultures but not common in Europe. Cooks used increasingly spicy and complex sauces to baste the roasting meats. Smoking survived as a dominant method of preparation. From these origins, barbecue has evolved into one of the most complex, diverse, and elaborate cooking styles in the world.

Wonderful accounts of the golden age of barbecuing and its modern fate may be found in Zora Neale Hurston’s writings on Florida food (Opie 2015) and Black barbecue chef Adrian Miller’s Black Smoke (2023). Hurston, a great and still underappreciated Black author, does a notable job of capturing the life of old-time large-scale barbecues. Any book on African American foodways is bound to touch on the tradition. It has, of course, been enthusiastically adopted by white, Latino, and even Asian-American cooks, with constantly growing diversity.

The Native American contribution was overwhelmingly important in one way: it contributed the staple food of the old south, maize. The Native Americans had developed ways of cracking corn into cookable-sized bits, and of making hominy by boiling kernels in wood ashes. This eliminated the phytic acid and thus eliminated the pellagra problem—which resurfaced, especially among Whites, as milled maize flour and meal became available. People no longer made or lived on hominy. Hoecakes were essentially a Native American food, as were various corn drinks and preparations, but cornbread is English-influenced, usually depending on some white flour and chemical leavening. It is still eaten African and Native American style, sopped in cooking liquids, but more often is eaten English style, with butter and jam. 

I have touched on the rice cookery above. Rice cooking in the American South began as a straightforward transplant from the Rice Coast. The history has been traced by Judith Carney in Black Rice (2001; Carney and Rosomoff 2009), and early by Karen Hess in Carolina Rice Cookery (1992). Pilaf or pilau from India reached America almost as soon as rice did, and morphed into the “perloo” and “peloo” of the South. New Orleans famously added French herbs, sausages, and sophisticated techniques like preparing a roux. But the basic cooking is African, as shown by names like “jambalaya”  (Wolof for “mixed grain stew”) and cala (a West African word for rice), used for rice dumplings that are unbelievably light and flavorful when fresh-cooked.

Native American influence appears in gumbo filé, ground sassafras leaves. They provide a wonderful spicy flavor that quickly caught on with African transplants. Also Native American is the fondness for crayfish, to say nothing of muskrat, alligator, garfish, turtles, and other wild meats.

These more exotic game items are largely eaten by the Cajun people. Supposedly descended from French exiled from Acadia (now New Brunswick) after the English took it over, they are a mixed group, very possibly more Native American than anything else. The original Acadians were described as blond and blue-eyed; modern Cajuns tend to be black-haired, brown-eyed, and olive-skinned. Census figures show a sharp drop in Native American population and an equally sharp rise in French population in Louisiana in the middle 19^th century.

Louisiana cuisine remains one of the great local cuisines, with influences wide-flung over North America. The classic source is the Picayune Creole Cook Book (1901, current available edition by Dover, 1971; the name refers to the main newspaper of the time, which originally cost a picayune, the New Orleans equivalent of a French sou). Among countless modern cookbooks, we may single out Cookin’ with Queen Ida (Guillory 1990), written by a lady whom many would indeed consider the unquestioned queen of Zydeco music, the upbeat Cajun musical tradition. It is basically French Canadian accordion music, with singing, but made a great deal wilder than anything Canadian by the West African rhymic miracles so typical of Louisiana music. (Zydeco itself is a food word; it is a somewhat parodied version of the Cajun pronunciation of les haricots, “the beans,” both green and dried beans being associated with Cajun lifeways.)

One does not have to go to the wilds of Louisiana to eat alligator, however. In the southeast coastal lands, from Florida north to the Carolinas, settlers also learned from Native Americans how to hunt and cook gators. They were a major food in the Okefenokee Swamp in the old days. They are still universal on menus serving local specialties, in Florida and in the Low Country (coastal Georgia and the Carolinas)

Jewish-American food has entered American foodways abundantly. Almost all the signature dishes are Ashkenazic; the Ashkenazim are Jews from north, central, and east Europe, supposedly descended from a small founder group that migrated from Italy to Alsace, originally the valley of Ashkenaz, in the early Medieval period. Genetics more or less confirms the story, but with many additions from local people. (Contrary to a persistent story, the Ashkenazim are not descendants of the Medieval Khazars, whose leaders converted to Judaism.)

The classic American Jewish foods radiated from New York in the 20^th century. They are largely East European foods, taken up by the Jews there during the “Pale of Settlement” period when the Polish-Lithuanian Empire welcomed them and much of western Europe was expelling them. Bagels and lox are possibly the most widely known, involving smoked salmon, as non-Levantine a food as can be imagined. People are fond of pointing out that “lox” is the oldest word in the English language; it is identical to the Indo-European *laks for salmon or large fish. Challah is simply a kosher form of the old European and Near Eastern ritual bread, with milk and butter replaced by oil to satisfy kashruth (kosher requirements). Knishes are Jewish versions of classic East European dumplings. Smoked and pickled herring and other preserved fish preparations are from the Polish-Lithuanian area. And chicken soup is possibly the most universal food on earth.

One American Jewish food that stands out is pastrami: cured, smoked, and steamed beef brisket. Brisket (from the foreparts of cattle) is the traditional Jewish cut, because removing the veins in the abdomens of cattle is difficult but is required by kosher law. In the United States it is considered a New York delicatessen invention. In Canada, however, a very similar commodity—usually salted and dried rather than pickled in brine—is known as “Montreal smoked meat,” and regarded as indigenous there. The Montreal Jewish community is as venerable, well-established, and culturally important as that of New York, though smaller.

All have noted the similarity of the word to Romanian pastrama (smoked mutton, or salted dried meat in general) and its ancestor, Turkish bastırma (beef air-dryed after salting and covering with paprika to preserve it). Yet American pastrami is clearly a descendant of the Alsatian dish pickelfleisch (pickled meat). The Irish scholars Angela Hanratty and Diarmuid Cawley (2024) show convincingly that Romanian Jewish immigrants brought the word pastrama, which in New York was applied to what elsewhere was variously called smoked meat or pickled meat.

Cowboy cooking was an odd mix of traditions. Mexican influence was strong enough to provide the word “coci,” from Mexican cocinero, “cook,” used in southwestern cow camps. Naturally, every part of a butchered animal was used. Of uncertain origin was “son of a bitch stew,” based on the “mar gut” (milk-filled small intestine of a calf; Harris 2011:148). “Son of a gun stew” was more general and less gut-based. In contrast to the lily-white cowboys of movie fame, cowboys were very often Black, Mexican, Native American, or a mix of some of the above with the more stereotypic Scots-Irish wanderers. A fair number still are. The food reflected this. It also reflected field conditions; coffee was supposed to be “black as night, strong as an ox, and hot as hell.” Cowboys were militant in ways not known to Hollywood; they formed an active and fairly successful union in the 19^th century.

            Mexican-American cooking is another tradition with great antiquity and countless variations. Its origin in Spain and Mexico is noted above. In New Mexico, farming in old-fashioned ways continues, either because of local conservatism (as I have often seen) or because of revival. My anthropologist friend Devon Peña comes from an old Colorado Hispanic land grant family, and as he moved toward retirement from the University of Washington he came more and more attached to the old place, where he now lives and works on restoring the system. He put together a wonderful collection of stories by revivalists like himself and local old-timers among his neighbors (Peña et al. 2017). Some of them bake bread and dry corn kernels in the old beehive ovens the Spanish introduced—ovens that go back to the ancient Near East.

Asian-American food also took on a life of its own. The most famous of American Chinese foods, chop suey, has found itself used as the title of more than one book, and the subject of many imaginative, and imaginary, origin myths. It was not invented to get rid of restaurant scraps, or because a restaurant found itself short of food when a visiting dignitary appeared, or to cheat the foreigners. It is, in fact, a venerable and universal Chinese dish. The name—za sui in Mandarin, tsap seui (or “chop suey”) in Cantonese—means “miscellaneous leftovers.” That being a rather general descriptor, the dish ranges from the “odd bits” left over from butchering an animal, in the north, to leftover small vegetables and chicken meat, in the south. The Californian form appeared possibly earlier in New York, but was certainly established soon after the gold rush of 1848. It was a dish of vegetable growers in the Toisan and Seiyap districts of Guangdong province. (Toisan is Mandarin taishan, “terrace mountain,” and Seiyap is “four districts.”) They spoke a slightly different dialect of Cantonese from the familiar one of Canton and Hong Kong. They would sell their vegetables and then cook up for dinner the ones too small or misshapen to sell. Often, these were the tenderest and most flavorful of the lot. They were flavored with ginger, garlic, and soy sauce. These were, of course, the “miscellaneous leftovers” of the dish title In the United States, any available vegetables and meat were used. (See Peters 2013, but most of this paragraph is based on my own research in Hong Kong and California.)

California’s great contribution to Chinese cuisine was the fortune cookie, actually invented in a Japanese tea room in San Francisco, and based on a Japanese cookie (Peters 2013). I suspect also influence from the American sugar cookie. It appeared in the early 20^th century. Who thought of folding it around a “fortune” seems unclear, but for a long time a single white man was responsible for all the fortunes in San Francisco. Some were Confucian taglines, many were folk wisdom. Today, they are bland nonsense, though sometimes someone gets assertive enough to have a quiet joke; one I received said “You will live in interesting times,” with reference to the fake-Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times” (which actually surfaced in England in the 1930s).

One of those odd stories of immigrant success in new-land foodways concerns the pink doughnut box. A Cambodian refugee named Ted Ngoy got a start in the new land by setting up a doughnut shop. He and other Cambodians succeeded mightily as franchisers or renters of doughnut shops, and soon the field was dominated by them in much of southern California. Ngoy found pink boxes were cheaper than white ones, and the result was an identification of doughnuts and pink boxes in the south; when it reached Hollywood, their movies and TV shows made the box go worldwide (Sanchez 2023).

California’s fusion cuisine extends to truly exotic blends, such as Punjabi-Mexican food. Many Punjabis, often Sikhs, emigrated to California in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, establishing communities in the far south and the center. Intermarriatge and fusion cooking were natural consequences. Roti quesadillas are a known item, and curries have blended with chile stews (Chopra 2019). Corn bread is a Punjabi staple, and tortillas were an easy borrowing.

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