Decription on Food

The food people ate varied a good deal from time to time and from place to place. So you'll need to read about each time and place separately. There are some things all these times and places had in common, though.

First, there was no refrigeration or freezers. It was very hard to keep food from going bad. People did a lot of different things to preserve food. They dried fruit to make raisins, prunes, dried peas, and dried apples. They pickled vegetables, meat, and fish in brine (salty water) to make pickles and garum, a fermented fish sauce. They fermented grape juice and apple juice and barley to turn them into wine and cider and beer. They made yogurt and cheese. They smoked meat from pigs to make ham and bacon. Honey also acts as a good preservative.

Second, because it was so hard to carry things from one place to another without canals or trains or trucks, people usually could only eat what was available in their area at that time of year. If there was a shortage of food because of bad weather or crop diseases, people starved. Even in a good year, it was impossible to get fresh vegetables in the wintertime!

Third, before Christopher Columbus came to America in 1492 AD, and even for some time after that, many of the foods we eat today were not known in Europe, Africa, or Western Asia. They had no potatoes, no tomatoes, no corn-on-the-cob (maize). Europeans also had not yet gotten rice or citrus fruits (lemons and oranges) from China. Indian spices like cinnamon and pepper were available in Europe, but they were very expensive. And they didn't know how to make noodles.

You can see that they must have eaten very differently! And yet a lot of the foods they ate will also seem familiar.

Brief History of Food

The earliest Indians, the Harappans, probably ate mainly wheat and rice and lentils, and occasionally cows, pigs, sheep, and goats, and chicken. Rice and chicken seem to have come from Thailand, and wheat and sheep from West Asia. Some of the wheat was made into stews or soups, and some into flat breads called chapatis. The arrival of the Aryans does not seem to have changed Indian eating habits.

But by around 300 BC, under the Mauryans, a lot of Hindus felt that animal sacrifices added to your karma and kept you from getting free of the wheel of reincarnation. Animal sacrifices became less popular, and although people didn’t give up eating meat entirely, they ate much less of it. And a lot of people became vegetarians.

In the Gupta period, around 650 AD, Hindus began to worship a Mother Goddess. Cows were sacred to her, and so Hindus stopped eating beef.

And then around 1100 AD, with the Islamic conquests in northern India, most people in India stopped eating pork as well, because it is forbidden by the Koran. People could still eat sheep or goats or chicken, but most of the people in India became vegetarians, and only ate meat very rarely or not at all.

The vegetarian food that Indians ate was mainly wheat flatbreads or a kind of flatbread made out of chickpeas, with a spicy vegetarian sauce, and yogurt. Or people ate rice, with yogurt and vegetables. A lot of spicy peppers grew in India.