A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [21]
For me, the most surprising thing about these new plants is that in their natural state you very often can’t eat them at all, or at least they taste pretty filthy if you do. Why would people choose to grow food that they can eat only once it’s been soaked or boiled or ground to make it digestible? Martin Jones, Professor of Archaeological Science at Cambridge University, sees this as an essential strategy for survival:
As the human species expanded across the globe, we had to compete with other animals going for the easy food. Where we couldn’t compete, we had to go for the difficult food. We went for things like the small hard grass seeds we call cereals, which are indigestible if eaten raw and may even be poisonous, which we have to pulp up and turn into things like bread and dough. And we went into the poisonous giant tubers, like the yam and the taro, which also had to be leeched, ground up and cooked before we could eat them. This was how we gained a competitive advantage – other animals that didn’t have our kind of brain couldn’t think several steps ahead to do that.
So it takes brains to get to cookery and exploit new sources of food. We don’t know what gender the cooks were who used our pestle to grind taro in New Guinea, but we do know from archaeological evidence in the Middle East that cookery there was primarily a woman’s activity. From examining burial sites of this period, scientists have discovered that the hips, ankles and knees of mature women are generally severely worn. The grinding of wheat then would have been done kneeling down, rocking back and forth to crush the kernels between two heavy stones. This arthritis-inducing activity must have been very tough, but the women of the Middle East and the new cooks everywhere were thereby cultivating a small range of nourishing basic foods that could sustain much larger groups of people than had been possible before. Most of these new foods were quite bland, but the pestle and mortar can also play a key part here in making them more interesting. The chef and food writer Madhur Jaffrey comments:
If you take mustard seeds, which were known in ancient times, and leave them whole they have one taste, but if you crush them, they become pungent and bitter. You change the very nature of a seasoning by crushing it.
These new crops and seasonings helped create new kinds of communities. They could produce surpluses which could then be stored, exchanged or simply consumed in a great feast. Our pestle’s long, thin elegant body looks far too delicate to have been able to withstand the vigorous daily pummelling of taro, so we should perhaps think of it more as a ritual, festive implement used to prepare special meals where people gathered, as we might do now, to trade, to dance or to celebrate key moments in life.
Today, while many of us travel freely, we depend on food grown by people who cannot move, who must stay on the same piece of land. This makes farmers across the world vulnerable to any change in climate, their prosperity dependent on regular, predictable weather. So it’s not surprising that the farmers of 10,000 years ago, wherever they lived, formed a world view centred on gods of food and climate, who needed constant placation and prayer in order to ensure the continuing cycle of the seasons and safe, good harvests. Nowadays, at a time when climate is changing faster than at any time for the past 10,000 years, most people in search of solutions look not just to gods but to governments. Bob Geldof is a passionate campaigner in this new politics of food:
The whole psychology of food, where it places us, is I think more important than almost any other aspect of our lives. Essentially, the necessity to work comes out of the necessity to eat, so the idea of food is fundamental in all human existence. It’s clear that no animal can exist without being able