Eating through time : the culture of food in the Mediterranean

Abstract

The story of human history, reduced to essentials, revolves around the basic requirements for life. Thus, no history that claims to recapture the lives of the masses of the inarticulate can ignore to look at the subject of food. The need for adequate nutrition in our own time has made the study of food much more than an object of historical curiosity. In Prehistoric times, people survived by adapting to the resources that were readily available. Initially, they gathered, scavenged, and hunted. Their successors gained greater control over food supplies when they embarked upon agriculture and animal husbandry. Later still, communities competed for control over granaries, or for the riches with which to assure themselves fuller lives. Throughout history, human beings had to adapt in order to sustain themselves by varying or expanding the basic kinds or forms of nutritional staples through agriculture; by migration; or by employing remarkable ingenuities to alter their environment, such as field terracing.