Extract: The Fascinating History of Food

Food has a rich and fascinating history, one that is intrinsically linked to our own. What we eat and how we eat it is as much about where we are in the world as it is about the communities we’re a part of. Since the earliest days of human history, societal and cultural norms have influenced the food we consume. The one thing we all have in common is our need (and desire) to eat.

Hailed as ‘compulsive reading’ and ‘a thing of beauty’ by The Spectator, Repast: The Story of Food explores this history, illustrated by the British Museum’s extensive collection of artefacts and objects. Jenny Linford – in consultation with curators from the British Museum – lays out broad themes such as hunting, preserving, feasting and eating out to tell the extraordinary global story of food, drink and the culinary arts.

In this extract, Jenny Linford weaves a thread from the early days of human history through to the present day and illustrates how food influences us all.

Food is universal, yet particular. The need to eat is a biological imperative, one that omnivorous humans have responded to with much ingenuity over many millennia. While the requirement to eat is common to all of us, what we eat and how we eat it varies according to geography, climate, history and societal norms.

The need for food has helped to shape who we are as a species. Finding and sharing food influenced socializing and bonding within groups of hominins, our early ancestors, who eked out an existence scavenging scraps of meat from animal carcasses. Successful foraging and reliably obtaining nutrition through the making and use of tools – evidence of which dates from about two million years ago – also fed the calorie-hungry brain, supporting its development. The ability to make and use fire for cooking, which possibly began just over a million years ago in parts of Africa, assisted and accentuated the importance of meat in the early human diet, as well as the social bonding and cultural significance associated with sharing a meal by the fire.

For most of early human history, people lived as hunter-gatherers, finding their food in the wild; indeed, some still do, living in remote regions where this practice is best suited to their environment. However, after about 12,000 years ago, a gradual shift towards agriculture took place independently across the world. Rather than foraging and hunting, humans began relying for sustenance predominantly on the food they produced themselves through growing crops and rearing animals. With the need to tend crops and livestock came a settled rather than nomadic existence. The food surpluses created by farming as opposed to foraging saw human populations increase and people live together in larger, permanent communities.

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Food has connective powers. The sharing of food is a basic act of hospitality, requiring trust on behalf of both the host and the guest. In our personal lives, food evokes memories; we associate particular foods and drinks with when and where we first encountered them, reminding us of our childhood or a special holiday. The sheer relatability of cooking and eating – activities we can all know and understand – makes the past seem closer. This is one reason, for example, why in recent decades so many stately homes have opened up their kitchens and kitchen gardens. As one studies the artefacts in this book, there is a jolt of recognition at seeing the familiar: a fish hook dating back to the late Ice Age; a long, slender drinking straw made in Ur around 2600 BCE; a shopping list written in Latin on a wooden tablet in the Roman fort of Vindolanda in northeast England between the late first and early second centuries CE. The writer of this list – perhaps responsible for stocking the fort’s mess, judging by the quantities involved – instructs the shopper to buy ‘a hundred apples, if you can find nice ones, a hundred or two hundred eggs, if they are for sale … at a fair price’. The list-writer’s concerns over the quality of ingredients and being overcharged are shared by food shoppers to this day.

In an age of social media and mobile phones, we are bombarded with glossy images of appetizing dishes: mouth-watering cakes, tempting bowls of pasta, succulent steaks. The objects and images in Repast offer a far more varied take on food. They are diverse and intriguing, selected across time and place: an Egyptian model of a group of brewers dating back to around 2050–2000 BCE, a dainty nineteenth-century Japanese netsuke carved in the form of a tea bowl and whisk, a Tiepolo drawing of a Venetian cafe scene. When one looks through Repast, the long-standing human fascination with food is clear.

Words by Jenny Linford.

Discover Repast: The Story of Food by Jenny Linford, available now.