Food in the Prehistoric Times

Early humans had tried to find food through hunting and gathering and learned to use fire about 500,000 to six million years ago. These early humans were hunter-gatherers, nomads who followed the food wherever it wandered or grew. Between 40,000 B.C. and 12,000 B.C., Asian people went east and crossed into North and South America. The Ice Age had dried up the seas, creating dry land between Asia and Alaska, making it possible to walk from one continent to the other. So, the first people in the America were Asians. Humans then learned to use fire and started cooking their food, but it is still unclear whether they discovered the fire or most likely happened accidentally. After this period, the agricultural revolution came within the decades. 

The two most important factors that determine where life is hospitable to plants and animals, including humans, are geography and climate. When the Ice Age ended around 10,000 years ago, the last of the glaciers receded and the planet warmed up. This was the first of three major climate changes planet Earth has experienced. The other two were the Medieval Warm Period (A.D. 950–1300) followed by the Little Ice Age, which ended about 100 years ago. Some scientists think that we are in a new period of global warming caused by pollution from gasses produced by car engines and machinery (the “greenhouse effect”) and that we have to do something about it fast. Others think it is just part of a natural cycle. Still others think that climate is random and that a catastrophic change could occur suddenly for no reason and be completely out of the control of humans. Humans then learned how to domesticate foods, livestock such as sheep, cows and goats, then grew barley and wheat. Because gathering nuts and seeds and grasses and hunting wild game was unreliable, inefficient, and could support only a limited population. Through growing their own food humans gained more control over their environment and a guaranteed supply of food.

Food and Culture in Pre-modern Muslim Societies

            As a religious tradition and a movement of conquest, Islam emerged from western central Arabia, the Hijaz, in the mid-seventh century. With the rise and expansion of Muslim rule from the seventh through the tenth centuries, first northward into Syria, then eastward towards India and westward towards Spain there came a rich, multiple and varied inheritance based upon the conquered lands. Compared to the relative scarcity of their own native environment, the Arab conquerors discovered lands of plenty in the great river valleys of the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates and the Indus together with the established technologies of agriculture and irrigation of these and other regions. In contrast with the basic dual source of Arab nourishment, the date palm and the camel, they encountered in abundance the famous triad of the classical world, wheat, the grape and the olive.

            This contrast of environments is reflected in early Islamic dietary laws. Of the four schools of Sunni legal practice, the Shafi, Hanbali, Hanafi and Maliki, only the last originated in the Hijaz cities of Mecca and Medina where the nagging reality of scarcity (and possibly hunger) were of more pressing concern than in the more richly cultivated centres of Iraq, Syria and Egypt. Hence, legal scholars of the Hijaz were alone in their attitude to the consumption of birds and beasts of prey; they permitted the eating of birds of prey while merely disapproving beasts of prey whereas the scholars of all other schools strictly prohibited the consumption of both categories.

            With the Muslim expansion and as roots were set down in the conquered territories, new customs were encountered, new ways of doing things. One such novelty was the variety of indigenous culinary traditions that were expressed to some extent in the appearance of cookbooks written in Arabic for the new urban leisure class as discussed above. Another sphere was, in the broadest sense, a medical tradition also of composite nature but ultimately reflecting the Greek corpus of writings represented by Hippocrates as reworked and developed by Galen, and then notably the compendium on medical material by Dioscorides. While not to forget, however, that in addition to the Greek legacy other influences reached the Arabs from Sassanian Persian, Syriac and, albeit only marginally, from Indian and Chinese sources.

            On the other hand, Muslims made contributions of their own to the new, evolving trans-cultural domains of Islam that stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to India and beyond. Two may be noted briefly here as they are both related to the food cultures of Muslim societies. The first was the encouragement given during the early Muslim era to the diffusion of a number of crops from India through Persia westward across the Middle East and North Africa. The crops included sorghum, sugar cane, banana, spinach and the eggplant described by Andrew Watson in his book Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World [Cambridge, 1983] together with the routes and mechanics of diffusion and their acclimatisation in new environments.

Nourishment and Beverages in Pre-modern Muslim Societies

              A classic essay by Maxime Rodinson on Nourishment. As the Arabic term (ghidha) suggests, nourishment comprises digestion which promote bodily growth and good health. As far back as the Hippocratic work Tradition in medicine the author observed that in the beginning man must have consumed the same food as the animals, all products of the earth; but as a diet of raw food caused much human suffering, means were eventually found to prepare raw resources in a manner better suited to humans’ natural constitution. This ancient insight is reflected in the classical Arabic tradition. Here the labours of physicians who dealt with the medical concern for ‘dietetics’ (al-aghdhiyya, plural of ghidha) in detailing the benefits and potential harm of the raw resources of nourishment were mirrored in culinary works which described the transformation of these raw products through a variety of cooking techniques that produced healthy and satisfying dishes for the daily table. Thus we note again the convergence of the dietetic and culinary traditions. Rodinson’s article is suitably wide-ranging. Food among pre-Islamic Arabs of the central peninsula is distinguished from that of the agriculturally richer southern Arabia; then the Arab-Muslim conquests brought about contact with other pre-Islamic food cultures throughout the Middle East, together with their adoption and later adaptation from them, especially the Persian and Turkish traditions. Of products consumed, attention is paid to their storage and preservation, preparation and distribution, followed by a longer section on the variations in food consumption between different groups of people.

            The next part discusses about drinks, covers a variety of beverages such as beer, milk, water—both on its own and, a luxury, mixed with snow—and fruit juices, some of which were considered medicines or tonics. Intoxicating drink is dealt with in two articles, each describing a different term for the beverage. The first is khamr, usually rendered as Wine. The legal aspects of wine are treated by A.J. Wensinck who shows how in the Qur’an its prohibition evolved rather than being forbidden outright at a single stroke. Jurists later forbade trade in the product as well and declared it the root of all evil. Dissenting opinion was expressed, basically in the query, ‘what is wine’? For a beverage called khamr could be made from a variety of substances. The debate continued as witnessed by the evidence of the traditions of the Prophet, Muhammad and so does the punishments for wine consumption are noted. The second more comprehensive term for Intoxicating Drink, nabidh, is also mentioned by Wensinck and is dealt with briefly by P. Heine in the second article as well. One further well known drink made of fermented mare’s milk is treated with extreme brevity by J. Boyle and the piece has not been included here;The beverage known as kumis (variant, koumiss) was the staple brew of the steppe peoples of Eurasia and is mentioned by Herodotus. The Franciscan friar William of Rubruck, who described Mongol life in the mid-13th century, also detailed its preparation: a large quantity of mare’s milk was poured into a skin bag and churning the contents began with a ‘stick which is as big as a man’s head at its lower end and hollowed out; and when they beat it quickly it begins to bubble like new wine and to turn sour and ferment . . .’ The good friar exclaimed that the resulting pungent liquid, ‘greatly delights the inner man.’ The medieval Moroccan traveller, Ibn Battuta, explained in his account to readers that Turkish imbibers, despite their being Muslim, adhered to the practice of the Hanafi legal school which, he claimed, tolerated its consumption. One beverage was a late comer to the Middle Eastern scene but ultimately was to enjoy global fame. This was Coffee. Not an indigenous plant to the Yemen, it was probably introduced from Ethiopia and its earliest mention in Arabic sources dates from the 16th century, although its actual use may have occurred earlier. According to legend, the use of the plant, whether the berry alone or the prepared decoction, was popular among circles of Muslim mystics in the Yemen and Cairo. Fondness for the brew was owed to its effects as an aid to dispelling sleep and the performance of nocturnal spiritual exercises. Opponents, however, condemned its use as an ‘intoxicant’, forbidden by religious law, although their wrath may have been directed more specifically at the alleged unseemly behaviour of the mixed clientele in public ‘coffee houses’. The leaves and young shoots of the kat (khat) shrub grown in east Africa and the Yemen, contained an alkaloid katin that produced a euphoric effect when chewed or drunk as a ‘tea’. The widespread use of this stimulant had predated the appearance and use of coffee which displaced it in popularity in the Yemen until coffee began to be exported in large quantities.

            The other beverage of modern global impact, tea, had a rather different history within the Muslim world. In the first half of the 11th century the famous scholar al-Biruni described cay but only as a plant grown and used in China. European merchants brought tea to Morocco in the 18th century while in Persia in the early 19th century a major shift in public taste occurred from coffee to tea, neither of which was yet cultivated in that region and in towns the coffee-house (kahwa-khana) came to serve tea only.