An Edible History of Humanity (6 page)

In Egyptian temples, animals were killed and their flesh was presented to images of the gods. The gods were believed to inhabit
the images three times a day in order to consume the life force from the offerings, which they needed to replenish the energy
they expended to keep the universe going. Food offerings were also required to maintain the life force of dead humans, who
had become gods. So offerings were frequently made to dead pharaohs, and tombs were filled with jars of food to sustain the
dead in the afterlife. Similarly, in Shang China both gods and royal ancestors were offered grain, millet beer, animals (dogs,
pigs, wild boars, sheep, and cattle), and human sacrifices, most of them prisoners of war. The gods were thought to drink
the blood of the slaughtered victims. But the most elaborate offerings were made to the ancestors of Shang kings, who depended
on these sacrifices as food. If their ancestors were not sufficiently well fed, the Shang kings believed, they would punish
their descendants with poor harvests, military defeats, and plagues.

The Mesopotamians thought humans had a duty to provide food and earthly residences for the gods, who were provided with two
meals a day in their temples. The gods depended on this nourishment from humans: In the Mesopotamian version of the flood
story, the gods destroy humanity and then regret their action when they grow hungry because of the lack of offerings. But
one of their number, Enki, warns Utnapishtim (the Mesopotamian equivalent of the biblical Noah) of the coming flood and tells
him to build an ark. When Utnapishtim emerges from his boat and offers a burnt sacrifice, the gods crowd around the smoke
“like flies” because it is the first nourishment they have had in days. They then forgive Enki for allowing a few humans to
survive. The Mesopotamians believed the gods could survive without humans, but only if they produced their own food—which
is why they created humans to do it for them, and taught humans about agriculture.

In all these cases, sacrifices and offerings channel energy back to the supernatural realm as spiritual food to nourish gods
and ancestors and ensure that they, in turn, continue to nourish mankind by keeping the agricultural cycle going. The pre
senta tion of sacrifices gave the elite a crucial intermediary role between the gods and the farming masses. By paying tax,
the farmers in effect exchanged food for earthly order and stability, as the elite managed irrigation systems, orga nized
military defenses, and so on. And by providing sacrifices to the gods, the elite in effect exchanged spiritual food for cosmic
order, as the gods maintained the stability of the universe and the fertility of the soil.

That such similar religious ideologies arose in the earliest civilizations, separated as they were in time and space, is surely
no coincidence. The notion that the gods depended on offerings from mankind for their survival was peculiar to these cultures,
no doubt because it was very con ve nient for the members of their ruling elites. It legitimized the unequal distribution
of wealth and power and provided an implicit warning that without the managerial activities of the elite, the world would
come to an end. The farmers, their rulers, and the gods all depended on each other to ensure their survival; catastrophe would
ensue if any of them deviated from their assigned roles. But just as the farmers had a moral imperative to provide food to
the elite, the elite in turn had a duty to look after the people and keep them safe and healthy. There was, in short, a social
compact between the farmers and their rulers (and, by extension, the gods): If we provide for you, you must provide for us.
The result was that taxes paid in earthly food and sacrifices of spiritual food, all justified by religious ideology, reinforced
the social and cultural order.

In the modern world, the direct equation of food with wealth and power no longer holds. For people in agricultural societies,
food functions as a store of value, a currency, and an indicator of wealth; it is what people toil all day to produce. But
in modern urban societies, money performs these roles instead. Money is a more flexible form of wealth, easily stored and
transferred, and it can be readily converted into food at a supermarket, corner shop, café, or restaurant. Food is only equivalent
to wealth and power when it is scarce or expensive, as it was for most of recorded history. But by historical standards, food
today is relatively abundant and cheap, at least in the developed world.

Yet food has not entirely lost its association with wealth. It would be strange if it had, given how far back the connection
goes. Even in modern societies there are numerous echoes of food’s once-central economic role, in both words and customs.
In English a house hold’s main earner is called the breadwinner, and money may be referred to as bread or dough. Shared meals
are still a central form of social currency: The elaborate dinner party must be reciprocated with an equally lavish meal in
return. Extravagant feasts are a popular way to demonstrate wealth and status and, in the business world, to remind people
who is boss. And in many countries the poverty line is defined in relation to the income required to purchase a basic minimum
of foodstuffs. Poverty is a lack of access to food; so wealth, by implication, means not having to worry about where your
next meal is coming from.

A common feature of wealthy societies, however, is a feeling that an ancient connection with the land has been lost, and a
desire to reestablish it. For the wealthiest Roman nobles, knowledge of agriculture and ownership of a large farm was a way
to demonstrate that they had not forgotten their people’s purported origins as humble farmers. Similarly, many centuries later
in pre-revolutionary France, Queen Marie-Antoinette had an idealized farm built on the grounds of the palace of Versailles,
where she and her ladies-in-waiting would dress up as shepherdesses and milkmaids, and milk cows that had been painstakingly
cleaned. Today, people in many wealthy parts of the world enjoy growing their own food in gardens or on allotments. In many
cases they could easily afford to buy the resulting fruit and vegetables instead, but growing their own food provides a connection
with the land, a gentle form of exercise, a supply of fresh produce, and an escape from the modern world. (Growing food without
the use of chemicals is often particularly highly regarded in such circles.) In California, the richest part of the richest
country in the world, it is the simple food of the Italian peasantry that is most highly venerated. A tourist village has
even opened in India, near the technology hot spot of Bangalore, where the newly prosperous middle classes can go to experience
a romanticized version of their forebears’ existence as subsistence farmers. One of the privileges of wealth is the option
to emulate the lifestyles of the rural poor.

Wealth tends to distance people from working on the land; indeed, not having to be a farmer is another way to define wealth.
Today, the richest societies are those in which the proportion of income spent on food, and the fraction of the workforce
involved in food production, are lowest. Farmers account for only around 1 percent of the population in rich countries such
as the United States and Britain. In poor countries such as Rwanda, the proportion of the population involved in agriculture
is still more than 80 percent—as it was in Uruk 5,500 years ago. In the developed world, most people have specialized jobs
that do not relate to agriculture, and they would find it difficult to survive if they suddenly had to produce all their own
food. The process of separation into different roles that began when people first took up farming, and abandoned the egalitarian
hunter-gatherer lifestyle, has reached its logical conclusion.

That people in the developed world today generally have a specific job—lawyer or mechanic or doctor or bus driver—is a direct
consequence of food surpluses resulting from a continuous increase in the productivity of farming over the past few thousand
years. Another corollary of these burgeoning food surpluses was the division into rich and poor, powerful and weak. None of
these distinctions can be found within a hunter-gatherer band, the social structure that defined mankind for most of its existence.
Hunter-gatherers own few or no possessions, but that does not mean they are poor. Their “poverty” only becomes apparent when
they are compared with members of settled, agricultural societies who are in a position to accumulate goods. Wealth and poverty,
in other words, seem to be inevitable consequences of agriculture and its offspring, civilization.

Flying snakes, giant carnivorous birds, and fierce bat-like creatures were just some of the perils that awaited anyone who
tried to gather spices in the exotic lands where they grew, according to the historians of ancient Greece. Herodotus, the
Greek writer of the fifth century B.C. known as the “father of history,” explained that gathering cassia, a form of cinnamon,
involved donning a full-body suit made from the hides of oxen, covering everything but the eyes. Only then would the wearer
be protected from the “winged creatures like bats, which screech horribly and are very fierce . . . they have to be kept from
attacking the men’s eyes while they are cutting the cassia.”

Even stranger, Herodotus claimed, was the process of collecting cinnamon. “In what country it grows is quite unknown,” he
wrote. “The Arabians say that the dry sticks, which we call kinamomon, are brought to Arabia by large birds, which carry them
to their nests, made of mud, on mountain precipices which no man can climb. The method invented to get the cinnamon sticks
is this. People cut up the bodies of dead oxen into very large joints, and leave them on the ground near the nests. They then
scatter, and the birds fly down and carry off the meat to their nests, which are too weak to bear the weight and fall to the
ground. The men come and pick up the cinnamon. Acquired in this way, it is exported to other countries.”

Theophrastus, a Greek philosopher of the fourth century B.C., had a different story. Cinnamon, he had heard, grew in deep
glens, where it was guarded by deadly snakes. The only safe way to collect it was to wear protective gloves and shoes and,
having gathered it, to leave one third of the harvest behind as a gift to the sun, which would cause the offering to burst
into flames. Yet another tale told of the flying snakes that protected the frankincense-bearing trees. According to Herodotus,
the snakes could be driven off by spice harvesters only by smoking them out with burning storax, an aromatic resin, to produce
clouds of incense.

Writing in the first century A.D., Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer, rolled his eyes at such stories. “Those old tales,” he
declared, “were invented by the Arabs to raise the price of their goods.” He might have added that the tall stories told about
spices also served to obscure their origins from European buyers. Frankincense came from Arabia, but cinnamon did not: Its
origins lay much farther afield, in southern India and Sri Lanka, from where it was shipped across the Indian Ocean, along
with pepper and other spices. But the Arab traders who then carried these imported products, together with their own local
aromatics, across the desert to the Mediterranean in camel caravans preferred to keep the true origins of their unusual wares
shrouded in mystery.

It worked brilliantly. The Arab traders’ customers around the Mediterranean were prepared to pay extraordinary sums for spices,
largely as a result of their exotic connotations and mysterious origins. There is nothing inherently valuable about spices,
which are mainly plant extracts derived from dried saps, gums, and resins; barks; roots; seeds; and dried fruits. But they
were prized for their unusual scents and tastes, which are in many cases defensive mechanisms to ward off insects or vermin.
Moreover, spices are nutritionally superfluous. What they have in common is that they are durable, lightweight, and hard to
obtain, and are only found in specific places. These factors made them ideal for long-distance trade—and the farther they
were carried, the more sought-after, exotic, and expensive they became.

So spices were, by definition, expensive imported goods. This was a further component of their appeal. The conspicuous consumption
of spices was a way to demonstrate one’s wealth, power, and generosity. Spices were presented as gifts, bequeathed in wills
along with other valuable items, and even used as currency in some cases. In Europe the Greeks seem to have pioneered the
culinary use of spices, which were originally used in incense and perfume, and (as with so many other things) the Romans borrowed,
extended, and popularized this Greek idea. The cookbook of Apicius, a compilation of 478 Roman recipes, called for generous
quantities of foreign spices, including pepper, ginger, putchuk (costus), malabathrum, spikenard, and turmeric, in such recipes
as spiced ostrich. By the Middle Ages food was being liberally smothered in spices. In medieval cookbooks spices appear in
at least half of all recipes, sometimes three quarters. Meat and fish were served with richly spiced sauces including various
combinations of cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper, and mace. With their richly spiced food, the wealthy literally had expensive
tastes.

This enthusiasm for spices is sometimes attributed to their use in masking the taste of rotten meat, given the supposed difficulty
of preserving meat for long periods. But using spices in this way would have been a very odd thing to do, given their expense.
Anyone who could afford spices could certainly have afforded good meat; the spices were the more expensive ingredient by far.
And there are many recorded medieval examples of merchants who were punished for selling bad meat, which rather undermines
the notion that meat was invariably putrid and rotten, and suggests that spoiled meat was the exception rather than the rule.
The origin of the surprisingly persistent myth about spices and bad meat may lie in the use of spices to conceal the saltiness
of meat that had been preserved by the widespread practice of salting.

Spices were certainly regarded as antidotes to earthly squalor in another, more mystical sense. They were thought to be splinters
of paradise that had found their way into the ordinary world. Ginger and cinnamon were said by some ancient authorities to
be hauled from the Nile in nets, having washed down the river from Paradise (or the Garden of Eden, according to later Christian
writers), where exotic plants grew in abundance. They provided an otherworldly taste of paradise amid the sordid reality of
earthly existence. Hence the religious use of incense, to provide the scent of the heavenly realm, and the practice of offering
spices to the gods as burnt offerings. Spices were also used to embalm the dead and prepare them for the afterlife. The mythical
phoenix was even said by one Roman writer to make her nest from—what else?—a selection of spices. “She collects the spices
and aromas that the Assyrian gathers, and the rich Arab; those that are harvested by Pygmy peoples and by India, and that
grow in the soft bosom of the Sabaean land. She collects cinnamon, the perfume of far-wafting amomum, balsams mixed with tejpat
leaves; there is also a slip of gentle cassia and gum arabic, and the rich teardrops of frankincense. She adds the tender
spikes of downy nard and the power of Panchaea’s myrrh.”

The appeal of spices, then, arose from a combination of their mysterious and distant origins, their resulting high prices
and value as status symbols, and their mystical and religious connotations—in addition, of course, to their smell and taste.
The ancient fascination with spices may seem arbitrary and strange today, but its intensity cannot be underestimated. The
pursuit of spices is the third way in which food remade the world, both by helping to illuminate its full extent and geography,
and by motivating European explorers to seek direct access to the Indies, in the course of which they established rival trading
empires. Examining the spice trade from a European perspective might seem strange, given that Eu rope occupied only a peripheral
position and a minor role in the trade in ancient times. But this served to heighten the mystery and the appeal of spices
to Europeans in particular, ultimately prompting them to uncover the true origins of these strangely appealing dried roots,
shriveled berries, desiccated twigs, slivers of bark, and sticky bits of gum—with momentous consequences for the course of
human history.

When a ship was found stranded on the shores of the Red Sea, around 120 B.C., there appeared at first to be no survivors.
Everyone on board had starved to death—except, it turned out, for one man, and he was only barely alive. He was given food
and water and taken to the Egyptian court in Alexandria where he was presented to King Ptolemy VIII (known as Physcon, or
“potbelly,” because of his girth). But nobody could understand what the foreign sailor was saying, so the king sent him away
to learn some Greek, the official language of Egypt at the time. Not long afterward the sailor returned to the court to tell
his story. He explained that he was from India and that his ship had gone off course on its way across the ocean, and had
ended up drifting in the Red Sea.

Since the only sea route to India known in Egypt at the time involved hugging the coast of the Arabian peninsula—something
Alexandrian sailors were forbidden to do by Arab merchants who wanted to keep the profitable trade with India to themselves—the
sailor’s reference to a fast, direct route across the open ocean to India was met with disbelief. To prove that he was telling
the truth, and no doubt to secure a passage home for himself, the sailor offered to act as the guide for an expedition to
India. The king agreed and appointed as its leader one of his trusted advisers, a Greek named Eudoxus who was known for his
interest in geography. Eudoxus duly sailed away and returned many months later with a cargo of spices and jewels from India,
all of which the king confiscated for himself. Eudoxus later made a second trip to India at the behest of Ptolemy VIII’s wife
and successor, Cleopatra III. Inspired by the wreckage of what appeared to be a Spanish ship on the east African coast of
Ethiopia, he then became obsessed with the idea that it was possible to sail right around Africa. He sailed along the north
coast of Africa and headed into the Atlantic to attempt the circumnavigation, but he was never heard from again.

That, at least, is the story related by Strabo, a Greek philosopher who wrote a treatise on geography in the early first century
A.D. Strabo himself was skeptical of the tale: Why did the Indian sailor survive, when his shipmates did not? How did he learn
Greek so quickly? Yet the story is plausible, because direct sea trade between the Red Sea and the west coast of India really
did open up during the first century B.C., just after the shipwrecked Indian is supposed to have appeared in Alexandria. Until
this time only Arab and Indian sailors had known the secret of the seasonal trade winds, which allowed fast, regular passage
across the ocean between the Arabian peninsula and the west coast of India. These winds blow from the southwest between June
and August to carry ships eastward, and then from the northeast between November and January to carry them westward again.
Knowledge of the winds, and Arab control of the overland routes across the Arabian peninsula, gave Indian and Arab merchants
a firm grip on the trade between India and the Red Sea. They sold spices and other oriental goods to Alexandrian merchants
in markets around the southwestern tip of Arabia. These goods were then shipped up the Red Sea, over land to the Nile, and
finally up the Nile to Alexandria itself.

Following in Eudoxus’s wake, however, Alexandrian sailors learned how to exploit the trade winds—the details are said to have
been worked out by a Greek named Hippalos, after whom the southwesterly wind was named—and were then able to bypass the Arabian
markets and sail directly across the ocean to India’s west coast, cutting out the Arab and Indian middlemen. The volume of
shipping increased as Roman traders gained direct access to the Red Sea following Egypt’s annexation by Rome in 30 B.C. Roman
control of trade between the Red Sea and India was cemented under the emperor Augustus, who ordered attacks on the ports of
southern Arabia, reducing Aden, the main market city, to “a mere village” according to one observer. By the early first century
A.D. as many as 120 Roman ships a year were sailing to India to buy spices, including black pepper, costus, and nard—along
with gems, Chinese silk, and exotic animals for slaughter in the Roman world’s many arenas. For the first time Eu rope ans
had become direct participants in the thriving trade network of the Indian Ocean, the hub of global commerce at the time.