SubscribeFood Timeline
Here is an interesting Food Timeline. It shows approximately when certain foods were introduced into the human diet. It is necessarily imprecise, but gives some context to the foods we eat. For those wondering, Oreos were introduced in 1912.
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Filed in Fruits, Vegetables, & Herbs 2 Comments so far
Anna on 26 Jun 2007 at 11:31 am #
Wow! Scott, how did you find this? What a treasure. I’ve been reading up on various food histories, but it was getting hard to keep everything sorted in my head. This is a great one-stop resource.
This supports a couple of notions that I have had for a while. One, we hear that we should be eating the food our grandparents ate. Well, my grand mother was born in 1919, and while her diet on their farm included lots of unprocessed foods, industrial foods already had foot in the door of many American households by the 20th century. From the timeline, one can clearly see that industrial processing was making headway early in the 19th century (in fact the Napoleonic Wars and the US Civil War were factors that pushed new food preservation technologies. So my goal is to eat more like the era of my great-great grandparents, or even earlier. Note I say the era of, rather than just what they ate, because the local foods in my neck of So California are quite different from the local foods of 17th and 18th century Central Western Pennasylvania. But since Mediterranean foods grow so well here, they are even older foods for humans.
I also noted the late date of the adoption of soy for human consumption. I have read about that in The Whole Soy Story, too, but this timeline really puts in it perspective. Soy has such a great PR machine. People have been convinced that it is so *ancient*, but it really is rather recent. Plus, most Americans do not even consume soy in its healthiest forms, traditionally fermented. Rather, they consume fractionated isolates, industrially brewed and processed soy, losing most of the benefits of soy and gaining all of the problems it causes.
I’m really glad you posted this timeline. I can see that I’ll have lots of fun taking a closer look through it.
Scott Kustes on 27 Jun 2007 at 6:38 am #
Hey Anna,
Nice point about the soy industry. Soy was in use long before it was considered a food by the ancient Chinese. They originally used it to fix nitrogen in the soil between food crops…it was a rotational crop. It wasn’t until they figured out that fermenting it took care of all of the nasties that they started to eat it. Like you said, the soy dogs and burgers, tofu, soy protein isolates, etc are extruded, precipitated, and fractionated. None of our modern processing takes care of the goitrogens, phytoestrogens, protease inhibitors, phytates, or overabundance of aluminum and manganese. What is really sad is giving soy formula to a baby…their delicate systems can’t handle the phytoestrogens or heavy metals.
Glad you enjoyed the timeline. There is alot of good reading there, 90% of which I haven’t had the time to get to.
Cheers
Scott