Question: why do different religions/populations have different taste within in food culture/

Jennifer Bates answered on 6 Nov 2016:

Cool question, and sorry for the long answer, but it is my favourite topic, and I hope it gets you thinking, as the archaeology of food is really interesting. (Plus you get to make loads of ancient recipes to test them…)

Food is something every human has to get involved with everyday – we all have to eat. [We also all have to poop, but that is another topic entirely 😉 ]

But what we eat varies. And this is because a lot of different ideas underpin food culture. We don’t just eat what is put in front of us, a lot of decisions go into deciding what is food and what isn’t. If I were to put a plate of deep fried locusts in honey in front of you – would you eat it? It would depend a lot on your background as to whether you consider it as food or not (in many parts of the world honey fried locusts are a delicacy and I can confirm they are DELICIOUS!) One of the reasons for this is that we are not robots, we are not clones, we are human and as humans we are made of all the social relationships that surround us, that influence and make us social beings. And food is a reflection of this sociality. Food culture, the things that make food so different between groups across the world, are affected by a lot of factors, and as you have picked up on, religion is one of these. Other factors might include class, ethnicity, age, gender, nationality for example.

Let’s take religion though, as you’ve picked up on it, and go with a modern example to start with. As we’ve noticed above, food cultures will vary between groups as they are created based on different ideas about what is the correct thing to eat, what is acceptable as food, how to eat that food, and when to eat it, and religion can influence this greatly. For example, in some branches of Christianity it is considered good to eat fish but bad to eat meat on Friday based on the idea that Jesus was a fisher of men and on notions of sacrifice, and in Judaism pork is forbidden and food has to be prepared and stored in a certain way (kosher) linked into the teachings in the book of Leviticus. These practices are therefore linked with deeply held beliefs, and play out in practices that affect religious food culture on a day-to-day basis. Some practices are linked into specific events marked out in religious calenders, for example feasting and fasting, like Ramadan or Christmas.

We can then think about how food culture differences could be seen in the archaeological record. Differences between groups might be seen in terms of different animal bone remains between groups where a certain species was not found in a particular area of a site, which might suggest deliberate avoidance of that ‘food’ by a group within a settlement. Or a big pit full of unusually high concentrations of exotic or expensive food remains from one event could be found and we might suggest that represents a feasting event. All this evidence however would need to be linked with other data, like texts (when available – not always possible), or artefacts, and other ‘contexts’ (layers or events) to put it in a larger picture. Then you can start to ask questions such as ‘does food change over time and if so, why?’

The trick is working out what has influenced that food culture, and it is not always possible in archaeological sites to boil it down to one factor like religion or class or social group, but by getting the bigger context story we can try, and often you get some really cool results.

I’m working on material at the moment from South Asia about 5000-4000 years ago when the Indus Civilisation was expanding into new regions meeting new settlements on its borders and I’m trying to work out how those settlements interacted on a day-to-day basis with the Indus. And the best way to do that, I think, is by looking at food and how food culture changed (or didn’t) as they interacted.