Throughout most of history, most people never got enough to eat, and many people starved to death. Food costed more than it is today, and governments helped people out less than they do now. Even farmers often went hungry when city people took all their food for themselves as taxes, or if the weather was bad and storms or diseases ruined the crop. Children went hungry more than their parents, because if the parents died. Than children are going to have a higher chance of dieing instead of the other way around. When people could get food, the food people ate varied a good deal from time to time and from place to place.
So you’ll need to read about each time and place separately. There are some things all these times and places had in common, though. First, one reason food was so expensive was that there was no refrigeration or freezers. It was very hard to keep food from becoming bad or wasted. People did a lot of different things to preserve food. The most important thing was to store dried grain: wheat and barley and millet and rice and corn. They also dried fruit to make raisins,dried figs, dried beans, dried corn, and dried apples. They pickled, eggs and vegetables, meat, and fish in brine to make pickles and garum, a fermented fish sauce.
They fermented grape juice and apple juice and barley to turn them into wine and cider and beer. They made milk into yogurt and cheese. They smoked meat from pigs to make ham and bacon, and they preserved meat in honey. Second, because it was so hard to carry things from one place to another without canals or trains most people could only eat local food that was in the season. If there was a shortage of food because of natural disasters, diseases or because soldiers had wrecked the crops in a war, people would often times starve.
People in different places ate very different foods, and later changed to due the fact that other food were coming to different parts of the world. Central Asians brought pigs and cows and apples to West Asia around 7000 BC; dates first came from West Asia to Africa about 4000 BC. Wheat first reached China from West Asia about 2500 BC; chickens first reached West Asia from India about 1000 BC. Bananas reached Africa from India around 500 BC, and rice left India for West Asia and Europe a few hundred years later.
Central Asia and the rise of the Silk Road Between 500 BC and 1500 AD encouraged a lot more trading of food all acros More Central Asian Cinnamon and pepper began to reach Europe and China. Bee-keeping traveled from West Asia to China, and peaches, lemons, and oranges returned in the other direction. Sugar spread from India all over Asia and even as far as Europe and North Africa coffee and tea spread across Asia from Africa and China. When Europeans began sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas about 1500 AD, they brought sheep and pigs and chickens, wheat, beehives, sugar, and apples with them.
A little later, it was tea and coffee. From the Americas to Europe, they sailed back with potatoes, tomatoes, corn on the cob (maize), turkey, chili peppers, squash, chocolate, and avocados. They brought American sweet potatoes to China, which was the main food source for many chinese poor farmers and workers. sals The History Oranges The first wild ancestors of oranges and lemons were probably evolved in Australia and New Guinea, where the first people probably began eating them soon after they arrived there, about 30,000 BC.
As early as the Stone Age, people were eating citron fruits in China, too. Citron fruits may have reached China by floating in the ocean, or people on boats may have brought it. Citrons spread from the Pacific across Southeast Asia to India, too, and from China and India Citrons soon reached Central Asia, West Asia, and East Africa. Citron appears in an Egyptian tomb painting from 1000 BC. These citrons were not juicy, and people mainly ate the rind rather than the fruit, or used citron rind to make perfumes.
Indian doctors knew citrus could cure scurvy (Vitamin C deficiency), and so they tried it for a lot of other illnesses too. Citrons reached ancient Greece and Rome not much later; Theophrastus described the fruit in 310 BC. Those came from two other kinds of citrus fruit, cousins of the citron, called the pomelo and the mandarin. Either Chinese Or Indian food scientists bred the pomelo and the mandarin together sometime before 314 BC to get new fruits – the bitter orange and the sweet orange. Indian cooks used bitter orange to make pickled oranges. They called the trees naranga.
That’s where our word “orange” comes from. These oranges spread west along the Silk Road. The bitter orange (but not the sweet orange) reached West Asia by the time of Ibn Sina (who used it in a recipe), and then in the Middle Ages, the bitter orange reached Europe, where people used it to make marmalade, and North Africa: Albertus Magnus mentioned bitter oranges around 1250 AD. About 900 AD, shortly after they invented purple carrots, Islamic food scientists probably in Iran mixed bitter orange back with its citron cousin to make lemons (that’s a Persian word).
Lemons spread south to India, and they joined citrons in Africa. Saladin’s doctor, Maimonides, wrote about their medical uses in the 1100s, and after that people began to eat lemons in southern Europe and North Africa. Naturally Jewish people in Egypt combined lemons with another new food, sugar, to make lemonade. By 1450 AD, farmers began to grow lemons around Genoa, in Italy. Sweet oranges, on the other hand, were most likely grown only in India and China until near the end of the Middle Ages.
Islamic traders brought Indian sweet oranges to East Africa, and they eventually brought sweet oranges to Genoa. People were growing oranges as well as sugar in the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean before the end of the 1400s. But when Portuguese explorers began explore to India and China, they brought back better and other different oranges, and oranges became very stylish in Europe in the late 1500s. In northern Europe, where it was too cold for oranges, very rich people in the 1600s even built special glass greenhouses to grow oranges in.
Christopher Columbus brought both oranges and lemons – both new and trendy in Europe – to the Caribbean in 1493. Later Spanish settlers brought the fruit to Florida, to California, to Pueblo land, and to South America – especially Brazil – in the 1500s and 1600s AD. French settlers brought oranges to Louisiana. And when British settlers came to South Africa and Australia in the 1700s AD, they, too, brought oranges and lemons along, so the fruit made a full circle around the world and back to its original home.
But in northern places, where oranges and lemons wouldn’t grow, they were still special treats. Children sometimes got an orange in their stocking. Even in hot places, oranges were not a big thing. In the 1800s, all across Europe and Asia, the new train systems meant that for the first time people who lived in cold climates could eat southern oranges shipped north on trains. Trains brought oranges and lemons north to England, France, Germany, Poland, and Russia. After the Civil War, people built railroads in the United States, too. Oranges, lemons, and grapefruits