"Food timeline" redirects here. Not to be confused with The Food Timeline.
Prehistoric times
5-2 million years ago: Hominids shift away from the consumption of nuts and berries to begin the consumption of meat.[1][2]
2.5-1.8 million years ago: The discovery of the use of fire may have created a sense of sharing as a group. Earliest estimate for invention of cooking, by phylogenetic analysis.[3]
250,000 years ago: Hearths appear, accepted archeological estimate for invention of cooking chicken.[4]
170,000 years ago: Cooked starchy roots and tubers in Africa[5][6]
40,000 years ago: First evidence of human fish consumption: isotopic analysis of the skeletal remains of Tianyuan man, a modern human from eastern Asia, has shown that he regularly consumed freshwater fish.[7][8]
25,000 years ago: The fish-gorge, a kind of fish hook, appears.[10]
13,000 BCE: Contentious evidence of oldest domesticated rice in Korea.[11] Their 15,000-year age challenges the accepted view that rice cultivation originated in China about 12,000 years ago.[11] These findings were received by academia with strong skepticism,[12] and the results and their publicizing has been cited as being driven by a combination of nationalist and regional interests.[13]
12,500 BCE: The oldest evidence of bread-making, found in a Natufian site in Jordan's northeastern desert.[14][15]
~7000 BCE: Farmers in China began to farm rice and millet, using man-made floods and fires as part of their cultivation regimen.[17]
~7000 BCE: Maize-like plants, derived from the wild teosinte, began to be seen in Mexico.[17]
~7000 BCE: Chinese villagers were brewing fermented alcoholic drinks on small and individual scale, with the production process and methods similar to that of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.[22]
~7000 BCE: Sheep, originating from western Asia, were domesticated with the help of dogs prior to the establishment of settled agriculture,[23]
~5000 BCE: Beans begin to be cultivated in the Americas [30]
~5000 BCE: Fossilized remains of possibly cultivated potato tubers on a cave floor in Chilca Canyon.[20]
4000-2000 BCE
Earliest archaeological evidence for leavened bread is from ancient Egypt. The extent to which bread was leavened in ancient Egypt remains uncertain.[31]
4500-3500 BCE: Earliest clear evidence of olive domestication and olive oil extraction[32]
~4000 BCE: Watermelon, originally domesticated in central Africa, becomes an important crop in northern Africa and southwestern Asia.[33]
~4000 BCE: Agriculture reaches north-eastern Europe.
~3900 BCE: In Mesopotamia (Ancient Iraq), early evidence of beer is a Sumerian poem honoring Ninkasi, the patron goddess of brewing, which contains the oldest surviving beer recipe, describing the production of beer from barley via bread.[36]
~3600 BCE: Date of the oldest definitive known evidence for popcorn, discovered in New Mexico, United States. It is attributed to the Ancestral Puebloan peoples, who maintained trade networks with peoples in tropical Mexico.[37][38]
~3000 BCE: Archaeological evidence of watermelon cultivation in ancient Egypt. Watermelons appeared on wall paintings; seeds and leaves were deposited in tombs.[33]
~2500 BCE: Domestic pigs, which are descended from wild boars, are known to have existed about 2500 BC in modern-day Hungary and in Troy; earlier pottery from Jericho and Egypt depicts wild pigs.[23]: 8
~2500 BCE: Pearl millet was domesticated in the Sahel region of West Africa, evidence for the cultivation of pearl millet in Mali.[44]
2500-1500 BCE: Time range of several sites with archaeological evidence of potato being consumed and cultivated in the South American continent.[20]
2000-1500 BCE: Rice cultivation in the upper and middle Ganges begins.[25]
327-324 BCE: Alexander the Great expedition to India brings the knowledge of rice to Romans. However rice did not enter as a cultivation: the Romans preferred to import rice wine instead.[25]
610: Possible invention of the pretzel. According to some narratives in 610 AD "... [a]n Italian monk invents pretzels as a reward to children who learn their prayers. He calls the strips of baked dough, folded to resemble arms crossing the chest, 'pretiola' ('little reward[s]')".[54][55][56][57][58]
8th century: The original type of sushi, known today as narezushi (馴れ寿司, 熟寿司), first developed in Southeast Asia and spread to south China, is introduced to Japan.[59][60]
8th century: Chronicles from monasteries mention Roquefort being transported across the Alps[61]
~800: Cod becomes an important economic commodity in international markets. This market has lasted for more than 1,000 years, enduring the Black Death, wars and other crises, and is still an important Norwegian fish trade.[62]
879: Gorgonzola cheese is mentioned for the first time.[61]
961: Watermelons, introduced by the Moorish, reported to be cultivated in Cordoba, Spain.[33]
997: The term "pizza" first appears "in a Latin text from the southern Italian town of Gaeta [...], which claims that a tenant of certain property is to give the bishop of Gaeta 'duodecim pizze' ['twelve pizzas'] every Christmas Day, and another twelve every Easter Sunday".[64][65]
1000-1500
11th-14th century: Ireland stores and ages butter in peat bogs, being known as bog butter. The practice is effectively ended by the 19th century.[66]
1516: William IV, Duke of Bavaria, adopted the Reinheitsgebot (purity law), perhaps the oldest food-quality regulation still in use in the 21st century, according to which the only allowed ingredients of beer are water, hops and barley-malt.[70]
1521: Spanish conquistadorHernán Cortés may have been the first to transfer a small yellow tomato to Europe after he captured the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City.[50]
1544: The earliest discussion of the tomato in European literature appeared in a herbal written in 1544 by Pietro Andrea Mattioli, an Italian physician and botanist.[50]
1548: First recorded instance of tomatoes in Italy: on October 31, the house steward of Cosimo de' Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany, wrote to the Medici private secretary informing him that the basket of tomatoes sent from the grand duke's Florentine estate at Torre del Gallo "had arrived safely".[72]
~1550: First mention of cucumbers cultivation in North America.[33]
~1570: First potato specimens probably reach Spain.[20]
1573: Potatoes are purchased by the Hospital de la Sangre in Seville.[20]
1576: Watermelons cultivated in Florida by Spanish settlers.[33]
1578: Sir Francis Drake meets potatoes in his trip around the world. However he does not bring potatoes back to Great Britain, despite common misconception.[20]
1596: Caspar Bauhin, Swiss botanist, first describes potato scientifically in his Phytopinax, assigning it the current binomial nameSolanum tuberosum. However he conjectured potatoes could cause wind and leprosy (because of a vague resemblance to leprous organs) and that they were aphrodisiac.[20]
Before 17th century: Watermelon appears in herbals in mainland Europe, outside Spain. It also begins to spread among Native American populations.[33]
1692: The earliest discovered cookbook with tomato recipes was published in Naples.[50]: 17
18th century
18th century: Soufflé appears in France. Cakes and pastries also begin to appear, thanks to the increasing availability of sugar and the rising of the chef profession.[74]
Early 1800s: West African farmers began to export palm oil.[40]
1800s: New potato varieties are brought from Chile to Europe, in an attempt to widen disease resistance of European potatoes. The import could have instead introduced or heightened vulnerability to the fungus Phytophthora infestans.[20]
1802 The first modern production process for dried milk was invented by the Russian physician Osip Krichevsky in 1802. The first commercial production of dried milk was organized by the Russian chemist M. Dirchoff in 1832. In 1855, T.S. Grimwade took a patent on a dried milk procedure, though a William Newton had patented a vacuum drying process as early as 1837.
1841: Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old slave who lived on the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, discovered that vanilla could be hand-pollinated. Hand-pollination allowed global cultivation of the plant.[82]
1964: The iconic Australian biscuit Tim Tam enters the market.[95][96]
21st century
2013: Professor Mark Post at Maastricht University pioneered a proof-of-concept for cultured meat by creating the first hamburger patty grown directly from cells. Since then, other cultured meat prototypes have gained media attention: SuperMeat opened a farm-to-fork restaurant called "The Chicken"[97]
^Kim, Minkoo (2008). Habu, Junko; Fawcett, Clare; Matsunaga, John M. (eds.). Evaluating multiple narratives: Beyond nationalist, colonialist, imperialist archaeologies. New York: Springer. p. 128. ISBN 978-0-387-76459-7. Most scholars were highly skeptical of Lee's report [...] Most specialists agree that rice is not indigenous to the Korean peninsula. The conventional perspective in East Asian archaeology is that rice cultivation started along the banks of the Yangtze River in southern China and subsequently moved northward.
^Kim, Minkoo (2008). "Multivocality, Multifaceted Voices, and Korean Archaeology". Evaluating Multiple Narratives: Beyond Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist Archaeologies. New York: Springer. p. 118. ISBN 978-0-387-76459-7.
^Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, Lara Gonzalez Carretero, Monica N. Ramsey, Dorian Q. Fuller, and Tobias Richter: Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 years ago in northeastern Jordan. PNAS, 11 July 2018 (onlineArchived 19 October 2018 at the Wayback Machine)
^McGovern PE, Zhang JZ, Tang JG et al. C (2004) Fermented beverages of pre- and proto-historic China. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 101, 17593–17598.
^ abcdLawrie, R. A.; Ledward, D. A. (2006). Lawrie's meat science (7th ed.). Cambridge: Woodhead Publishing Limited. ISBN 978-1-84569-159-2.
^ abcdefghi"Rice". The Cambridge World History of Food. Retrieved 4 July 2013.
^Zohar, I.; Dayan, T.; Galili, E.; Spanier, E. (2001). "Fish Processing During the Early Holocene: A Taphonomic Case Study from Coastal Israel". Journal of Archaeological Science. 28 (10): 1041–1053. Bibcode:2001JArSc..28.1041Z. doi:10.1006/jasc.2000.0630.
^DK Jordan (November 24, 2012). "Beyond Wheat". The Neolithic. University of California – San Diego. Retrieved 2013-04-22.
^D. Samuel (2000). "Brewing and baking". Ancient Egyptian materials and technology. Eds: P.T. Nicholson & I. Shaw. (Cambridge: Cambridge University PressISBN 0-521-45257-0) p. 558.
^Joules L. Quiles (2006). Olive Oil and Health. CABI. pp. 1–. ISBN 978-1-84593-072-1. Retrieved 17 June 2013.
^Kindstedt, Paul (2012). Cheese and culture. Chelsea Green Publishing. p. 34. ISBN 978-1-60358-412-8. Retrieved 2013-04-14.
^Manning, Katie; Pelling, Ruth; Higham, Tom; Schwenniger, Jean-Luc; Fuller, Dorian Q. (2011). "4500-Year old domesticated pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) from the Tilemsi Valley, Mali: new insights into an alternative cereal domestication pathway". Journal of Archaeological Science. 38 (2): 312–322. Bibcode:2011JArSc..38..312M. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2010.09.007.
^In NBC 11196 (5 NT 24, dated Shu-Sin 6), the 'abra's of Dumuzi, Ninkasi, and I'kur receive butter and cheese from the 'abra of Inanna, according to W.W. Hallo, "The House of Ur-Meme", Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 1972; a Sumerian/Akkadian bilingual lexicon of ca 1900 BCE lists twenty kinds of cheese.
^Terry G. Powis, W. Jeffrey Hurst, María del Carmen Rodríguez, Ponciano Ortíz C., Michael Blake, David Cheetham, Michael D. Coe & John G. Hodgson (December 2007). "Oldest chocolate in the New World". Antiquity. 81 (314). ISSN0003-598X. Retrieved 15 February 2011.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^Tannahill, Reay (1973). Food in History (Stein and Day.ISBN 0-8128-1437-1). p. 37, 61, 69.
^ abJames Grout. "Garum". Encyclopaedia Romana. University of Chicago. Retrieved 16 June 2013.
^What is the story behind the pretzel's special shape? The pretzel represents folded arms across the chest. In that way, it was common to pray during the Middle Ages. According to a story, it was an Italian monk who produced the special pastry in the 7th century. The monk wanted to reward his students with small pieces of bread shaped in the same way as the children's arms when they crossed them during prayer. The pastries were named "pretiolas" - "little rewards". (Translated from Swedish). https://varldenshistoria.se/kultur/gastronomi/varifran-har-kringlan-fatt-sin-form
^Rodger, N. A. M. (1994). The Insatiable Earl: A Life of John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich 1718–1792 (1st ed.). W W Norton & Co Inc. p. 480. ISBN 0-393-03587-5.
^Silver Cloud Estates. "History of Vanilla". Silver Cloud Estates. Retrieved 2008-07-23. In 1837 the Belgian botanist Morren succeeded in artificially pollinating the vanilla flower. On Reunion, Morren's process was attempted, but failed. It was not until 1841 that a 12-year-old slave by the name of Edmond Albius discovered the correct technique of hand-pollinating the flowers.
^Bly, Robert W. (2007). All-American Frank: A History of the Hot Dog (1st ed.). New York: PublishAmerica. ISBN 978-1-4137-5062-1.
^Pompeo Capella (1997). Manuale degli oli e grassi. Tecniche Nuove. pp. 10–. ISBN 978-88-7081-979-3. Retrieved 15 August 2013.
^Grigoroff, Stamen, 1905. Étude sur une lait fermentée comestible. Le “Kissélo mléko” de Bulgarie. Revue Médicale de la Suisse Romande. Genève. Georg&G., Libraires-Éditeurs. Librairie de L’Université.