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Ancient food are absurdly complicated.
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A lot of fermented stuff like bread, cheese, wine and beer most likely started as "stuff forgotten in a pot" - not very complicated. In case of bread you need: two stones for milling the grain, a pot to mix it with water and store it, and then a fire to bake it. Not medieval tech, but way earlier.
Beer has been known since at least the bronze age, there are recipes known today, but the initial stage was, yet again, mill some grain, mix with water, forget in a pot.
Wine: forget some fruit in a pot.
Source: Reading history, plus my ADHD brain keeps forgetting stuff in the kitchen. I accidentally invented soda one of these days, because sometimes the forgotten stuff gets fizzy, too (you do need to invent the hermetically closing jar for that though, open clay pot doesn't work in that case)!
Btw one of my crazier theories (although I'm not the only person considering it) is that it wasn't us domesticating the world, but that we were domesticated by yeast. So it was inevitable that we kept producing vessels and feeding the fungus with sugar in ever more refined ways. Fungus wants to grow.
I always heard it was wheat that domesticated us
It was probably a range of plants and fungi seeking interaction with a species that could care for them and bring them to new places. Maybe wheat and yeast ganged up to control the apes? However the first plant humans propagated were fig trees, and apparently the first plant we grew in a gardening context was the bottle gourd (pot to ferment stuff in!) Maybe we find out one day which of those fuckers are responsible for us having credit scores and 9-5 now!!