A
Movable
Feast
This book, based largely on The Cambridge World History of Food, provides a look
at the globalization of food from the days of the hunter-gatherers to present-day
genetically modifi ed plants and animals. The establishment of agriculture and the
domestication of animals in Eurasia, Africa, the Pacifi c, and the Americas are all
treated in some detail along with the subsequent diffusion of farming cultures
through the activities of monks, missionaries, migrants, imperialists, explorers, traders,
and raiders.
Much attention is given to the “Columbian Exchange” of plants and animals that
brought revolutionary demographic change to every corner of the planet and led
ultimately to the European occupation of Australia and New Zealand as well as the
rest of Oceania.
Final chapters deal with the impact of industrialization on food production, pro-
cessing, and distribution, and modern-day food-related problems ranging from famine
to obesity to genetically modifi ed food to fast food.
Kenneth F. Kiple did his undergraduate work at the University of South Florida, and
earned a PhD in Latin American History and a PhD certifi cate in Latin American
Studies at the University of Florida. He has taught at Bowling Green State University
since 1970 and became a Distinguished University Professor in 1994. His research
interests have included biological history applied to the slave trade and slavery, the
history of disease, and more recently, food and nutrition. He is the author of approxi-
mately fi fty articles and chapters, and three monographs, and the editor of fi ve
volumes including The Cambridge World History of Disease and (with K. C. Ornelas)
The Cambridge World History of Food, in two volumes.
Professor Kiple has been a Guggenheim Fellow and has received numerous other
grants and fellowships from organizations such as the National Institutes of Health,
the National Library of Medicine, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Tools
Division (and two other National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships), the

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vii
Contents
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xv
INTRODUCTION : FROM FORAGING TO FARMING . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Ch. 1: LAST HUNTERS, FIRST FARMERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Ch. 2: BUILDING THE BARNYARD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Dog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Sheep and Goats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Pig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Cattle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Horse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Camel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Water Buffalo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Yak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Caribou . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Pigeon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Chicken. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Duck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Goose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

African Viands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Egypt and North Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
South of the Sahara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
viii
Contents
European Edibles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Ch. 6: CONSEQUENCES OF THE NEOLITHIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Social and Cultural Consequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Ecological Consequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Health and Demographic Consequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Food Processing and Preservation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Ch. 7: ENTERPRISE AND EMPIRES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
Pre-Roman Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
The Roman Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Ch. 8: FAITH AND FOODSTUFFS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Islam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Christianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Buddhism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Ch. 9: EMPIRES IN THE RUBBLE OF ROME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Ch. 10: MEDIEVAL PROGRESS AND POVERTY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Ch. 11: SPAIN’S NEW WORLD, THE NORTHERN
HEMISPHERE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Mesoamerica and North America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
Ch. 12: NEW WORLD, NEW FOODS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Ch. 13: NEW FOODS IN THE SOUTHERN NEW WORLD . . . . . . 127
Ch. 14: THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE
AND THE OLD WORLDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Africa and the East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144

Ch. 21: HOMEMADE FOOD HOMOGENEITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
Restaurants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
Prepared Foods, Frozen Foods, Fast Foods,
and Supermarkets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
Ch. 22: NOTIONS OF NUTRIENTS AND NUTRIMENTS . . . . . . . 238
Thiamine and Beriberi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
Vitamin C and Scurvy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
x
Contents
Niacin and Pellagra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
Vitamin D, Rickets, and Other Bone Maladies . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
Iodine and Goiter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
Other Vitamins, Minerals, and Conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Ch. 23: THE PERILS OF PLENTY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
Ch. 24: THE GLOBALIZATION OF PLENTY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Ch. 25: FAST FOOD, A HYMN TO CELLULITE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
Ch. 26: PARLOUS PLENTY INTO THE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
Ch. 27: PEOPLE AND PLENTY IN THE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
Notes 307
Index 353
Contents
xi

xiii
Preface
An ungainly term, globalization often suggests a troubling deter-
minism, a juggernaut that destroys rain forests, while multinational
agribusinesses plow under family farms and capitalism forces peasants

slugged it out with the police. Most protesters view globalization as bristling
with threats to the environment; many also feel that it is a menace to cul-
tural integrity, even to state sovereignty, and some express the concern that
globalization will promote even greater inequality among the world’s peo-
ples. Their opponents point out that a global community is preferable to the
nationalism (and some of its component parts such as ethnocentrism and
racism) that has occupied the world’s stage (often disastrously) throughout
the past half millennium and that poor countries, which have changed their
policies to exploit globalization, have benefi ted most from it.
6
Many of globalization’s perplexities are evident in the history of foods
and food ways. Some are obvious. Culture, for example, always a tough
opponent of globalization, is defended whenever people defend their cui-
sine. On a biological level the people of developing countries require an
adequate supply of the right kinds of foods for the creation and mainte-
nance of healthy and productive populations. But in between these cul-
tural and biological poles lies the murky political and economic question
of what happens to those who resist the forces of globalization.
In the case of food, can or will a global community make enough food
available to those holdouts who, for cultural or biological reasons, do not buy
into the existing technologies? Today, for example, we have starving coun-
tries that refuse aid because that aid is in the form of genetically modifi ed
(GM) foods. And they refuse to sidestep future crises by planting geneti-
cally modifi ed rice or maize or millets even though such GM crops not only
deliver substantially higher yields than unmodifi ed counterparts but are
resistant to pests, weeds, and droughts, and consequently to famine.
Other big questions are “when did globalization begin” and “where and
how will it end?”
7
In terms of food globalization, our answers are thank-

the hope that new scholarship will add fresh insights to the narrative. Free-
dom to do this reading and research came from funding supplied by the
National Institutes of Health in the form of a National Library of Medi-
cine Grant for the years 1998–99; the Institute for the Study of Culture
and Society, where I spent the spring semester of 2001 as a Scholar in
Residence; and a Bowling Green State University Faculty Research Leave
during the autumn of that year.
This book has also benefi ted from another project – our ongoing ency-
clopedic effort to provide historical entries for every important food on the
planet. While I was writing this book, that work has proceeded under the
direction of Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas with the help of Steve Beck, who
spent a summer researching and writing animal and fi sh entries. I am grate-
ful to Coneè as well for the countless hours that she labored on this effort,
catching errors, making corrections, and offering suggestions. She refused
co-authorship, so the least I can do is dedicate the book to her. Finally the
students in my Globalization of Food Seminar have been assiduous, if not
relentless, in locating new data and shaping new perspectives.
Publicity to introduce The Cambridge World History of Food began in the
fall of 2000 in New York with a reception and press conference hosted by
Gourmet magazine. A nomination for the Kitchen Aid Best Book and a
Writing and Reference Award from the James Beard Foundation followed; the
books were listed as one of the “Outstanding Reference Sources for Small
and Medium-Sized Libraries,” and named one of the top 100 food events
of the year 2000 by Saveur magazine. At Bowling Green State University,
Teri Sharp, Director of Public Relations, was instrumental in working with
Cambridge to arrange these events, along with scheduling (what seemed to
be) scores of telephone and television interviews. We are grateful as well to
Kathie Smith, Food Editor of the Toledo Blade, for a lovely spread on the
culinary possibilities of the project and how the books came to be.
Vivian (Vicky) Patraka, director of the Institute for the Study of Cul-

species in an evolutionary journey to the top of the food chain.
The pages that follow look at the thousands of years of food fi nding and
food producing that have carried us to the brink of food globalization – the
latter a process of homogenization whereby the cuisines of the world have
been increasingly untied from regional food production, and one that prom-
ises to make the foods of the world available to everyone in the world. Food
globalization has grabbed headlines as cultures have circled wagons against
the imperialism of multinational companies such as McDonald’s and Coca
Cola. But such standardized food production in which “McDonaldization”
has become synonymous with food globalization is a distortion of the con-
cept that has been going on for some 10,000 years since humans fi rst began
to control the reproduction of plants and animals;
1
since the fi rst wild rye
2
A Movable Feast
was brought under cultivation in one place, wheat in another, and maize in
another; since the jungle fowl of southeast Asia was transformed into the
chicken of Europe and the wild boar, fi rst domesticated in the eastern Medi-
terranean, became the pig during its long eastward dispersal (with many
more domestications) toward Indonesia, before sailing off with the human
pioneers who spread out across the Pacifi c.
2
Yet food globalization means much more than simply food diffusion.
Animal and plant domestication fostered sedentism, and sedentism in turn
nurtured deadly diseases that became globalized. It also caused popula-
tions to swell, inviting famine to shrink them again and impelling humans
further and further afi eld to occupy less desirable portions of the world’s
surface. Out of sedentism sprang organized religion, and religious wars;
states, and wars between them; nationalism, trade, and wars for empire, all

that if population growth can be curtailed. However its most apparent
short-run impact, ironically, has been to encourage population explosions
in the “revolutionized” countries so that every one of them is an importer
of the staple foods they had expected to produce in abundance.
7
These are but a few illustrations of the unintended consequences of new
technologies on the food front. Countless others can be found in recorded
history and doubtless many more took place in a prehistory that we know
little about. As of today, humans have spent less than one-tenth of one per-
cent of their time on earth as sedentary agriculturalists and, consequently,
much less than one-tenth of one percent of that time in the light of recorded
history – which brings up a third theme.
For 99.9 percent of humankind’s stay on the planet (and around 90
percent of that of Homo sapiens) our ancestors made a living by hunting
and gathering, which means that millions of years of our food and nutri-
tional history will forever remain obscure (recent molecular phylogeny
indicates that the hominid species split from the ancestral chimpanzee
line between 6 million and 8 million years ago). Nonetheless, it makes con-
siderable sense that it was during those millions of years and not the past
10,000 that most of our nutritional requirements were shaped – shaped
even before Homo sapiens emerged as the sole survivor of a succession of
several dozen hominid models launched on, as it turned out, unsuccessful
evolutionary journeys.
8
There are numerous methods employed by bio-anthropological inves-
tigators to determine the diet (the foods consumed) and the nutritional
status (how those foods were utilized) of our ancient forebears.
9
Plants
and animal remains unearthed in archaeological sites across the globe,

For example, rickets (caused by vitamin D defi ciency) and scurvy (occa-
sioned by vitamin C defi ciency) are diseases documented in literary and
archival sources from Greek and Roman times onward but there is lit-
tle evidence of such ailments in prehistoric populations.
14
Or again, the
incidence of anemia increased steadily from Neolithic times through the
Bronze Age so that the lesions of porotic hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia
(a pitting and expansion of cranial bones that are signals of iron defi ciency
anemia) found in the skeletal remains of Fertile Crescent farmers living
from 6500 to 2000
BCE
indicate that about half of them were anemic.
15
By
contrast, only 2 percent of the skeletal remains of hunter-gatherers dating
from 15,000–8000
BCE
) show evidence of anemia, which seems testimony
to an iron-rich meat diet.
16
In addition hunter-gatherers had far fewer dental
caries, knobby joints, and abscesses. And fi nally, as a rule, hunter-gatherers
were signifi cantly taller than the village agrarians who followed them, indi-
cating a much better intake of whole protein.
17
In fact, among some foraging groups meat may have constituted as much
as 80 percent of the diet and for most it was at least 50 percent – but this
was an intake that decreased precipitously after foragers became farmers.
18

among the few animals to enjoy an abundance of the vitamin.
But abundance was a relative state of affairs. The feast part of “feast or
famine,” and certainly the famine part – hunger and its appeasement – were
the forces that propelled hunter-gatherers from their early days of mostly
gathering and scavenging throughout the world in pursuit of an increasingly
carnivorous diet. However, during their long and arduous trek to reach
the various parts of the globe and the process of adapting to them, natural
selection planted the seeds of some of humankind’s modern health diffi -
culties. Energy was stored as fat against seasonally decreased food intakes,
and those who stored fat effi ciently survived during bad times, whereas
others did not.
22
The trouble is that our bodies are genetically programmed
to store calories against lean times that nowadays (at least for affl uent
populations) never come. Lifestyles have become increasingly sedentary
but our diets are more energy-packed, with less fi ber and more refi ned car-
bohydrates.
23
As a consequence, the “thrifty mechanisms” of carbohydrate
metabolism that saved our forebears now curse us with obesity, diabetes,
and heart problems.
And fi nally, it was during the last 200,000 years that Homo sapiens – the
wise man – appeared on earth with a brain as large as our own. Evolution
had transformed him from a scavenging and gathering, ape-like australo-
pithecine to a fully modern human being – the large brain facilitating the
exploitation of a wide range of food sources and the colonization of mar-
ginal environments. However, an enhanced brain size was metabolically
expensive, accounting for only 3 percent of the adult body weight but
demanding around 20 percent of its energy. Calorie-dense meat, shellfi sh,
Introduction

enged carcasses – other animals’ leftovers. But by the time we became
Homo sapiens – Our Kind – which happened in eastern Africa some 100,000
years ago, we were hunters, not scavengers – opportunistic hunters who
apparently became so good at it that those ancestors put a considerable dent
in their food supply. Around 80,000 years ago they began to radiate out of
northeast Africa to western Asia, where they once again encountered plenty
of protein on the hoof, and in this larger world they mustered the momen-
tum to out-compete all others of the genus Homo that had preceded them.
This was the modern human species, which began colonizing Australia
around 50,000 years ago, moved from the Asian steppes into Europe from
around 40,000 years ago, and into the Americas 15,000 to 30,000 years
ago. And it was in these wanderings that the progressively larger brains of
humans gave birth to progressively better tools and weapons and increas-
ing social organization.
8
A Movable Feast
There is evidence of specialized hunting strategies by 20,000 years
ago that allowed our big-brained ancestors to consistently bag really big
game. In the middle latitudes of Eurasia large gregarious herbivores such as
horses, wooly mammoths, reindeer, and bison were victims of these strate-
gies. Elsewhere the prey consisted of buffalo, wild pig, aurochs, and camel.
Large animal carcasses had numerous advantages over plant foods. A day
of foraging for plants produced the food value of just one small animal,
whereas by eating animals humans took in a highly concentrated food that
contained all the essential amino acids. Moreover one large animal could
feed an entire band, and food sharing seems to have been the norm for
hunter-gatherers.
1
Others of Our Kind made a living from the water. Ancient rock art
the world over depicts fi sh, although it is relatively silent about how they