What is the oldest common food in the typical western diet?

j4k3@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 50 points –

Of the things available to most of us, what are common and the oldest things we might find on a store shelf?

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I'm not really confident about what qualifies as "common food" or "typical western diet", nor the accuracy of the following sources, but I feel like if someone's going to answer OP, they should have something to back it up.

Onions - 5,500 years ago
http://www.vegetablefacts.net/vegetable-history/history-of-onions/

There are two schools of thoughts regarding the home of onion cultivation, and both look at the period 5,500 years ago in Asia. Some scientists believe that onion was first domesticated in central Asia and others in Middle East by Babylonian culture in Iran and West Pakistan

Sugar - 6,000 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sugar

The extraction of sugar cane juice from the sugarcane plant, and the subsequent domestication of the plant in tropical India and Southeast Asia sometime around 4,000 BC.

Beans - 7,000 years ago
https://cablevey.com/history-of-dried-beans-how-it-all-started/

Examining the origins of the dry bean takes us back to South America. These, serving as a dietary cornerstone, were initially cultivated over 7,000 years ago in the southern regions of Mexico and Peru.

Corn - 10,000 years ago
https://cropcareequipment.com/blog/corn-farming-history/

People have been farming corn, or maize, for thousands of years. Native civilizations in present-day Mexico first domesticated corn around 10,000 years ago.

Potatoes - 13,000 years ago
https://spudsmart.com/domestication-of-the-potato/

Wild potatoes from the (then) humid coastal plains of South America were probably first eaten by people as early as 13,000 years ago.

Around here (Sweden) I would bet a bit that any fish from the Baltic Sea is both common and super old member of the diet for the population around the water. Salmon is also a great contender being found in the rivers as well.

Any of the easily hunted animals that are still around, don't know if it's "common" if it's seen as a delicacy outside of hunting families though

I think fish is a likely winner - it's something we likely hunted and gathered and continue to consume in generally the same format over the years.

Bread and beer. The reason that modern civilization exists. Of course, the modern versions are quite different from the ancient ones

And the ancient ones are still relatively new to humanity.

Some type of fish or herb, I would imagine. Crops only go back to the advent of agriculture, and lots of the game our ancestors ate isn’t at a grocery store.

Depends. In one way, nothing is old, because we shaped and changed everything. But I guess the foods that humans ate at the beginning of our journey is mostly berries and roots.

I'm going to suggest food items that we still take from nature and eat with minimal preparation:

  • Honey
  • Fish like salmon, trout, grouper
  • Shellfish (eg oysters)

We have evidence of shellfish and fish being eaten for a very long time - at least the middle stone age at 140kya - in middens which are 10s of thousands of years old.

Honey is likely to have been a food source - a treat even - even before humans left Africa (so before 100kya) but sadly this would be invisible in the archeological record

I was going to say oatmeal, but honey is actually a better answer, since it predates even agriculture as a major food.

If you live somewhere with fresh seafood that's also a great answer. I wonder if grocery stores somewhere sell fresh insects, although that wouldn't be the West as per OP.

Chickens were domesticated around 8000 years ago.

They were native to South-East Asia. However, with that being said, wild/jungle fowl species are still found in South and South-East Asia. The domestic species, aka Gallus gallus domesticus went international, baby!

pakaoow!

Apples?

Approximately 750,000 years ago: early Paleolithic food gatherers in (modern) Kazakhstan, central Asia, discovered sour crab apples growing wild in the forest.

https://historicsites.nc.gov/all-sites/horne-creek-farm/southern-heritage-apple-orchard/apple-history/origins-apples

All the fruits could count, and the ones native to east Africa will go all the way back to pre-human apes, but the modern grocery store cultivars are all very selectively bred, and don't much resemble their wild precursors.

Figs are a very old food, there is archaeological evidence of cultivation of figs at least 11,000 years ago. So meaning not foraged but cultivated on purpose.

In my parts of the world, meat and eggs definitely are the way to go. Nothing grows but grass. Definitely Mountain Goat 🐐 and Highland Cow 🐄 and animals like those. Maybe some herbs to go with that, but crops - nah, not up here.