The World Until Yesterday

Table 8.2. Traditional food storage around the world

EURASIA
Eurasian herders	Dairy products: butter, cheese, skyr, fermented milk.
European farmers	Wheat and barley, salted or dried fish, dairy products, potatoes and other tubers, pickled vegetables, beer, oil.
Korea	Kimchi: pickled fermented cabbage, turnip, cucumber. Pickled, salted, or fermented fish and shrimp.
Ainu (Japan)	Nuts, dried and frozen fish, dried venison, root starch.
Nganasan (Siberia)	Smoked, dried, or frozen reindeer meat. Rendered goose fat.
Itenm’i (Kamchatka) Dried and fermented fish.
AMERICAS
Most Native American farmers	Dried maize.
Northern Plains Indians	Pemmican: dried bison meat, rendered fat, and dried berries.
Andes	Freeze-dried meat and tubers and fish.
Inuit	Frozen whale meat, frozen or dried caribou meat, seal oil.
Northwest Coast Indians	Dried and smoked salmon, rendered candlefish oil, dried berries.
Great Basin Shoshone	Mesquite pod starch, pine nuts, dried meat.
Inland Northern California Indians	Acorn meal, dried salmon.
AFRICA
Nuer	Millet, beer.
PACIFIC
East Polynesia	Fermented taro and breadfruit. Dried bananas and starch.
Maori (New Zealand)	Bird meat, heated and sealed with fat. Tubers.
Trobriand Islands (New Guinea)	Yams.
New Guinea lowlands	Sago starch and dried fish.
New Guinea Highlands	Tubers. Sweet potatoes stored as live pigs.
Australian Aborigines	Wild grass seed cakes.

Traditional peoples dealt with predictable seasonal food shortages in three main ways: storing food, broadening their diet, and dispersing and aggregating. The first of these methods is routine in modern society: we store food in refrigerators, deep freezers, cans, bottles, and dried packages. Many traditional societies as well set aside food surpluses accumulated during a season of food abundance (such as fall harvest time in the temperate zones), and consumed that food during a season of food scarcity (such as temperate-zone winters). Food storage was practised by sedentary societies living in markedly seasonal environments with alternating seasons of food abundance and food deficits. It was uncommon among nomadic hunter-gatherers with frequent changes of camp, because they couldn’t carry much food with them (unless they had boats or dog-drawn sleds), and the risk of pilferage by animals or other humans made it unsafe for them to leave food unguarded at one camp and to plan to return later. (However, some hunter-gatherers, such as Japan’s Ainu, Pacific Northwest Coast Indians, the Great Basin Shoshone, and some Arctic peoples, were sedentary or seasonally sedentary and stored large quantities of food.) Even among sedentary peoples, some living in small family groups stored little food because they were too few to defend a larder against raiders. Food storage was more widespread in cold temperate regions than in the hot wet tropics, where food spoils quickly. Table 8.2 gives examples.

The main practical problem to be overcome in storing food is to prevent the food from rotting through decomposition by microorganisms. Because microbes, like all other living creatures, require mild temperatures and water, many methods of food storage involve keeping food cold (not an option in the tropics before the development of refrigerators) or else drying food. Some foods are sufficiently low in water content in their natural form that they can be stored for months or even years, as is or else after just light drying. Those foods include many nuts, cereals, some roots and tubers such as potatoes and turnips, and honey. Most of those foods are stored in containers or larders built for the purpose, but many root crops can be “stored” or banked by the simple method of leaving them in the ground for months until they are required.

However, many other foods, such as meat and fish and juicy fruits and berries, have sufficiently high water content that they require extensive drying by means such as placing them on racks in the sun or smoking them over fires. For instance, smoked salmon, now a delicate luxury, used to be a staple prepared in large quantities by Pacific Northwest Coast Indians. Dried bison meat, combined with fat and dried berries to store as a mixture known as pemmican, was similarly a staple on the North American Great Plains. Andean Indians dried large quantities of meat, fish, potatoes, and oca by freeze-drying (alternately freezing and sun-drying).

Still other dried foods are obtained by taking a moist raw starting-material and extracting the nutritious component without most of the original water. Familiar modern examples of such foods are olive oil made from olives, cheese made from milk, and flour made from wheat. Traditional Mediterranean peoples, Eurasian herders, and Eurasian farmers respectively have been preparing and storing those same products for thousands of years. Rendering fat to extract it in a form with low water content was widely practised by Maori bird hunters of New Zealand, Native American bison hunters, and Arctic hunters of marine mammals. Pacific Northwest Coast Indians rendered fat from a species of smelt so oily that its English name is candlefish because when dried the fish can be burned like a candle. The staple food of the New Guinea lowlands is sago starch, obtained by extracting the starch from the pith of sago palms. Polynesians and Japan’s Ainu similarly extracted starch from roots, as did the Great Basin Shoshone Indians from mesquite pods.