A Timeline of Food History — 12,000 BCE to Today

A timeline of food history

c. 12,000 BCE — Bread before farming: Charred flatbread crumbs at Shubayqa in Jordan predate agriculture — people were baking wild grain thousands of years before anyone sowed it.

c. 9000 BCE — Einkorn and emmer are domesticated: The first wheats are brought under cultivation in the Fertile Crescent — hulled, stubborn grains that will feed the ancient world.

c. 7000 BCE — Maize is domesticated in Mesoamerica: From the wild grass teosinte comes maize — and eventually nixtamalization, the alkaline technique that makes a maize civilisation possible.

c. 5000 BCE — Fonio and teff take root in Africa: West Africa and the Horn domesticate their own cereals — tiny, fast, drought-proof grains that still outperform wheat where wheat cannot grow.

c. 3000 BCE — Egypt runs on bread and beer: Grain becomes a wage. The same emmer, often the same dough, feeds the workers as bread and pays them in beer.

c. 1750 BCE — The oldest written recipes: Babylonian clay tablets record around 25 recipes — stews with method and ingredients, written for cooks who already knew what they were doing.

c. 700 BCE — The Celtic cauldron: Iron Age feasting in northern Europe: a great cauldron over the fire, meat boiled with barley, and status measured in who gets the best cut.

c. 600 BCE — Persia sets the royal table: The Achaemenid court turns dining into statecraft — rice, fruit, sweet-and-sour, and a refinement that will echo through Baghdad, Istanbul and Delhi.

c. 500 BCE — Sparta eats its black broth: Pork boiled with blood and sharpened with vinegar, eaten in the common mess. Other Greeks found it inedible; Spartans found it the point.

c. 400 BCE — The Greek symposium: Athens drinks — watered wine, small savoury dishes, and conversation as the real course.

206 BCE — The Han table: grain first: Millet, fermented soybean pastes, and the fan–cai principle that still governs how a Chinese meal is built.

c. 130 BCE — The Silk Road opens: Han envoys reach Central Asia. Grapes, sesame, walnuts and coriander travel east; rice and sugar travel west. Food globalises for the first time.

1st century BCE — Rome runs on garum: Industrial salting works along the Mediterranean turn fish into the empire's default seasoning — salt and umami in one bottle.

1st century CE — Silphium is harvested to extinction: Rome's most prized seasoning is loved to death. Pliny reports a last stalk sent to Nero as a curiosity — a flavour no living person has tasted.

1st century CE — Everyday food in the Roman city: Puls, bread, olive oil and wine. The banquet is the exception; the porridge is the rule.

1st century CE — Globi: fritters for the gods: Cheese and flour balls fried, rolled in honey and dusted with poppy seeds — a Roman sweet Cato thought worth writing down.

1st century CE — Moretum, pounded at dawn: A Latin poem watches a poor farmer make his breakfast: garlic, herbs and cheese crushed in a mortar before he goes out to the fields.

c. 100 CE — The sauces of Apicius: Pounded in a mortar, balanced between garum, honey and vinegar — the lost art at the centre of Roman cooking.

476 CE — Rome falls — and flavours vanish with it: When the supply chains break, so does the food. Garum fades from western kitchens along with the empire that shipped it.

6th century — Byzantium keeps the table set: Constantinople inherits Rome and absorbs Persia — spice, fish, sweet-and-sour, and the fasting calendar that shapes it all.

793–1066 — Norse crews provision for the Atlantic: Stockfish air-dried hard as wood, barley flatbread, skyr — preservation as navigation.

c. 800 — Pottage, the daily pot: Grain, pulses and greens simmered in the one cauldron a household owns, topped up for days on end.

9th–13th century — Baghdad's golden-age kitchen: The Abbasid capital writes cookbooks while much of Europe eats pottage — sweet-sour stews, rosewater, and a grammar of flavour we still use.

c. 1000 — What medieval Europe drank: Unhopped ale brewed at home by alewives, wine for those who could afford it, and the myth that nobody drank the water.

11th century — Ten foods that defined the Middle Ages: Bread, pottage, spice, pies, ale — the staples, the luxuries and the surprises of the medieval plate.

13th century — Shojin ryori in the Zen temples: Japanese Buddhist cuisine refines vegetarian cooking into restraint as a discipline — every vegetable still tasting of itself.

13th century — Building flavour, medieval style: Spice blends, verjuice, and the deliberate layering of sweet, sour and warm — the opposite of the bland-and-grey myth.

c. 1300 — Le Viandier is written down: One of Europe's earliest cookbooks: sharp, spiced sauces poured over roast meat, and a professional cook's assumptions on every page.

14th century — Gingerbread, honey and spice: Not a cake: a stiff, dark confection of honey, breadcrumbs and spice, cut into pieces and pressed with a clove.

14th century — Hippocras closes the feast: Wine, sugar and spice strained clear through a cloth sleeve — the drink that ends a banquet and announces a host's wealth.

14th century — The feast as theatre: Subtleties, redressed peacocks, frumenty and blancmange — dishes designed to be read as much as eaten.

1392–1897 — Hwajeon: spring on a griddle: Joseon Korea presses edible flowers into rice pancakes — a dish the calendar decides, not the appetite.

15th century — The Aztec market astonishes Europe: Tenochtitlan feeds 200,000 people on maize, beans, squash, chiles and chocolate, from lake gardens and long-distance trade.

1438–1533 — The Inca farm a vertical world: Quinoa, freeze-dried tubers and the vertical archipelago — a cuisine engineered for altitude.

15th century — The Ottoman helvahane: Topkapı gives sweets a kitchen of their own, and the confectioners of the palace shape the desserts of three continents.

16th century — Chia, the Mexica energy drink: Seeds hydrated in water with lime and a little sweetness — a runner's ration, and a tribute crop worth taxing.

1526–1857 — The Mughal dastarkhan: Persian technique meets Indian ingredients: saffron, almonds, yoghurt and rice, cooked low and slow for an emperor.

16th century — Tudor marchpane: Sugar is still a luxury, so the banquet course ends with an almond-and-sugar showpiece, gilded and iced.

1603–1868 — Edo invents fast food: Sushi, tempura and soba are born at portable street stalls, sold to workers with no kitchens of their own.

17th–19th century — The Age of Sail eats hardtack: Ship's biscuit, salt horse and pease — a diet built entirely around outlasting the voyage.

18th century — The Russian pech: A masonry oven so large it cooks, dries the grain, heats the house and provides the warmest bed in it.

18th century — The peasant stew, everywhere at once: Beans, greens, stale bread and a long simmer — the same dish, under a hundred names, across Europe.

19th century — Sourdough before packet yeast: Every loaf on earth rises on a living leaven kept in a crock — a household responsibility, not a purchase.

1840s — The Victorians invent Christmas dinner: Goose, then turkey; the flaming plum pudding; Stir-up Sunday. A tradition assembled — and marketed — almost from scratch.

late 19th century — The pantry as technology: Lard, suet, homemade vinegar, dried apples, preserves — the ingredients that kept a household fed through the year.

late 19th century — Heirloom vegetables, before uniformity: Thousands of open-pollinated varieties, saved as seed and passed down — most of them now gone from the market.

20th century — The Sunday lunch that anchored the week: Roast, gravy and three generations at one table — across Europe, the meal the whole week turned on.

1950s — Mid-century home cooking: Past the aspic and the tinned soup lies a decade of genuinely good, thrifty, made-at-home food.

Still with us — The earth oven never left: The Pacific umu and hangi still cook the way the oldest ovens on earth did: hot stones, leaves, and hours of trapped steam.

Still worth doing — Old techniques, revived: Salt-baking, ember cooking, fermenting, curing — methods modern kitchens abandoned and are now rediscovering.

Still worth doing — Preservation comes home: Pickling, fermenting, salting and smoking return to domestic kitchens — not to survive winter, but because they taste better.