Wheat, peas, olives, sheep, goats: some of the oldest domesticated plants and animals, brought into cultivation by about 8500 BC in the fertile crescent area of Turkey (according to "Guns Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond, 1997, p. 100) A Pulitzer Prize Winner I'm currently reading. Well, I eat wheat, peas, and olives. No sheep or goats lately. A long 10,000 year span of time.
Then, the bottle gourd, an ancient plant used by folks native to here, the Americas. Never used that personally. Here's what it looks like: bottle gourd.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Don't you think that its weird that olives were one of the first to be domesticated? Apparently olives straight off the tree are virtually inedible, so you would think it would have taken a while for people to realize that soaking them in brine would result in one of the most delicious foods ever. You would think that oranges or grapes (for wine) or onions or broccoli or even lemons would have been ahead of olives. (Just some of the veg I would have chosen.)
Yes, what did those poor people do before they had grapes for wine?
Maybe wild grapes were made into wine way before they were grown in vineyards. That way folks could wander the counntryside hunting deer, gathering wild broccoli etc while carrying their fermenting grapes with them -- in wineskins made from the deerhide. Sounds reasonable.
Actually, this is a wild guess since I realized this morning that the book was overdue at the library and I brought it back.
Post a Comment