Food preservation

[lpetrich]

If one has more than enough food to eat, then a good strategy is to save this excess to eat later, and to keep competition away.

Food preservation is scattered across the animal kingdom. The most notable example is honey. When honeybees visit flowers, they often drink the flowers' nectar, the juice that they make to attract pollinators like bees. They take the juice home in their stomachs and vomit it up into cells in their hives, where it becomes honey. During cold weather or dry weather, the bees then eat the honey.

Another example is why dogs bury bones. Wolves, their wild ancestors, often bury uneaten food to keep it away from scavengers, and they later unearth it and eat it without haivng to do more hunting.

Squirrels bury nuts to get them through winters, and they seem able to remember where they buried their nuts: Do Squirrels Remember Where They Buried Their Nuts? | Scientific American - with burial strategies that can vary by species: burial in one or two spots vs. burial in several spots.

Parasitoid wasps lay their eggs in a variety of other arthropods, like caterpillars, grasshoppers, cockroaches, and spiders. When the grubs hatch out, they then eat their hosts from the inside, often being very careful in what they eat to avoid killing their hosts too soon. Some of these wasps paralyze their prey before laying their eggs on that prey, and some of them drag their prey into burrows.

 Sphex - digger wasps - do this.

Some Sphex wasps drop a paralyzed insect near the opening of the nest. Before taking provisions into the nest, the Sphex first inspects the nest, leaving the prey outside. During the inspection, an experimenter can move the prey a few inches away from the opening. When the Sphex emerges from the nest ready to drag in the prey, it finds the prey missing. The Sphex quickly locates the moved prey, but now its behavioral "program" has been reset. After dragging the prey back to the opening of the nest, once again the Sphex is compelled to inspect the nest, so the prey is again dropped and left outside during another stereotypical inspection of the nest. This iteration can be repeated several times without the Sphex changing its sequence; by some accounts, endlessly.

By our standards, this seems very dumb, but for the wasp, it may be good for checking on that burrow in case it also got disturbed.


Needless to say, our species beats all of them, even if we had to learn how to preserve food, as opposed to doing that by instinct. We have also been doing that for millennia, even if earlier evidence is not preserved very much.

 

[lpetrich]

A very old kind of food preservation is likely  Pemmican - a mixture of dried meat, animal fat, and sometimes berries.

"Historically, it was an important part of indigenous cuisine in certain parts of North America and it is still prepared today." European explorers and colonists discovered it to be prepared by people in northern North America like the Cree and Lakota people. Since these people's technology was Paleolithic-level, one can plausibly infer that it was prepared by our cold-climate Upper Paleolithic ancestors.

Drying meat requires only Paleolithic technology: heat it over a fire or leave it out on a hot sunny day. Drying meat over a smoky fire will make smoked meat.

 

[lpetrich]

In addition to drying, there are a variety of premodern food-preservation techniques, most of them involving various additives, either made in situ by fermentation or else introduced from outside. Evidence before recent centuries is very fragmentary, but since these techniques require only Paleolithic or Neolithic technology, they are likely very old.

• Salt (NaCl) -- salted meat
• Lye (NaOH) -- lutefisk
• Alcohol (CH3-CH2-OH) -- alcoholic drinks
• Acetic acid (CH3-COOH) -- pickles
• Lactic acid (CH3-CHOH-COOH) -- yogurt, sauerkraut
• Sugar ((CH2O)x) -- fruit preserves: jams, jellies

Some of these techniques work by lowering the osmotic pressure of the foodstuff, something that drying also does. This pressure is the relative pressure of water (the solvent), and it goes down with more stuff dissolved in it (the solute). That is why seawater is not safe to drink; our bodies have about 1/3 the solute of seawater, meaning that we tend to lose water rather than gain it when we drink seawater. It's the Ancient Mariner effect:

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Others work from toxicity, like acetic and lactic acid making foods too acidic (too many H+ ions) and lye making foods too alkaline (too many OH- ions).

Another premodern technique is burial of food, like Icelandic buried shark.

 

[robnisch]

Yupʼik cuisine - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

They ferment fish by burying them in baskets.
Eatable, but very smelly!

 

[lpetrich]

Like Hákarl - Wikipedia - Icelandic fermented shark meat.

The traditional method begins with gutting and beheading a shark and placing it in a shallow hole dug in gravelly sand, with the cleaned cavity resting on a small mound of sand. The shark is then covered with sand and gravel, and stones are placed on top of the sand in order to press the fluids out of the body. The shark ferments in this fashion for six to twelve weeks, depending on the season. Following this curing period, the shark is cut into strips and hung to dry for several months. During this drying period, a brown crust will develop, which is removed prior to cutting the shark into small pieces and serving.

Also edible, and also very smelly - it strongly smells of ammonia.

 Food preservation mentions various other instances of food burial, like  Bog butter - butter buried in bogs in Ireland and Scotland - and  Storage clamp - a covered pile of root vegetables.

 

[lpetrich]

 History of beer - the oldest fermented food: Fermented beverage and food storage in 13,000 y-old stone mortars at Raqefet Cave, Israel: Investigating Natufian ritual feasting - ScienceDirect

 Natufian culture - the Natufian people lived in the Levant about 15,000 - 11,500 years ago, harvesting wild grains that grew around them, and making bread from these grains. Their beer was fermented porridge. They lived through the  Bølling–Allerød Interstadial (15,000 - 13,000 years ago) warm period at the end of the last Ice Age, which was followed by the  Younger Dryas cold period (13,000 - 11,500 years ago).

At the end of the Younger Dryas, the beginning of the Holocene, the present warm period, some of these people started planting some of their harvested seeds, thus inventing agriculture.

These early farmers likely continued to brew beer, as did their descendants, and when Middle Easterners invented writing, they wrote about beer and beer making.

 Rice wine was made in China from 9,000 years ago, not long after the domestication of rice itself.

 History of wine - fermented grape juice - was made in Eurasian Georgia from 8,000 years ago.

 Fruit wine - made from a variety of fruits and berries -  Mead from honey -  Cider from apples -  Perry from pears - hard to find much history, but if beer, grape wine, and rice wine are any indication, they likely date back to the domestication of their sources.

 

[lpetrich]

 Fermentation in food processing includes not only alcoholic drinks but also the likes of

•  Sauerkraut - (German: "sour cabbage") fermented cabbage
•  Yogurt - fermented milk
•  Garum - ancient Roman fermented fish sauce

Likely also older than recorded history.

 History of salt - salt production goes back some 8,000 years - The earliest salt production in the world: an early Neolithic exploitation in Poiana Slatinei-Lunca, Romania | Antiquity Journal
It was often used for food preservation, and salted meat was a major food item for sailors until a little more than a century ago.

 Fruit preserves and  Sugaring and  Pickling (vinegar, salt) - likely also older than recorded history.

Alkaline preservation is used in  Lutefisk (Norwegian: "lye fish") and Chinese  Century egg

 

[lpetrich]

Needless to say, industrial-era  Food preservation includes plenty of new techniques, alongside new food additives.

But a new technique was aseptic processing, heating or cooking food then sealing it in containers to keep out unwanted organisms, containers like metal cans and glass bottles, and more recently, plastic containers, including plastic bottles and plastic trays and shrinkwrap.  Pasteurization is a form of this kind of processing.

Freezing I mention here because it had limited preindustrial applicability, needing freezing weather and permafrost as sources of cold. Icebox refrigeration was common a little over a century ago, using the thermal inertia of ice collected in freezing weather. But the most successful technology was gas-cycle refrigerators, invented in the middle of the 19th cy. and made common a century ago. As a result,  Frozen food is now very common.

There are several others, which I won't get into.

 

[Swammerdami]

Milk spoils quickly, so cheese was invented. But lactose intolerance was the norm in the Stone Age for all but young children so most of this cheese was inedible. A gene for lactose tolerance seems to have arisen independently in at least three distinct places, all places where milkable animals were bred! (I regard this as a tribute to Darwinian evolution and a demonstration of its speed.)

The gene for lactose tolerance MIGHT be one of the reasons for the sudden success of the Proto-Indo-European people.

 History of beer - the oldest fermented food: Fermented beverage and food storage in 13,000 y-old stone mortars at Raqefet Cave, Israel: Investigating Natufian ritual feasting - ScienceDirect

The Funnel Beaker Culture arose from mesolithic people whose habitat reduced the "need" for farming. When they did adopt farming, their early villages retained characteristics of a mobile hunting society (e.g. unhygienic garbage dumps). The claim is made that they adopted cereal farming only when they learned the recipe for beer! It sounds like a joke, but I think it's now accepted fact!