Sitting alone in the pho restaurant last night, I hit the startling epiphany that when Europeans/Westerners think of “fast food,” it’s usually in the form of sandwiches and burgers. When most of the Asian cultures I’ve come into contact with think of “fast food,” it’s ramen, chow mein, and pho. That makes sense, I reasoned, since it’s easier to make bread out of wheat and noodles out of rice.
Are those safe generalizations so far? If so, does every major culture across the world have the idea of a staple grain that a lot of the cuisine is based around? What about societies who have predominantly fish-based diets? Or are there areas where it’s simply too cold to sustained grain crops?
Well, if you’re demanding that the primary dietary staple be an actual grain, then any culture which lives primarily off of potatoes is out. Similarly, there are a large number of tropical cultures which subsist on taro, another starchy tuber.
Someone will probably be along shortly with an appropriate passage from Guns, Germs, and Steel (my copy is at home, alas.)
In the US, I don’t believe there is one staple grain, since maize (corn), wheat and potatoes are roughly equal contributors to the typical diet, with rice of less importance, but still significant.
Wheat, rice, or corn are the only ones that I could think of. I’d forgotten about potatoes and tubers. Basically, the question was: does every society have some kind of vegetable crop that provides the dominant part of their cuisine?
In other words: I know the expression “man shall not live by bread alone,” but does man always have to live by bread at all?
Although there must be many cultures around the world that have a non-grain based culture, you are much likely to come across those that do. The reason is quite simple, civilisation is built on grain. In addition to being highly productive, grain crops such as wheat, barley, rice and maize have the advantage that they can be stored for long periods. As far as I know, all dominant civilisations feature the storage of food which then has to be guarded by warriors and controlled by kings. Taxes, fortifications, cities and beaurocrats soon follow. Grain based civilisations spread and come to dominate all areas of cultural contact.
Cultures based on foods that cannot be stored are much less likely to become dominant and to spread. It is difficult to store meat, fish, fruit or root crops and societies based on these crops are likely to be more egalatarian.
Now that I’m home with my copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel, I see that Gaius.Cornelius pretty much hit it. Hunter-gatherers do not have a staple crop like farming societies do, but that means that their food sources are generally spread out over greater distances, and so they can’t become sedentary, and so they have little reason to build up the things we think of as “civilization.”
In various parts of the world, millet, barley, sorghum, quinoa, teff, maygrass, knotweed, and goosefoot have been cultivated as well.
Civilisation is run on taxes. One might almost say that civilisation is tax and that inventions such a writing, weapons, fortifications etc are just a means to that end.
I have not really studied this, but I suspect that the size, duration and sophistication of a civilisation are roughly proportional to the ease with which the local staple crop can be stored for long periods. Grasses tend to be dry and their seeds will store easily whereas root crops, fruit, meat, fish etc are wet and difficult to conserve. If you cannot store it, it is not worth collecting; if it is not worth collecting, you cannot tax it; if you cannot tax you cannot have civilisation.
Non civilised cultures do not spread their influence. So if you go abroad, you are more likely to encounter the grain based foods of a successful civilisation.
I really must get round to reading Guns, Germs, and Steel sometime, it must be the most frequently cited book on this forum!