Contents
What role does food play in our lives, how the human diet has changed and what methods help to study the nutrition of the past – in the material “Trends”
About the expert:
Maria Dobrovolskaya, Head of the Laboratory of Contextual Anthropology, Leading Researcher at the Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Historical Sciences.
Food is what we need physiologically, what we share with our loved ones in order to experience certain emotions that unite us and allow us to feel comfortable. Both are very serious – and it is not known which is more important.
In the age-old struggle with the fear of hunger, modern man rather won – and now suffers more from this abundance than one might expect. In a situation where food insufficiency has been the background for a long time, and a person associated his well-being with food abundance, it is very difficult for society to rebuild. Any restriction in food is perceived very alarmingly. Today we are thinking about how the difficult economic situation will affect our nutrition, and the main fear is that we will starve. Nobody knows what to do with it. Against the background of food abundance, there is no culture of self-restraint, and this abundance is likely to bring more negative than positive physiological results.
Mankind has put and continues to put so much effort to feed itself, because far from all parts of the world people can really eat their fill, and as a result, the pendulum has swung in a completely different direction.
About historical changes in the structure of nutrition
Nutrition is a very interesting cultural marker. Each of us has our own habits: someone focuses on carbohydrates, someone on animal proteins.
If we try to trace what is happening with the general trend in the structure of nutrition of modern people, then we will not be able to talk about humanity as something monolithic. our country is closest to the developed countries, where the mental basis of the roll towards vegetarianism is being prepared. However, there is no evidence that the consumption of animal proteins has decreased.
If we turn to the distant historical past, it turns out that diets have changed: 8-10 thousand years ago, there was a transition to eating agricultural food products – food that is prepared from domestic plants and domestic animals. In this diet, of course, there are not so many components of animal food than in the typical hunter-gatherer diet for a person of that time. However, the first transition occurs in the Neolithic, when grain and oil of vegetable origin appear first of all.
Then comes cattle breeding and mobile pastoralism, and with it the opportunity to consume dairy products in large quantities. There is a problem here, because every mammal, including humans, freely consumes dairy products in childhood. And when it grows up, the ability to digest whole milk is physiologically lost. This is an interesting process of transition, and in fact – selection on the basis of the ability to digest whole milk. A few years ago, we assumed that this was due to the development of cattle breeding, because in the third millennium BC, a very intensive spread of pastoral tribes began. Approximately three thousand years ago, groups of people who digest whole milk well begin to appear, but they never spread around the world. Everything else is some kind of microchanges, which are more related to the period of the scientific and technological revolution.
In the traditional way, people had their own food tradition, they made some kind of preparations, for them there was a very typical seasonal change: in winter we eat one food, in summer another, and in spring we starve. The habit of malnutrition, the seasonal change in diet – the human body is very well adapted to this, but not to constant abundance.
On the study of the diets of ancient people
Nutritional issues are so relevant today because there are a variety of new methods by which we can compare the past and the present.
The topic of nutrition is explored through the study of traces of ancient biomes, traces of microflora that remains on the remains of ancient people obtained from the study of archaeological sites. There we find the remains of those plants that surrounded man, the remains of the bones of animals that were eaten. All this creates a powerful base in order to study what a person ate in the past.
In addition to the observation and identification of human food remains of the past, new methods are emerging in molecular biology, biochemistry, and paleogenetics, which make it possible, first of all, to identify the materials themselves – for example, carbon deposits on ancient dishes. Using the methods of chromatography, spectral analysis, one can understand what kind of molecules were preserved and understand what kind of food it was.
Paleogenetics reveals mutations that indicate that a person, for example, was already able to digest grain foods. Methods of paleogenomic analysis, methods of isotopic analysis allow us to understand from a small piece of bone tissue which food prevailed in the human diet.
About the food of the future
Also in our time there are many new technologies, with the help of which, in conditions of high-tech production, it is possible to grow food, for example, meat.
In the traditional diet, when we eat the simplest dish, we never know exactly what we are eating – only the basic molecular composition. And in the food that is grown technologically, everything is very clearly defined, and it is not entirely clear how much this set will actually meet the needs of the body. A person, turning to technology, believes that he knows what is good and useful, but in reality everything may turn out to be completely different. In itself, tech food is not bad, but it may not be enough in terms of variety. And then, will it be suitable for those microorganisms that are an integral part of our internal environment?
As for powdered food, on the one hand, this is an archaic tradition. One of the traditional ways of eating as far back as the Neolithic, if not earlier, is the preservation of the product in the form of a dry powder: flour, fish meal, acorn meal. Then it was perfectly brewed with hot water and an effective meal was obtained. For its digestion, the body does not need as much effort as, for example, to digest a piece of meat. So powdered food is not know-how, but the deepest tradition. The only question is what the powder is made of: if these are molecularly adjusted products that are addressed to some specific organs, they are more like medicines. They can be used to, for example, build muscle, but hardly as the basis of the diet.