As a species, we discovered the ability to cook our food tens of thousands of years ago. And while it may have started as nothing more than a few pieces of meat held over a fire, it didn’t take too long for people to experiment and discover new ways of preparing food. Today, there are countless cuisines from across the world, each offering something unique to the region that it was born in, but there are some foods that are so common that they transcend culture and region completely.
Here we will be looking at some of the most popular foods around the globe.
Rice
Rice is one of those foods that has been grown in most parts of the world for thousands of years. Initially, our ancestors would have encountered and eaten wild rice strains, but as we began to create civilisations and agriculture, rice was quickly adopted and shaped to our liking.
Today, rice can be found in most cuisines, but is especially popular within Asia and Africa. Rice comes in dozens of varieties, each offering different textures and flavours.
Bread
The first bread is believed to have been baked around 12000 years ago, and it was quickly adopted by peoples around the world thanks to it being nutrient-dense and much easier to eat than the tough roots, meats, and vegetables that our forefathers were used to consuming every day.
Bread proved to be an important turning point for mankind, and lead to further cultivation of wheat along with the refinement of specific tools for making the ingredients necessary to make bread. Today, it’s among the most commonly eaten foods in the world, and there are many different types that are often dependent in the region they’re made in.
Pasta
While we most commonly associate pasta with Italian cuisine, the origins of this food can actually be traced to ancient China. In fact, the noodles that the ancient Chinese ate on a regular basis were the inspiration for the various kinds of pastas that would pop up around the world.
Historians believe that the famous Silk Road was largely responsible for the distribution of pasta to other countries throughout the ancient world, such as leading to its widespread adoption in Italy. Today, pasta has exploded throughout the globe, and is just as popular among Western cooking as it is in Eastern, similar to other trends like sushi or online bingo.
Eggs
For our most distant ancestors, finding an egg would have been something of a joyous occasion. Eggs tend to be extremely rich in a wide range of vitamins and minerals, and would have been something of a special find, especially when their diet consisted mainly of eating as much meat and as many vegetables as possible to meet their dietary requirements.
Eggs never lost their popularity, and the ancestor of today’s chicken would be domesticated in Southeast Asia and used for the production of eggs. They remain some of the most widely eaten foods in the world and can be found in most cuisines.
