What can food tell us about the past?
About this episode
This episode explores how food reveals insights into historical societies through various lenses including archaeology and historical cookbooks.
What can food reveal about the people who came before us? From ancient meals and family recipes to the chemical traces left behind in bones and teeth, food offers remarkable clues about how people lived, travelled and survived. In this episode, Ruth Alexander explores how historians, archaeologists and old cookbooks are helping us piece together the story of our past. Historian Professor Peter Scholliers explains how something as ordinary as the changing price of food can reveal shifts in society, politics and everyday life. In India, author and historian Tarana Khan takes us inside a remarkable collection of two-hundred-year-old cookbooks from Rampur, uncovering forgotten recipes that reveal changing tastes, cultures and identities. And in Scotland, archaeologist Dr Sam Leggett explains how scientific analysis of ancient bones and teeth can reconstruct diets, migrations and even challenge long-held assumptions about the lives of people in the past. They explore how food can reveal trade routes, social class, cultural exchange, climate change, migration and the choices people made around the dinner table centuries ago. From old recipe books to archaeological discoveries, we…
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