How Food Travelled Throughout The World

Evolution ensured people adopted new foods through generations of experiments. But in a fast globalising age, this tradition has been bypassed

- Vibha Varshney

The sesame seed may seem like an unlikely representative to trace the history of the global food trade, but it is the most apt one. It is believed that the seed originated in India, as some seeds were excavated from the Harappa ruins (2600-2000 BC). In India, the sesame seeds are used to make makar laddoo, a sweet prepared specially during the festival of Sankranti. But in the US, burger buns have a decorative sprinkle of the seeds, and in Central Asia, it is part of the ubiquitous hummus. Yet, there is very little archeological evidence to prove how it traveled. What’s interesting is that this journey occurred much before the establishment of the Silk Route and the Spice Route, the two major trade routes that are attributed to the exchange of food in the past. The Silk Route connected China with the Mediterranean countries through Central Asia, and the Spice Route (or the Maritime Silk Route), which was established later, connected India with Southeast Asia, West Asia and the coast of East Africa.

Robert N Spengler III has come to this conclusion in the book Fruit from the Sands. Spengler, who is the director of the paleoethnobotany laboratories at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, used archaeobotanical data from 15 excavation sites in Central Asia (currently Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan). He concluded the local food habits in Central Asia were impacted much before the manifestation of the Silk Route—two millennia before this route was established. Archaeobotanical data is an exciting way to confirm theories that are often anecdotal, he says.