New food processing technologies: from foraging to farming to food technology

Abstract

The ‘daily bread’ for over six billion people today is largely derived from plant sources. The history of plant use reaches back uninterrupted to our earliest hominid ancestors. There is a long tradition of regarding the origins of agriculture (Hannery, 1973) as an important stage in the development of human society. Whilst acknowledging its significance, an equally profound revolution has passed unnoticed, this is the revolution in food processing and technology. The theme of the present paper is to discuss new ‘food technologies’ and the impact they have had, and are likely to have, on our society. Before we examine the ‘new’ food technologies, it is instructive to review the stages that man has passed through in the exploitation of plants and animals as food. Human food acquisition strategies can be broadly described as a transition from hunting and gathering (foraging), i.e. depending on wild plants and animals, to agriculture (farming), i.e. domestication of plants and animals (Fig. 1). The lifestyles of our ancestral hunter-gatherers were such that they had little need of methods of food preservation. However, with the domestication of plants and the evolution of farming, the need to preserve and store foods became inevitable. The foods we consume are predominantly of biological origin, i.e. from plants and animals. Unless effective methods of preservation are used, microbiological and/or enzymic changes will render the food inedible. Evidence of early food use and methods of food preservation may be gleaned from archaeological, ethnographic or written sources. Whilst archaeological sources may supply evidence of the type of plant and animal use, ethnographic studies are more likely to provide richer social and biological insights into our distant past. For example, the Australian Aboriginals were the largest known group of hunter-gatherers who lived in isolation for almost 50000 years (Kirk, 1981).