Now, we’ve all been here: you’re sitting around thinking about time travel and wondering how well you could pass for normal in your favorite time period. I used to be worried that I couldn’t pass at all in 18th century Italy, because Europeans hold their forks all fancy and delicately push their peas on the backs of upside-down tines and other such impressive table skills while I live in a barn and hamfistedly shovel food into my mouth, or so I’ve been made to believe. And in the 18th century everyone would see me eat and just know that I was not from around these parts. But then I learned that in fact, Americans have preserved the older form of forking, so I’m in like Flynn for basic table skills once I build that time machine. The European style only dates from the 19th century.

Americans: get ready to time travel in the early modern era slightly easier than Europeans, woo woo.

I was reading Sophie Coe's book America's First Cuisines about what people ate before Europeans arrived. What surprised me the most was that the tortilla is not a ubiquitous food staple in Mesoamerica. It is a central Mexican food item that did not get introduced to the Maya region until after the Lowland Collapse. Before that time the Maya ate tamales or maize dough dissolved in water. Their meals were typically a hot water/dough mixture for breakfast, cold water/dough mixture for lunch, and tamales for dinner with other fruits and vegetables and sometimes meat thrown in. It made sense since no comals were found in the region until later, but it was something I had never really thought about. Food is often overlooked sometimes. Reading this made me wonder what the people in my own area ate. We know they grew maize, but how they ate it is a different story. They left few pictorial decorations like murals or painted vases. Instead all we have are the large hollow and small solid figurines found in tombs and graves and they do not depict eating. From what I know of their ceramics they do not have comals. Perhaps they had tomales or made a dough they dissolved in water. It is a conversation I have had with my advisor and so far it is still a mystery. That may all change once someone is able to procure some funding to excavate households which no one has done yet.

As I write my latest technical report, I am struck by just how much archaeology relies on ceramic types for dating. I have a few non-tableware diagnostics at this particular site, but by and large I am talking about what I've found in the historical record and the bits of someone's dinnerware that back me up. It's a strange business, archaeology.

This may slightly break the 20 year rule, but I would like to talk (briefly) about how different cultures and nations dealt with feeding troops in the field. Inspired by /u/Lost_city's comment about the medieval welsh, I started thinking about other situations in which people eat in groups or singly. While I know that this is anecdotal, I've heard a variety of stories over the years about the local reception of American military food by local civiliuans in the various overseas locations that American troops have been stationed, as the opinion of the American military food by the enlisted men of our opponents and allies. Here are the stories I've heard over the years:

• There are a number of anecdotes from the Vietnam war that the Viet Cong would be perfectly willing to steal and eat american MREs from buried or abandoned supply caches -- with the exception of one particular variety (suet & beans?) that was so gross that even the starving vietnamese wouldn't eat it. While this story may or may not have any truth to it, it certainly says something about how the troops viewed the rations they were issued.

• When discussing the matter with people who have served in Levantine militiaries, they have generally found the American practice of issuing individual rations to be quite odd and inefficient. As far as I can tell, the practice in Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Syria, etc, was usually to give a squad, section or platoon, a certain amount of dry foods and camp-cooking kit to share. The meals were pre-packaged, but with the expectation (and portion sizes) that they would be shared out a single pot by a group of (7-12) soldiers. This meal generally was designed so that it could be eaten without a fork, using only a spoon or piece of bread to scoop up the food. I think the Israelis may have started using American-style MREs sometime in the 1990s, but even they were something of a novelty.

• In general, the practice seems to have been that non-Western militaries generally follow the pattern of issuing rations to be shared by a squad or section, at least prior to the 1990s. The practice of issuing individual-sized pre-packaged, self-heating rations seems to have been restricted to the USA, France, Britain, and maybe a few other western counties. Most of the Warsaw Block and the 3rd world generally stuck with communally-issued rations consisting chiefly of dried starches and dried beans.

That's all I can recall now. I'm visiting my great-uncle in a few weeks -- he was in the American Army back in the 1950s and may have more stories that I can't recall right now.

Speaking of military food, when did the Spork come along?

Though San didn't have any form of iron smelting before contact with iron-age Bantu peoples and Europeans, once contact was made (beginning probably a couple thousand years ago) iron and iron-working were quickly adopted. Arrows would often still have bone or thorn tips, but spear tips could be made of iron, and, perhaps more importantly, cooking pots could be made or traded.

When Richard B. Lee and company began their anthropological work with Ju/'hoansi San in the Dobe/Nyae Nyae region, the San lived a (mostly) politically independent forager existence that seemed materially similar to the way their pre-contact ancestors would have lived. However, they used iron and iron cooking pots. Wondering how pre-contact San would cook and eat their food, Lee asked a man how their ancestors lived before iron pots. The man thought for a moment and said, "Well, you can't live without iron cooking pots, so they must have died."

On the subject of tableware, one problem that has always bothered me: Where did pre-modern peoples get the glazes they used on pottery? The clay itself is obviously, dirt cheap. But most modern ceramic dyes and glazes use all sorts of compounds that weren't readily available before a modern understanding of chemistry existed. Many modern glazes used by artisans contain elements unknown before the 18th century, like boron and chromium.

More of a question than an answer-

I have read that in Medieval Wales the high born ate in pairs. They shared the same plate, but probably had their own knives. It's an interesting custom.

Today we normally eat singly unless at certain restaurants. But what other cultures adopted unusual (for us) dinner pairings, groupings?