Hi, AskHistorians, bit of an odd one here.
Myself and some friends were discussing how a plate is defined - is it a tool? An implement? A vessel? Our discussing of this led us to the wiki article for plates, where we discovered that:
a) A plate is a flat, cocave vessel.
b) Plates as we know them today were invented in European potteries likely sometime shortly after 1708.
From discovering this, our discussion become one of the practicality of the plate, specifically; what did people eat from before the creation of plates?
Were they bowls? Some manner of primitive bowls? Did people eat straight from cooking implements, or straight from the floor?
I've looked around but can't find anything that might inform us of this. Please help me AskHistorians, you're my only hope.
The standard food vessel, at least in Europe in early medieval period, was the trencher. The trencher was generally stale/old bread (although sometimes they were made of wood) that was used to hold food and mop up sauces at the end of the meal. Richer households and courts used metal trenchers.
Platters were used to serve food, and these tended to be wood/metal.
See The Good Wife's Guide (Le Menagier de Paris) by Gina Greco and Christine Rose, or Food and Eating in Medieval Europe by Martha Carlin and Joe T. Rosenthal.
Sorry about the limited focus (my specialty is medieval and Renaissance history), hopefully someone can fill in the period before this!
There are as many aswers to that question as there are cultures. When one looks back to hunter gatherer societies and the ancient traditions their descendants have maintained, one finds several answers to the problems of containment of food. Here's a few:
Basketry - several societies would make baskets through either weaving or folding bark. These vessels could take several different shapes (boxes, baskets, plates, etc) depending on the planned usage (berry picking, fishing, etc) (modern example of traditional birch-bark Innu basket).
In other cultures, flat leaves were used to handle food (think of Tamales, or banana leaves in Indonesian cuisine).
Sone cultures also just placed the food on the floor in the middle of a dwelling and cut it up for eating collectively with their hands. Such a practice is still currently maintained in many Inuit families of the Eastern canadian arctic.
As to plates, the oldest examples of ceramic usage go back 30 000 years. The cool thing about ceramics is that even for hunter-gatherers, the relative ease with which basic pieces can be produced from common materials makes it unnecessary to carry them with you when you migrate. So ancient ceramic plates, bowls and even pots go really way, way back... Perhaps your reference about the 1700s means individual china plates, but plates and bowls were used in several cultures either as collective or individual receptacles for food for centuries before that.