Of the things available to most of us, what are common and the oldest things we might find on a store shelf?
probably salt
I’m going to suggest food items that we still take from nature and eat with minimal preparation:
- Honey
- Fish like salmon, trout, grouper
- Shellfish (eg oysters)
We have evidence of shellfish and fish being eaten for a very long time - at least the middle stone age at 140kya - in middens which are 10s of thousands of years old.
Honey is likely to have been a food source - a treat even - even before humans left Africa (so before 100kya) but sadly this would be invisible in the archeological record
I’m not really confident about what qualifies as “common food” or “typical western diet”, nor the accuracy of the following sources, but I feel like if someone’s going to answer OP, they should have something to back it up.
Onions - 5,500 years ago
http://www.vegetablefacts.net/vegetable-history/history-of-onions/There are two schools of thoughts regarding the home of onion cultivation, and both look at the period 5,500 years ago in Asia. Some scientists believe that onion was first domesticated in central Asia and others in Middle East by Babylonian culture in Iran and West Pakistan
Sugar - 6,000 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sugarThe extraction of sugar cane juice from the sugarcane plant, and the subsequent domestication of the plant in tropical India and Southeast Asia sometime around 4,000 BC.
Beans - 7,000 years ago
https://cablevey.com/history-of-dried-beans-how-it-all-started/Examining the origins of the dry bean takes us back to South America. These, serving as a dietary cornerstone, were initially cultivated over 7,000 years ago in the southern regions of Mexico and Peru.
Corn - 10,000 years ago
https://cropcareequipment.com/blog/corn-farming-history/People have been farming corn, or maize, for thousands of years. Native civilizations in present-day Mexico first domesticated corn around 10,000 years ago.
Potatoes - 13,000 years ago
https://spudsmart.com/domestication-of-the-potato/Wild potatoes from the (then) humid coastal plains of South America were probably first eaten by people as early as 13,000 years ago.
Rice - 13,500 to 8,200 years ago China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RiceWheat - as early as 21,000 BC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat
Apples?
Approximately 750,000 years ago: early Paleolithic food gatherers in (modern) Kazakhstan, central Asia, discovered sour crab apples growing wild in the forest.
Chickens were domesticated around 8000 years ago.
Bread and sugar. Everything is bread and sugar.
Bread and beer. The reason that modern civilization exists. Of course, the modern versions are quite different from the ancient ones
Onions.
In fact it’s the oldest food, found everywhere domesticated and nobody knows where they come from or who first domesticated them.
