Jack's Food Blog

Since I’ve been in the food scene, there have been a huge number of trends that us foodies have loved to get stuck into. 2020 saw the explosion of sourdough; before that, it was the fermented and gut-friendly food hype that everyone was talking about. My parents saw cooking French food as the height of sophistication when they were younger, with the classic sauces and techniques seen as the pinnacle of foodie culture. Since then, it’s been everything from Asian, to Italian, Lebanese and Eastern European that’s captured the world’s attention.

However, what we don’t tend to think about too much, and the folks over at Betway Casino have done an amazing job of in their article, “What will You Eat in 2050” is the future of food consumption and what’s likely to drive it. After reading the interesting piece. I thought I’d take a look back into the big food innovations of the past, to see if there’s anything we can learn that might shape our future developments.

So, without further ado, here are the biggest inventions that drove the way we eat today!

Fire

it may seem strange to think it now, but we humans haven’t always been able to cook our meat to perfection. However, scientists agree that the harnessing of heat (firstly through raw fire) in our cooking represented an important step not only in how we eat, but actually our genetic makeup too. Fire helped us cook root vegetables we would have struggled to before, as well as drastically increasing our meat consumption, giving us and our brains the energy they needed to grow.

Refrigeration

Before fridges, we humans came up with a range of nifty techniques for storing food, but none came close to the innovation that was the fridge. Everything from mounds of soil, to frequent ice delivery were commonplace before the fridge. Household refrigeration itself meant that a wide range of foods could be kept, and kept for longer for the average person, revolutionising how we ate

Curing & Smoking

Survival was hard for early humans. Not only did we have to work hard for every scrap of food we could salvage, or animal we could catch and butcher, we also largely had to eat what we acquired over a very quick timespan, or risk poisoning through the nasty microbes and bacteria that built up over time in foods. Enter curing and smoking! In curing, we added salt to our foods, which blocked unwanted life from forming. In the case of smoking, it’s exposure to lowe level heat over a long period of time that does the job, drying it out and stopping bacterial and fungal growth

Pasteurisation

Louis Pasteur has quite rightly been called a “Hero of Food Safety” for his eponymous innovation Pasteurisation. The process involves super-heating milk to between 60 and 100 degrees celsius, in order to kill off harmful organisms, without compromising the quality of the product. Pasteur also proved the Germ Theory of contamination, enabling us to enjoy more, more varied foods and drinks from then onwards.

So, there you have it, the top 5 innovations in humans’ food history. What all of the innovations above had in common is that they solved a problem for humans, whether it was scarcity, flavour, or more commonly just safety. But what will be next? Something to help us feed our growing population, replace meat, or abate our ongoing obesity crisis? Take a look at Betway Casino’s piece for some fascinating thought-starters.

Or, if you’re in the mood for some foodie inspiration…