Paper short abstract:

An important feature characterizing Africa and Middle Asia as different culture areas is the contrast between two cuisines: bread/oven and pot/porridge. This difference that emerged about 10.000 years ago has had far-reaching socio-cultural consequences until the present.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores symbolic uses of food and food related items (pots, ovens, hearths etc.) and the ways theyare embedded in material forms.

My discussions of such symbolic elaborations are based on empirical material from two core regions (The Middle Asian and the African) defined by two different cuisines (the bread/oven cuisine and the porridge/pot cuisine) within the Neolithic period. I shall also discuss relations between these cuisines in their fringes or cross-roads such as: Deccan, Horn of Africa, and Nubia.

My attempt to identify regions by cuisines is related to the conventional culture area approach formulated long time ago by Kroeber. Cuisines appear to have certain time-space continuum in the sense of their long-term and geographical distribution. From this point of view it becomes important to look at the fringes of cuisines where items of different cuisines overlap as well as changes over time.

My focus is on what I call the Middle Asian cuisine (bread/wheat/barley and connected food preparation items) in the larger geographical region (from the Mediterranean to Deccan) within which incremental innovations and development occurred and spread. However, to explore the Middle Asian cuisine I find it necessary to place it in a comparative context of the African cuisine, where African food crops spread across the Indian Ocean during the 4th millennium bp.