Staple Crops’ Impact on Culture

 by Rowan Reddy

A large portion of human culture is centred around, and influenced by, food. This began in the early years of humanity, when hunting and gathering were the easiest ways to procure food. Many early cave paintings showed animals being hunted - for example, an almost 44,000 year old painting in a cave in Indonesia depicts several people hunting pigs. Because food was so scarce for prehistoric humans, cave paintings were likely meant to increase success when the hunters next attempted to catch prey. 

With the advent of farming, food-related art shifted from being centred around animals to mostly relating to staple crops. As the main staple crop in the UK and north-west Europe is wheat, much of our culture is centred around this grain. It might be less noticeable today, but some of the impacts of wheat’s influence still remain. Like in many languages, our terminology for food relates directly to our staple crops. For example, the word ‘meal’, the phrases ‘breadwinner’, ‘daily bread’, ‘bread and butter’... the list goes on. In Chinese, one word for food is 饭 (pronounced ‘fàn’) which can also refer to rice, another very important staple crop - in fact, roughly 40% of an average person’s daily calorie intake is composed of rice, wheat and maize in varying amounts. 

Not all staple crops are grains, though. Most non-grain staple crops are tubers and starchy root vegetables, like potatoes, yams, taro, and turnips. The potato, likely the most commonly eaten staple root, was first domesticated in southern Peru in around roughly 5000 BC. Potatoes featured as a design influence in ancient Peru for pottery, which is most noticeable in Peruvian water vessels, which depict the characteristic rounded, irregular shape of the potato.

The potato’s irregular shape inspired fear as well as creativity. Some potato-shaped vessels were used to represent a mutilated human form, and the potato’s bulbous,  regularly appeared in art as malformed animals and humans, meant to evoke images relating to deformities and hallucinations.

Other than potatoes, there’s plenty of art depicting other staple crops - especially wheat and bread-making. Baking has been depicted in art for thousands of years. Some of the earliest images of bread can be seen in ancient Egyptian art, showing bread as an offering for souls to consume in the afterlife, as a feature of daily life, as payment for work, and as a gift. The Egyptian hieroglyph for food was the combination of their hieroglyph for bread and their hieroglyph for beer, showing the importance of bread. As well as this, bread and beer, or measures of grain, were often used as payment for workers.

Overall, it’s clear that staple crops have had a massive impact on human culture. From art to language to sculpture, important foodstuffs have had an influence on almost every aspect of our lives.