The History of Plant-Based Foods

In tenth-century Baghdad, a sprawling, multicultural city, home to around one million people, a bookseller compiles a collection of recipes for a wealthy patron and readers across the Middle East and Mediterranean. 

Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq’s Book of Food, one of the world’s oldest cookbooks and the earliest surviving cookbook written in Arabic, includes two chapters on plant-based ‘substitute’ foods. Most were attributed to the region's Christian communities, whose fasts still involve abstaining from animal products, but many were also recommended for the sick. Chronicles and literary sources suggest that plant-based products sustained much of the population, including Muslims and Jews, and were associated with poverty. On the other hand, the cookbook’s ‘substitute’ dishes seem to have been designed to amaze and impress wealthy guests by imitating the real thing.

About the speaker - Costas Theo Gavriel

My family is originally from Cyprus, and when I began researching this topic, I was struck by how familiar many of these thousand-year-old recipes were to me. Even more familiar were the tensions between the many meanings ascribed to plant-based foods, and how they shaped and were shaped by patterns of production and consumption. At a time of growing global food insecurity, plant-based foods are both praised and attacked on medical, environmental, ethical, socio-economic and cultural grounds, and the need to sustainably feed the population continues to influence and clash with our ideas about what we should eat.

I am a current Master’s student at the University of Oxford, having completed my BA in History and Modern Languages.

Please arrive at 11:45 am. The talk will start at midday, and lunch will be served at 1:00 pm. 

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