‘Sweet and Delicious, he who Tastes it will Go Back to it’: Food, Memory and Religion in the Roman Middle East

Abstract

This article aims to understand food habits in Roman-period temples in the Middle East by exploring the nexus of taste, architecture and memory. This article shows that there was a range of flavours and tastes associated with religious behaviour and some that were explicitly not associated with religion. Where the data allow, this article demonstrates that some food practices can survive in cultural memory and be brought back after a seeming break of several hundred years: a glimpse of habits that are hard to break. I argue that we need to look beyond the rooms with benches to the whole temple building to understand the interplay between the foods eaten and the setting in which that happened. One of the strongest habits seems to have been the selective and deliberate incorporation of food memories into the fabric of the buildings. While there are clear similarities in behaviour across a wide tranche of time and space, there are also idiosyncracies that echo the malleability of memory to reflect long-term habits, but also to be open to new introductions.

Same Taste, Different Place: Looking at the Consciousness of Food Origins in the Roman World

“…4 See also Sutton 2000;: 7-9, 2008Holtzman 2006;Korsmeyer and Sutton 2011. 5 For more focused studies see Bartosiewicz 2003;Hamilakis 2015;Morley 2015a;Potter 2015;Kamash 2018;Rowan forthcoming. 6 For other examples of a varied non-elite diet see van der Veen 1998;van der Veen and Tabinor 2007;Reed and Leleković 2017;Martyn et al 2018.…”

Food systems in archaeology. Examining production and consumption in the past

“…This move away from simple dietary reconstructions has also allowed us to think about how people interacted with, experienced and thought about food (e.g. Hamilakis 2013;Hastorf 2017;Kamash 2018;Rowan 2019;Twiss 2007;; Van der Veen 2008;. A recent study by McClatchie et al (2019) explored foodways in Neolithic Ireland by integrating all the archaeological evidence available, including animal and plant remains, pottery and stone artefacts, human bone and stable-isotope analyses.…”