FOOD HISTORY CAN REVEAL SECRET RECIPES AND USEFUL INFORMATION FOR TODAY’S INDUSTRY

Georgios Malliaris  discuss how the study of history can reveal the struggle of man to survive and cover his nutritional needs. Through the centuries, man was fighting to get his food and feed his family. There was a continuous development of how man was looking for his food. At the beginning, he was searching for food, here and there, eating roots and whatever else he could find on his way. Later he became a hunter and a farmer leading to today's organized structures of intensive agricultural production techniques and methods. Man developed not only the production of food but also the processing that made food better and more palatable. Food processing was continuously improved by either creating new products and taste or increasing the quantity and quality of the already used food.

 The Food specialists of different years, studied carefully many food and drinks processes and created their own recipes and techniques for new products. Traditional products are tested over the years in all their parameters. These products contribute to the nutrition of the populations around the world. Traditional production of food and drinks was based on the raw food available in the regions and the local knowledge on how to process it to arrive to a meal. We ended up with an enormous list of recipes for all kind of food used by nations that forms an amazing richness of historical elements recorded by historians and food experts. These elements is what Georgios Malliaris presented in his research with the definition of gastronomic models for each nation, regions or other delimited area of our planet. In his book Greek Taste analyses and sets a thorough description of the Greek Model of Gastronomy providing the relevant information. Greek Gastronomy is another book where he sets all the traditional recipes, another set of his research on the traditional food history of Greece. This research is a huge project that will take many years to be completed for all different sorts of gastronomic models existent on earth. Finally, it is worth to note that the study has brought to the surface many unknown links of people through their gastronomic culture as the need for food is common for all human beings.