Philadelphia
Teach Me To Fish
by | Oct 2, 2024 5:46 pm
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Posted to: Visual Art
Ancient Food and Flavor
Penn Museum
3260 South St.
Philadelphia
Oct. 1, 2024
I looked down at 6,000-year-old strawberry seeds, elderly corn kernels and dried llama jerky preserved behind glass — and felt my stomach growl for a feastful future.
My vision was cooked up at the Penn Museum’s Ancient Food and Flavor exhibit.
I approached the display of 150 food-related artifacts like a homegrown American showing up for the infamous 72-ounce steak challenge. Because let me let you in on a little secret: The Penn Museum offers free admission for the half hour before closing time. So if you can get to the museum at 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, you’ll have half an hour to scarf down as much knowledge of early civilizations before the buffet gets cold (I mean, closes).
The show organizes itself around three sites where food remains have been abnormally well-preserved due to environmental conditions. There’s Robenhausen, a 6,000-year-old Neolithic settlement by the Swiss Lakes where flax and apples were successfully protected from bacteria when the former wetland was flooded. There’s Numayra in Jordan, which was destroyed by a fire 4,500 years ago that incidentally saved food scraps through its scorch.
Last but certainly not least is Pachacámac, an Andean city in a coastal desert environment where dry conditions managed to keep food from spoiling for over 600 years.
With so little time on my plate, it wasn’t necessarily the old leftovers — all of which looked, no surprise, like shit — that held my attention. Instead I spent a lot of time looking at a simple cartoon animation of life in Pachacámac.
It featured moving components imagining what a mundane afternoon among the ancient Incas pre-Spanish conquest might look like. I liked what I saw: A seaside shelter full of loose llamas and dogs where a horde of women were drinking chicha (corn beer) and snacking on peanuts by a guava tree. Other people were shown fishing or coming back from mountainous escapades.
I felt like a baby watching Cocomelon while staring at that picture. It’s not that the animation was especially eye-catching. It’s that I was face to face with an uncomplicated vision of modern utopian thought.
I wasn’t really looking at Pachacámac, the same way that toddlers watching Youtube Kids aren’t observing real bobbleheads saturated in sunshine. But an image of people providing for themselves — actively building their lives and culture around the food sources that sustain them — read as fantasy to me in a twisted way.
However, based on my 30-minute, museum-made-understanding of time and place, Pachacámac was a cosmopolitan city that’s granted us modern evidence of the Inca Empire’s vast food networks. The people of Pachacámac hauled elite goods from the mountains, coastal valleys, and the sea — and they cooked not just for sustenance, but for ceremony.
“Workers specialized in producing specialty foods and fine crafts,” a placard read. “Residents tended many little gardens and kept guinea pigs for meat and as religious offerings.”
Foods like freeze-dried potatoes (chuño) could be prepared only at mountainous altitudes. Residents reportedly snacked on dried fish and fruits like avocado and guava. Those are all my favorite foods, but they break my budget at the grocery store.
Roasted meat, on the other hand, was saved for special occasions. That said, we apparently get our modern word, jerky, from the Incas — who referred to dried meat at “ch’arki.”
In Pachacámac, as with so many other cultures, food is something spiritual. It’s offered up as a way to honor dead ancestors; it transcends time and space.
Successful survival in my day-to-day is practiced through McDonald’s runs and an occasional attempt at fiscal-friendly meal prepping. My appetite seems to be shrinking everyday while the space that microplastics take up in the conspiratorial portion of my brain seems to grow.
Being part of a self-sufficient society dining on fine foods using artisan-crafted dish wear? That’s probably not on the table for me. It’s hard to connect to your food when most knowledge to be gleaned about your groceries is fucked up. But I’d like to figure out how to make food about pageantry, and not just spoiled perfection, once again.
All in all, 30 minutes was not enough time to digest the whole show. But my time at the exhibit helped me recognize some real hunger, in myself and others, to know more about where not only we — but our food — comes from. That could be a start.
