Apart from history, culture and traditional values, food habit plays an important key role in determining the life style of each specific community. Because humans made up their food habits depends on the climate and their surrounding natural habitats.
Like this, each community in the World has its own cultural identification and grown with their own natural habitat globally over time and still growing. I hope we are all well aware of these facts.
In the Stone Age, tribal communities who survived through time had lived with available food, cloth and shelter. However, they evolved and preserved their food only after their culture started on river beds and they used to occupy their own tribal land. Only after the introduction of fire, they learn to cook and preserve their foods.
The ultimate objective of this post is to clarify and make the reader aware of history of Tamilians food culture which is known to have 6000 year old history. All these information shared here in this regard are collected from the old Tamil poems. It is pity that, out of the 6000 year history, we have information only for the last 1500 years.
Even though, we got the poem of 1500 years, the olden historical happenings before 1500 years was known from sculptures, saasanam and from the folk stories and rest to the guess. However, the information of food habit is very mere and on contrary they are absolutely interesting.
From the poems of Puranaanooru and Perumpaanatrupadai, we came to know the food habit of olden Tamils, as they used to hunt animals and had eaten raw and dried it for after use and then they used to cook and preserve on time run. It becomes lengthy and tedious job to explain all intrinsic details, so that I just left the poem part here.
On other side of hunting practices for food, old Tamil community used to keep cattle’s on open grazing land for food. This we can say as the perfect stage, where they became aware of developing own style of manufacturing and preserving food grains. We also can say this the period, the old Tamils started cooking their food.
What is called cooking? How Tamils used to cook their food?
Further information in upcoming post!!!
Original – www.siththarkal.com
Translated by Lalithambika Rajasekaran
