RoughRomanMemes

Explanation: Just a rare bit of OC from me! Was thinking about food as I ate dinner today (how recursive!) and decided to make this!

All polities and cultures have different challenges and desires according to their environments and goals. Culinary challenges no less than others! How we eat is also often a reflection of how we live - or how we're trying to live.

The Roman Empire had a robust logistics system for its famed Legions (and less-famed but no-less-important auxiliaries) wherein centralized supply depots were manned and kept filled so that food could be rapidly distributed to smaller distribution hubs along marching routes, or established in the wake of a legion's advance to provide reliable supply lines to get the legionaries their allotted rations. Diet was seen as key to health by the Romans, so the 'generous' variety was a touch self-serving by the polity - you want your soldiers in the best condition you can get them, for as long as you can keep them there! You may be marched to exhaustion, drilled like a machine, beaten like a dog, have your leave revoked because your centurion had a bad day, and tossed into a meat-grinder of a war... but a Roman soldier can always depend on the government moving heaven and earth to get two things to him - his pay, and his food! (And, of course, as in every pre-modern military system, ravaging the land for anything edible was also an option, at least in hostile territory)

This may seem natural or intuitive to us in the modern day, but that level of organization was deeply unusual for pre-modern polities. Alexander the Great conquered a good fifth of Eurasia playing logistics by ear. As late as the 17th century AD, European supply and rationing systems - and payment - for armies could be very ad hoc. The Romans, simply by saying "Let's make this nice and orderly" actually gave themselves a massive advantage.

But for that matter, the system could not have survived simply as a 'command economy' - the Roman government was actually very small, with few expenses other than the military, and the general attitude was to prefer that low-cost system for administering the provinces. Without a large civilian bureaucracy to regulate production and movement (and thus prevent the government being 'cheated'), organizing large-scale, regular seizures would have been an impossible task. The Roman military sometimes requisitioned foodstuffs, but more often made large purchases from local merchants. To have local merchants plentiful enough - and themselves supplied enough - to make such large exchanges, a robust market is needed - something provided both by the fussy and meticulous legalism (especially in contract law) of the Romans, and the constant presence of their Legions. As bad as the Legions could be to the locals, they also were very active in crushing banditry - welcome to the general population, but especially welcome to the local merchants!

Roman legionaries were often also detached when on garrison in the provinces to act as civil servants in temporary positions that didn't rate attention from an imperial slave or freedman - a welcome reprieve from ditch-digging duty!

The Mongols and Turkic peoples, and to some degree horse-riding pastoralist nomads more generally, play the game of food logistics on easy mode - where they go, so too goes their food supply! Herds are split and combined as the local environment allows, and are moved almost as easily as (mounted) people! When your food supply literally marches with you, relocating or suddenly changing plans is a (relative) breeze. In particular, placing dried meat under their saddle in a bag, they could 'tenderize' an otherwise rather rough meal simply by doing their normal riding for the day. Work while you work!

The only question is deciding where to go... I hear there's plenty of water and pasture for the herds just over the border, where all of those sedentary grass-eaters live...

During the Age of Sail, the poor sods who gave the era its name got to 'enjoy' a uniquely terrible diet. Rather than poverty or local environment being the issue, it was that the Age of Sail introduced, for the first time, semi-safe oceanic travel... but that travel took literal-months without resupply, during which time the only real source of food and water was onboard the ship. Water is fairly non-negotiable in terms of storage and preservation... food, on the other hand, can get quite... 'preserved'. Since these are largely impoverished and desperate men being fed, and by entities which are either strapped for cash (early modern states) or looking to maximize profit margins (early modern corporations), well...

The two most common foodstuffs were hardtack and salted pork (or corned beef). Salted pork was just pork that was soaked in salt... and then soaked again in a solution of salt and water. That's a lot of fucking salt. Corned beef is similarly salted. Hardtack, on the other hand, is just a simple mixture of flour, water, and salt. Fortunately, it was discovered that with such simple ingredients, giving such a simple cracker a second trip in the oven once it's cooled greatly increased its storage time, increased its resistance to insects and mold, and only slightly decreased its nutritional content. And baking it four times made it last even longer!

Unfortunately, even just baking it two times also makes it hard and tasteless to the point of being unpalatable. To top it off, a few insects can penetrate the hard exterior and hard interior of hardtack, namely burrowing types like worms and weevils, which added a little surprise 'flavor' to those 'exciting' long trips across the world's oceans.

In the pre-Columbian Americas, large domesticated animals like horses and oxen were unavailable, and there aren't many great inland seas to allow for safe and convenient shipping, which makes issues of weight all-important when considering journeys of any serious distance. Particularly for the indigenous societies which relied more on hunting than farming, this meant that food had to be calorie-dense and physically dense - you can't just pack up a wagon with an extra box of hardtack if you're going to be another week on the trail.

Maple sugar, modern-style jerky (albeit made from game or buffalo), and pemmican were all culinary innovations of various indigenous American cultures - the latter two foodstuffs being almost immediately recognized by later European travelers as peerless travel rations despite the... otherwise high level of cultural chauvinism expressed by many European explorers of the Americas. The technique of making jerky was eventually spread from tip-to-toe of the Americas, while pemmican and especially maple sugar were more regional.

Maple sugar might not sound like a 'ration' to our modern, calorie-counting ears, but as a calorie-dense food was highly useful to peoples whom often needed to make long and physically exhausting journeys carrying only minimal weight. Maple sugar was mixed with dried corn as a high-efficiency hunting ration. Just add water!

Besides charqui/jerky, soldiers from the Inca empire also had freeze-dried potatoes at their disposal:

Locally known as chuño. Spread taters on a high altitude field, let them freeze through the night and thaw through the day, trample them to remove skins and further moisture, and optionally wash them (if you don't you get black chuño, with a stronger flavour; else you get white chuño, like in the pic). Then to eat the chuño rehydrate some in warm water, and cook it as usual. You can also grind it for some sort of instant potato mash, or for a stew/soup thickener.

The whole process is rather laborious, and it takes five days (not counting transport), but chuño was essential for logistic reasons — it weights a fraction of the raw potatoes it was made from, without losing too many nutrients. And if properly stored it lasts for decades without spoiling.

So for example, if you were a soldier on march you'd pack some chuño, perhaps some other dried ingredients (like charqui or dried peppers [nobody likes boring food]), then supplement it with meat and greens foraged from the fields (…or pillaged from locals). Foraging is necessary because potatoes aren't exactly protein-rich, and you still need vitamins, but even if you're unlucky at least you won't get hungry.

Note however the empire didn't create chuño. It was the opposite — chuño created the empire. The technology behind its production predates the formation of the empire, it's from the 13th century; and since the kingdom of Cuzco had really good material conditions to produce lots of chuño, it was able to expand and become the Inca empire.

A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry coined the term "tyranny of the wagon equation" based on this sort of thing. There are hard limits on how far you can travel using food you're carrying. Horses help, but their benefit is asymptotic, because horses eat more than you do. The real answer for how these armies ate is that they showed up and stole shit. "Foraging" is a very polite way to describe looting and pillaging, often of your own countrymen. What are you going to do about it? They're the fucking army. And because that army was mostly farmers, the Romans carried sickles as standard equipment, so they could harvest whatever was nearby. Caesar relied on this to make some high risk / high reward moves that nearly killed everybody. But because it worked out, he was hailed as a heroic genius... from a distance.

In the spring time when the snow is still around and the weather is still cold we conduct a major Canada Goose hunt. This allows us to harvest lots of large birds and since it is still cold outside, we can temporarily store them outside in the snow without spoiling. This gives us time to process these birds for further long term storage.

Since there are not much bugs around yet, everything can be cut open, laid out without worrying about spoiling.

The birds are then cut into long thin strips for smoking over a fire in a teepee ... racks and racks of them would be processed this way. In modern times they look like the image below.

But in my mom's time and grandmother's time, they said that that these birds would be cut and stretched so thin that it would be about four feet long (but folded over which makes it stretched to eight feet long) ... and all those old people used to butcher a bird so that you could separate the flesh from the bones into two whole parts. All being done on your lap and no table.

Needs Mesoamerican Yaoquizqui deploying tactical tamales.

Me after seeing that list of food: