Past

Food Genealogy: The Origins of Ingredients

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What’s it all about?

It is Friday night and you feel like eating Italian. You go and grab a slice of margarita pizza. Very Italian, right? What if I told you that your pizza is the granddaughter of Mexican, Turkish and Polish?

Come and enjoy a trip through time and space, identifying the origins and spread of ten common ingredients, while discussing the techniques that archaeologists use to identify these food items in their excavations.

What we will cover?

In this class, Dr Coral Montero Lopez will discuss the history of ten of the most common food ingredients in the world. Some of them, like tomato and chillies, have spread extensively and have been deeply adopted by other groups to the point that these ingredients have become key ingredients in Italian and Asian cuisines.

Who will be teaching?

Coral profile pictureCoral is a Mexican archaeologist who has studied the ancient diet of the Maya people in the south of Mexico. She has more than 15 years of experience as an archaeologist and has worked in many parts of Mexico and more recently in Australia. With the information she has gathered from her studies, she has set a small catering company where she cooks traditional dishes using Prehispanic ingredients and methods.