Takeaway dining in the ancient world

By mentioning takeaway foods people tend to think of the unhealthy products of American food chains. Especially in Hungary, where almost the entire society still lives mentally in a special form of feudalism, and found themselves totally unprepared for the opening to the global free market around in the late 1980s - early 1990. The overall confusion caused by the new possibilities of consumption turned the society into a weirdly deformed consevatism, there are possibly no other country in Europe where people are so deeply convinced that Past was a better place. 

In a society where the older generations still think that cooking means suffering (!) in the kitchen for hours and hours  (in the late 2000's, when gastroblogging became a thing, there were serious issues of older women bullying bloggers about how dare they provide content about meals easily prepared within half an hour), even just talking about takaway food involves always strong moral judgement. 

Although since the 2010s there is a renaissance of high quality artisan street food they are mostly accessable to the urban (new) middle/upper-middle classes living mostly in Budapest. (And this is more about cultural and not financial  boundaries.)

This is one of many reasons I think we should talk more about the fact that 

street food is actually older than home cooking. 

Eating out was far more common thing in ancient big cities than preparing your food at home. Mostly because most  people did not have private kitchens. It became standard only in the last few hundred years. Before that, kitchens were communal shared small smoky or non-existent.  Only with wealth, new building designs, and industrial fuel did households begin cooking as a default.

Of course, takeaway food was not fancy, it had to be prepared on a quick and cheep way to make the business profitable. In big thriving cities vendors offered the easiest way to start your on business and earn your livelyhood.¹

Street food never lacked consumers. Workers, travelers, craftsmen, sailors, bath-goers, basically everyone needed quick, convenient meals.  Menus  might have been varied, but the hits were consistent: bread (always, everywhere), olives and cheese, lentil or chickpea stews, sausages or salted fish, mulsum (wine sweetened with honey and herbs).

Takaway food has been always part of human existence, an everyday consumotion habit, and peefectly unnecessary to judge people falsly for it. 

📝Notes

¹ It was always one of the easiesr way, even in 19th century London (See more: Street Food by Charly Taverner)

📚 Further reading: 

A Cultural History of Food in Antiquity. (ed. Paul Erdkamp)

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