The history of technology is concerned not only with the growth of foodstuffs but with the subsequent processes of preparation, to which mankind has devoted increasing ingenuity and skill. Under the early civilizations the diet of the masses came very largely from cereals or pulses, varied to some extent with fish: the flesh of animals was beyond the means of the poor save for special occasions. Animal foods are nowadays more important: a large proportion of our cereals therefore goes in fodder. But the economy of Rome, for instance, depended upon the cheap import of wheat by sea, and the population--in the time of Augustus, nearly one million--lived mainly upon a poor-quality flour which came from wheat that had been coarsely ground and sifted, and not very thoroughly cleaned.

Pounding the grain to get rid of the husks and then grinding the kernels to make flour were originally processes carried on separately in every household. Pestle and mortar gave place to the saddle-quern, used by the Egyptian housewife 4,000 years ago. The second stage in the development of the quern, commonly met with in classical Greece, was the so-called pushing mill, in which both stones were flat and grooved, and grain was fed from a hollow in the upper surface of the top stone through a slit on to the grinding surfaces below. Then came the rotary hand-mill, one of the first important new uses of the principle of rotary motion since the potter's wheel. A handle rotated the upper stone, which was perforated in the centre to admit the corn and had a wooden or iron bridge fixed across the perforation, so as to transfer the weight of the upper stone to a spindle fixed in the middle of the lower one. These rotary querns came to Rome from the Near East, and are associated with the growth of the class of professional millers, but their spread was a result of the fact that the armies of Rome were accustomed to grind their own corn, every group of ten men being provided with a mill. Larger mills were known as donkey-mills, from one common source of animal power; their survival at Pompeii suggests that they were a regular feature of urban civilization, and it was not until the fourth century A.D. that water-mills began to take their place.

The empires of the Near East and the Mediterranean made great use of the fig, the olive, and the grape: the plants which bear them take some years to come into full bearing, but their deep, widespread roots tap the subsoil moisture, which enables them to withstand drought, and they crop plentifully for many years. The fig-tree, indeed, may bear two or three crops a year, and was always a staple food for the poorer classes, including slaves. The olive was the main source of oil for all classes: indeed, the word 'oil' is believed to have come, through the Latin and Greek, from the ancient Semitic word for olive oil. Oils or fats from animal sources came to predominate in northern Europe, however, where the olive will not flourish and the expensive importation of olive oil was largely confined to ecclesiastical requirements. There were two main processes in preparing the oil. The first separated the pulp from the kernel without crushing the latter, for which purpose the Romans used an oil-mill --two cylindrical stones turning on a central pivot with a sufficient (variable) clearance to separate the pulp from the olives spread evenly in a flat trough below. The second process was the extraction of the juice from the pulp, which in the earliest times was done simply by twisting the top of a porous bag so as to squeeze its contents. In the last millennium B.C. the principle of the lever was brought into use, weights of all kinds being attached at the loose end of a hinged beam so as to extract the juice from pulp which lay in a bag under the beam. Pliny knew of four types of presses, worked by beams which might be as much as 50 feet long, or by screws. The screw principle, associated with Archimedes, was  applied first to force down the beam, and a little later to work directly on the top of a press.

The press was used also for the grape, but the initial processes of viticulture were much more elaborate than those of growing the olive-tree. It was an art which came to Greece from the Near East, but one which the Greeks raised to its full height. The wine which they exported westwards was a determining factor in the growth of Celtic culture, and it is claimed that Hellenistic culture spread eastwards precisely as far as the vine would grow. In Greek vineyards the plants lay generally along the ground, their growth helped by careful hoeing, the pruning of unnecessary leaves during the summer, and an occasional use of green manure. In September the baskets of grapes were brought in to be trodden on cement or wooden floors, the first product--especially the juice squeezed from the grapes by their own weight--being the best. It was the second yield and quality of grape juice that was extracted by the press. The must was then stored for six months to ferment in huge pottery vessels, the  type of the so-called tub in which Diogenes made his home. These vats were smeared inside and out with resin, which gave a characteristic tang to the liquid that was taken from them, and finally filtered into amphorae for sale. Greek wines remained the best, though for quantity--running up to 1,600 to 1,700 gallons an acre --Italy became for a time the chief centre of the industry, followed by Spain. The Romans propped or trellised their vines, and took much trouble to vary the conditions of fermentation for different types of grape and to modify the flavor. But the biggest change was the introduction of the wooden cask with metal hoops, which came to Italy from the Celts about the beginning of our era, for barreled wine kept much better than that in clay amphorae. In return, the Romans established vine-growing in France, the Rhineland, and even southern Britain.

The vineyard, like many of the amenities of life, made but a slow recovery from the Dark Ages. A revival began about the time of Charlemagne, helped by the desire to have wine available for ritual use and for medical purposes. In the absence of sugar, grape-must was valued as a sweetening-agent where honey was scarce, and viticulture was promoted by the great monasteries; by the end of the twelfth century vineyards were being planted as far to the east as the valley of the Oder.

The preparation of malt to produce a fermented drink from corn was a common practice in the early empires: the Sumerians, for example, listed nineteen types of beer. The Greeks and Romans, however, regarded it as a barbarian drink characteristic of the Celts and, later, of the Germans: it was the latter who, by the thirteenth century A.D., had introduced the modern type of beer, flavored and preserved with hops, which were not grown in England until about 1400. There was no other major innovation in brewing until the introduction of porter early in the eighteenth century. Perry and cider were made at an early date from wild fruit, but cider-making from improved apples spread from Normandy to England in the thirteenth century, providing country districts with a drink which made no inroads upon valuable supplies of grain.

Alchemists were familiar with the process of distillation at least as early as the first century A.D., but a thousand years seem to have elapsed before it was applied to the preparation of strong potable spirits. A consequence of this development was the preparation of liqueurs, often a product of monastic herb-gardens, which acquired a new importance in the time of the Black Death ( 1348), when physicians are said to have commonly prescribed strong alcoholic drinks, perhaps for psychological rather than purely physical reasons. Hence came the distilling of gin with the juniper berry, brandy distilled from wine, and finally the much cheaper aqua vitae, 'the water of life'. This name seems to have meant originally almost pure alcohol, but was later attached to the brandy made from yeast-fermented barley, which in the fifteenth century became the characteristic and all-too-familiar means of alleviating the northern winter. Regulations against the abuse of strong drink testify to the existence of a serious social problem even before 1300.

Literature, before the days of the modern realistic novel, had little to say about the diet of the masses. It seems clear, however, that in the earlier Middle Ages it continued to be farinaceous and dull and was varied more often by fish than by meat. But from the thirteenth century onwards town workers, at least, had more frequent access to meat and other supplements to starchy foods. The introduction of a more varied diet must have helped to diminish the incidence of diseases, such as rickets and scurvy, which arise not from lack of food but from the absence of essential elements (vitamins) for maintaining health: such deficiency diseases were, indeed, rife among all classes. Where rye was the staple cereal, fearful plagues of ergotism occurred in hot, damp seasons which favored the infestation of the crop by a poisonous mould: in 994, for example, 40,000 people are said to have died from this cause in Aquitaine alone, and as late as the eighteenth century there were two severe outbreaks within six years. . .