Lentils
Lentils
Lentils are a type of bean, native to West Asia. They grow on low bushes, and can do well with very little water. The lentils themselves are the seeds of the plant. People have surely been gathering and eating lentils since they first came to West Asia, about 60,000 years ago. By the time of the Neolithic, about 10000 BC, West Asian farmers were deliberately farming lentils. Soon afterwards, people were farming lentils in Egypt and in Greece.
A lentil bush
From that time to this, lentils have been an important part of what people ate in West Asia, North Africa, and all around the Mediterranean Sea. Lentils have a lot of protein, and they're easy to cook by just boiling them in water to make lentil soup or lentil stew. And they taste good!
About 1500 BC, when the Indo-Europeans first came to northern India, they brought lentils with them, and from then on people also ate a lot of lentils in India, too. Lentils came with the Phoenicians to North Africa, about 800 BC if not before, and with Islamic traders to East Africa, about 800 AD (or earlier). But people in China never really started eating a lot of lentils, because they had soybeans in China and they just kept on eating those.
Learn by doing - projects with lentils
For more about lentils, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
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(a project)
Lentil Stew
Lentil Soup
West Asian food
Islamic food
Roman food
Indian food
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