Medieval Islamic Food

Around the Mediterranean, people continued in the Islamic period to rely on the three main foods from antiquity: wheat, olive oil, and wine. Though technically speaking Islam did not allow alcoholic drinking, still a lot of people did drink wine. People who didn't drink wine began to drink more tea, which came from India or China.

On the other hand, Islam forbade people to eat pig meat (pork and ham and bacon), and people really did stop keeping pigs. Throughout the Islamic empire there is a big change from the Roman to the Islamic period where people stop keeping pigs and start keeping more goats and sheep instead. This unfortunately had a bad effect on the environment, because pigs do not destroy a forest when they live in it, but sheep and goats do. As a result of there being more sheep and goats, the landscape of North Africa, especially, was stripped of a lot of trees, and a lot of what had been forest turned into bare hills with just little scrubby bushes on them. Without the trees to hold the soil, a lot of dirt washed off the hills into the ocean, and the farmland was no longer as good as it had been before.

Another important change in food in the Islamic period was that people began growing and eating more citrus fruits like oranges and lemons, which had mainly been grown in India and China before this time. This may have helped a lot with getting enough Vitamin C, which before people had gotten from wine vinegar and cabbages mainly.

By 1450 AD, at the end of this period, Sufi believers were also just beginning to drink coffee as part of their religious experience. They bought the coffee from East African traders.

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