Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4.

This is the sound of worship. It's coming from a Christian church in Chiapas, the

southernmost state of Mexico, where the local Indian population are offering their God not just their devotion but also their food.

It's a practice they've been following for thousands of years.

Nowadays we like to say we are what we eat but for generations amongst the faithful

it's been equally true to say we worship what we eat. This willingness to venerate the food on our plate seems to arrive at a particular moment in human development

and it tells us much more about a society than its favorite supper dish.

He is always present in one way or another.

Either to be eaten or to be looked at or to be worshipped,

it is part of the cultural identity.

A history of the world.

In a stone statue discovered in Honduras, approximately 1,300 years old. Some archaeologists argue that food must always have had a divine role, even for our earliest

ancestors just think of the cow goddess of Egypt or Bacchus and

series of classical mythology, or Anapurna, the Hindu goddess of food. But there's a particular

time, after the end of the Ice Age, so between 10 and 5,000 years ago, roughly,

when a range of new foods seems to be accompanied by a range of new gods.

Across the world, people began to identify particular plants that would provide them with food.

In the Middle East, as we saw in the last programme, it was wheat and barley.

In China, millet and rice, in Papua New Guinea, Tarot and in Africa, sorghum.

And as they did so, everywhere stories about gods emerged, gods of death and of rebirth, gods who would guarantee the cycle of

the seasons and ensure the return of the crops, and gods more importantly that represent

food itself.

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