🍜 Food Map Over Time · Culinary History Atlas

Getting around

🖱️Click any marker for its name, era, and full story

🔍Scroll or pinch to zoom; drag to pan

‹›Toggle the side panel for a distraction-free view

⛶Fullscreen button hides the browser chrome entirely

🗺️ Trace a food migration

🌶️Pick any food from the top bar — chili, potato, coffee, wine and more

→Animated arcs draw the route across the globe, stop by stop, with dates

⏹Click the food again or hit Stop to clear the routes

Filter by era

🏺Ancient — crop domestications going back 10,000 BCE

⚔️Medieval — spice trade, feast culture, monastery brewing

⛵Early Modern — Columbian Exchange reshapes world food

🏭Industrial — canning, refrigeration, mass production

📡Modern — organic movements, alt-protein, food crises

Suggested journeys to try

🌶️ Start with the Columbian Exchange How tomatoes reached Italy, chili pepper conquered Asia, and maize fed Africa — all after 1492.

🌿 Follow the Spice Routes Nutmeg, cloves, pepper, cinnamon — the ingredients that launched empires and global trade.

🫙 Trace Fermentation through time From 9,000-year-old barley beer in Iran to the global kombucha boom.

☠️ Map the Famines & Crises The Irish blight, Holodomor, Bengal famine, Dust Bowl — food as weapon and tragedy.

🌍 Explore Indigenous Food Systems Aboriginal fish traps 6,600 years old, Polynesian ocean voyaging, Inuit zero-waste hunting.

Pro tips

▶Select a journey then hit Autoplay — the map flies through every stop chronologically

⏸Pause mid-journey to read a marker in detail, then resume

🌍Country colours show the Agricultural Heritage Index — darker green = older, richer food culture

🔗Switch to the Kindness Map or GPS via the links at the bottom of the screen

Food Map · Over Time