7 Meals That Survived Famines, Wars, and Empires

The first time I ate funge, I was sitting on an overturned bucket in a market stall in Luanda. It's a stiff, glossy paste made from cassava flour, and you eat it with your hands, tearing off a piece and using it to scoop up whatever's swimming in the bowl next to it (in this case, a fish stew with okra). The funge didn't taste like much. Cassava has never been about flavor; its legacy lies in the fact that it will still be there when everything else is gone.

That's true of most of the foods on this list. None of them were invented to impress anyone. They were invented to keep people alive through the worst stretches of their lives: a siege, a famine, a war, and a thousand-mile trek with no guarantee of what waited at the other end. Here are seven of them, along with the history that made them matter.

1. Hardtack
2. Pemmican
3. Cassava
4. Injera
5. Sourdough
6. Congee
7. Biltong

Hardtack

Picture a cracker with the personality of a brick. That's hardtack: flour, water, and sometimes salt, baked until it could survive a shipwreck, a battlefield, or a decade in a supply depot. Roman legionaries carried a version of it called buccellatum, which was tough enough to hold up in the swamps of Britain and the deserts of Syria alike. By the American Civil War, it was still doing the same job: being issued to soldiers and maintaining a shelf life so long it could outlast the war it was baked for.

Pemmican

Long before “meal replacement bar” was a marketing phrase, Indigenous nations across the North American plains had their own version of one: dried meat pounded fine, mixed with rendered fat and berries, packed into something that needed no fire, no water, and almost no time to eat. A pound of it carries something close to a full day's calories. It kept people alive through winters that killed the unprepared, and later, fur traders and polar explorers ran on it too.

Cassava

Cassava came from the Amazon Basin, was carried across the Atlantic by Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century, and became one of the reasons entire regions of Africa survived the droughts and famines that followed. Its root can sit in the ground for months, unbothered by locusts or bad rain. Farmers in places like the Congo leaned on it as insurance against the hungry season. It's still called a famine-reserve crop today, feeding more than 800 million people across Africa and South America.

Injera

Injera looks like a soft, sour, spongy tablecloth, and in Ethiopia and Eritrea it is a plate, utensil, and centerpiece all at once. It's made from teff, one of the oldest domesticated grains on the planet. Teff thrives in poor soil and drought, and so has the cuisine built around it.

Sourdough

In San Francisco during the Gold Rush, sourdough starter wasn't a hobby—it was a possession you guarded like a piece of jewelry. Miners carried their starters in pouches close to their bodies and slept with them on cold nights so the wild yeast wouldn't die before morning. That devotion outlived the Gold Rush itself; Boudin Bakery has kept a piece of its original 1849 starter alive ever since, even rescuing a bucket of it as the bakery burned during the 1906 earthquake.

Congee

Congee is rice boiled down until it forgets it was ever solid, and it has been feeding people through catastrophe in China for roughly three thousand years. The Confucian Book of Rites records emperors distributing it during famine years, and by the Tang Dynasty it had become a fixture of temple charity, ladled out to the poor and to pilgrims passing through. Over time, congee traced a path from ancient gruel to modern comfort food. That's what survival food eventually becomes: something you crave instead of something you need.

Biltong

Long before biltong turned up sliced and packaged in delis outside South Africa, it was how the Khoikhoi and San people turned one hunted animal into months of food. This food was traditionally made from strips of meat rubbed with salt and hung to cure and dry. Dutch settlers arriving at the Cape in the seventeenth century added vinegar and spice to the method, and generations later, the Voortrekkers loaded it by the wagonload for the Great Trek. Decades later, during the Anglo-Boer Wars, it became the reason Boer commandos could outrun an empire: dried meat tied to a saddle meant a guerrilla unit never needed a food supply line. A wartime commissary study shows just how much of that war ran on biltong and little else. It's sold on every corner in South Africa now.

None of these foods were built to be delicacies. They were simply built to outlast whatever was trying to kill the people eating them. What's the dish in your family's history that did the same thing—the one nobody calls a delicacy, just the thing that got everyone through?