I was watching art historian Dr Gus Casely-Hayford’s BBC4 documentary exploring the pre-colonial history of some of Africa’s more impressive kingdoms this week.  There was a remarkable snippet on the magnificent 16th-century bronze casts that were discovered in the kingdom of Benin in 1897 which many at the time could not believe had been made by Africans! In the same show Gus touched upon a group of sophisticated West African cave dwellers who had constructed and decorated sizable food stores within their caves to store and preserve grains and pulses. These early storage solutions represent an important turning point in history both in terms of the constructor’s abilities to secure and store their food for future use and also the fact that their sophisticated lifestyle allowed time to decorate the exteriors of these giant food storage boxes.

So are these the oldest known examples of kitchen or rather food storage solutions in the world? Apparently not…

The oldest food storage boxes used to store, preserve and cook food in are around 14,000 years old (that’s the Stone Age to you and me) and come from Japan. Known as Jomon storage pots, and heralded (by me) as the world’s first kitchen storage solution, they were crafted from coiled wet clay which was baked and then had strands of wicker or seagrass added to the outside to give a basket-like look.

Joman Pot in the British Museum

I believe that Jomon literally means  ‘wicker-like storage basket’ or ‘cord pattern basket’ in Japanese but these storage pots represent much more than the slightly misleading translation suggests and in my opinion are a remarkable leap in technology. Unlike the contemporaneous crude wicker storage baskets or even large leaves and foliage used to store or eat food off, the Jomon storage pots where both watertight and allowed food to be cooked inside without the risk of burning meat etc or destroying the container in a fire. Further, they also allowed easy and secure transport of whatever was stored inside from one place to another.

It could be postulated that the ability to safely transport stored items was important to the Jomon people who were hunter-gatherers, however they lived in a particularly food rich area which allowed the Jomon to settle in one place for years at a time and (it is thought) thus encouraged the invention of what is in my opinion the world’s first storage solution.

Remarkably some Jomon storage pots still contain burnt food deposits and gas chromatography –mass spectrometry (GC/MS) analysis has revealed the residue of what could also be the world’s first fish stew and remarkable over 65 different mammal species!

So you heard it here first…the world’s first kitchen storage solution was invented by the Japanese 14,000 years ago!
Any other contenders for the oldest storage solution in the world, please let me know!

Si @ STORE HQ

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