A garbage cube of 2,000 ago in Mallorca exposes the star product of Roman fast food: Zorzal’s skewer

The concept of “fast food“It is currently strongly associated with that of”junk food”. It usually involves a not very healthy dish due to the presence of processed foods. But fast food really exists For centuries And the Romans, of course, have something to say there. And a recent study puts on the table an important fast food industry in Roman times to northern Mallorca.

The star dish? Singing birds.

“Popina”Alejandro Valenzuela is a researcher at the Mediterranean Institute of Advanced Studies in Mallorca and the author of a Published article in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology in which he details how in the Roman city of Pollentiahe Zorzal He was the protagonist of street food. Founded in the 123 AC to the north of Mallorca, Pollentia was an imperial city for the empire due to its location in the Mediterranean and its ports that They favored trade With the island.

Today is an archaeological site in which we have a curious and small theater, but in its day it must have been a very busy city, a bustling shopping center in which food played an essential role. Inside the shops, were the ‘Popinae‘. These are small establishments where you could eat something fast and have a wine before following the way. They were focused on the lowest classes of Roman society.

Searching in the garbage. This was something common in Roman cities due to their rhythm of life. In Herculano and Pompeii you can see some ruins in good condition of Themopoliumwhich are more like taverns for somewhat more wealthy people, but basically, in both cases there was a bar with amphorae to get some hot food, serve the client and that it followed on their way.

An example of Thermopolium

Valenzuela, what interested him was to know what was in those mud vessels, but to discover what the inhabitants who were walking for Pollentia had to look in their garbage. Near one of those popinas there was a septic tank of a few meters deep in which everything was thrown. Part of the garbage was ceramic, which has allowed to date the date of use of the well between 10 AC and 30 AD

What else was there? A large number of mammalian bones, birds and fish. And the bones of the birds are the ones that caught their attention.

Pollentia location in Mallorca in image A. in B, the location of the well. In C, the meters at which a greater concentration of bones were found

Fast Food Bird. Although there were several species, such as chicken, the bones were mostly slut. They are small singing birds associated with the diet of the upper classes of the Roman empirebut here we are in a very different context: popular food at street level. The remains highlighted the skulls and sternons of those birds, which indicated one thing: the most juicy parts should be the ones that served in the popina.

As with other birds, the extremities and the upper part of the chest are the most juicy, and Valenzuela estimates that removing that juicy meat allowed the food seller to cook those parts quickly to the grill or in oil to serve it quickly. It is a meat that hardly takes a few seconds to cook.

The darker, the more presence of parts they found in the black well. Within the red perimeter, the most fleshy parts and their associated bones, little present in the well

Seasonal. There is also the possibility that customers sit down and consume the zorzal in dishes, since ceramic remains could indicate that there was a dishes, but due to the size of the bite, Alejandro Comment In Live Science that, within the “context of street food, it is also plausible to serve in skewer to facilitate consumption.”

In the end, except exceptions, food in ancient times was linked to seasons and the foal is a seasonal product that would have integrated well into a diet like that of Roman cities with others like domestic chicken either European rabbittwo species whose remains would also have served in this restaurant Fast food of Pollentia.

But the most important thing is that this finding makes the belief that the Zorzal was a luxury bite for the Romans staggers because the Popinae They were not precisely the premises that most frequented the High classes.

Images | Daniele Florio From Rome, Dion art

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