| European farmers | Wheat and barley, salted or dried fish, dairy products, potatoes and other tubers, pickled vegetables, beer, oil. |
| Korea | Kimchi: pickled fermented cabbage, turnip, cucumber. Pickled, salted, or fermented fish and shrimp. |
| Ainu (Japan) | Nuts, dried and frozen fish, dried venison, root starch. |
| Nganasan (Siberia) | Smoked, dried, or frozen reindeer meat. Rendered goose fat. |
| Itenm’i (Kamchatka) Dried and fermented fish. | |
| AMERICAS | |
| Most Native American farmers | Dried maize. |
| Northern Plains Indians | Pemmican: dried bison meat, rendered fat, and dried berries. |
| Andes | Freeze-dried meat and tubers and fish. |
| Inuit | Frozen whale meat, frozen or dried caribou meat, seal oil. |
| Northwest Coast Indians | Dried and smoked salmon, rendered candlefish oil, dried berries. |
| Great Basin Shoshone | Mesquite pod starch, pine nuts, dried meat. |
| Inland Northern California Indians | Acorn meal, dried salmon. |
| AFRICA | |
| Nuer | Millet, beer. |
| PACIFIC | |
| East Polynesia | Fermented taro and breadfruit. Dried bananas and starch. |
| Maori (New Zealand) | Bird meat, heated and sealed with fat. Tubers. |
| Trobriand Islands (New Guinea) | Yams. |
| New Guinea lowlands | Sago starch and dried fish. |
| New Guinea Highlands | Tubers. Sweet potatoes stored as live pigs. |
| Australian Aborigines | Wild grass seed cakes. |
Traditional peoples dealt with predictable seasonal food shortages in three main ways: storing food, broadening their diet, and dispersing and aggregating. The first of these methods is routine in modern society: we store food in refrigerators, deep freezers, cans, bottles, and dried packages. Many traditional societies as well set aside food surpluses accumulated during a season of food abundance (such as fall harvest time in the temperate zones), and consumed that food during a season of food scarcity (such as temperate-zone winters). Food storage was practised by sedentary societies living in markedly seasonal environments with alternating seasons of food abundance and food deficits. It was uncommon among nomadic hunter-gatherers with frequent changes of camp, because they couldn’t carry much food with them (unless they had boats or dog-drawn sleds), and the risk of pilferage by animals or other humans made it unsafe for them to leave food unguarded at one camp and to plan to return later. (However, some hunter-gatherers, such as Japan’s Ainu, Pacific Northwest Coast Indians, the Great Basin Shoshone, and some Arctic peoples, were sedentary or seasonally sedentary and stored large quantities of food.) Even among sedentary peoples, some living in small family groups stored little food because they were too
