Ancient Mayan Foods


The Maya generally eat three meals a day: breakfast (el desayuno), lunch (la comida), and supper (la cena). Corn, the most important food of their ancestors, remains the central ingredient in their diet today and is used to make tortillas or tamales.

Ancient Mayan Variety Food Items

After corn, beans (frijoles) are the most basic staple, served boiled, fried, or refried. Soups-many of them actually thick stews-form a large part of the Mayan diet. One of the most popular is lime soup (sopa de lima), made from chicken, limes, and a variety of spices

The central ingredients of the Maya culture are corn, beans, and squash. This basic diet has remained consistent for centuries. However, the modern Maya diet differs from the ancient one in that it has incorporated European foods that were unknown to the ancient Maya, such as rice, wheat, chicken, and pigs.

Meat was not usual in the diet, the domestic turkey was the most common. Otherwise it would have been random hunted animals like rabbits and monkeys. Fish and seafood was mostly eaten in the coastal regions but was to some extent salted and transported.

Beans for the Maya were a major source of protein. They were also mashed up and wrapped up inside tortillas to make something like the first burrito. Squash came in many different varieties, and the Maya used all of the squash. They ate the raw flesh as it was, and also dried and roasted the seeds as a nutritional snack.

Best food of Mayan

One of the best-known foods of the Maya is Cochinita Pibil , a pork dish that dates back to pre-Columbian times, when it was made from wild boar cooked in a coal-filled pit.

Mayan Food

This diet was supplemented by fishing, hunting, and domestication of food animals such as turkeys, peccaries, and dogs. The Maya also raised bees in hollowed-out logs for honey, and harvested eggs from turkeys and iguanas. Deer, wild turkey, duck, armadillo, peccary, quail, tapir, monkeys, and iguana were some types of animals hunted by the Ancient Maya, using bows and arrows, spears, blowguns, darts, and snares.

Mayan Food Recipes

Many of the methods of preparing the food dated from pre Columbian times. Later, the original recipes became combined with Spanish, French and Arabian elements.

Ancient Mayan Foods

Fruits like avocado, papaya and guava were domesticated or collected - rain forests in the region always made fruit collection important. They also knew how to make chocolate from cacao.

The agricultural practices varied from shifting cultivation to properly managed and irrigated fields, various methods were developed to meet the specific demands of a certain area.

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