The only living being who prepares the food before eating it is human. Since ancient times, human, used to cook the food before consumption. Whether it's about meat or vegetables, human cooked the food before eating it. It is well known that the first human beings on earth were hunting for meat. They were using fire to cook it, and using stone hand-made tools they were cutting it in smaller pieces because they realized that if they do so the cooking process is shorter and the taste is different. Since then, human developed the cooking process, inventing all kind of tools, mixing one type of food with another, using all kind of plants to season the food.
Cuisine Evolution
The development of cooking in each country was not the same. There are two major factors that affected the way each pupils developed their cuisine: the position of the country on earth and religion. Of course there are many more factors that could affect a nation's style of cooking like the neighbors, wars, emigrants, superstitions and so on.
Country's position on Earth
The soil type and climatic conditions vary from place to place on Earth. Each plant needs a specific soil to live. You can't grow a plant designed by nature to live in temperate climatic conditions, in a zone with tropical climate. For someone living in Africa, was very difficult to get some ingredients from Europe so they just improvised something else to eat, using the ingredients they had.
Religion
In some religions you are not allowed to eat or drink specific aliments. Muslims, for example, are not allowed to eat pork, while in the Christian religion, there are some periods of the year such as the week before Easter when you are allowed to eat only vegetable foods.
