Food

Poorer families seldom had meat, whereas wealthier families ate it regularly. Beef, lamb, pork, goat, ducks, and geese were the meats of choice. Fish, turtles, and shellfish were plentiful in the rivers and canals. Barley and wheat were the staple foods. Grain was crushed and cooked as porridge or ground into flour and baked as unleavened bread. Fruits, oils, juices, and honey were added to the basic recipe and varied the recipe so much that there were more than 300 Mesopotamian words for bread. Barley was also used to make beer, the staple beverage. Locust swarms caused problems by destroying crops, but they were also skewered, roasted, and enjoyed as a tasty delicacy!

Main Food Staples were: http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodfaq3.html

The raw materials of the Sumerian diet...were barley, wheat and millet; chick peas, lentils and beans; onions, garlic and leeks; cucumbers, cress, mustard and fresh green lettuce. By the time Sumer was succeeded by Babylon a special delicacy had been discovered that was dispatched to the royal palace by the basketful. Truffles. Everyday meals probably consisted of barley paste or barleycake, accompanied by onions or a handful of beans and washed down with barley ale, but the fish that swarmed in the rivers of Mesopotamia were a not-too-rare luxury. Over fifty different types are mentioned in texts dating before 2300 BC, and although the number of types had diminished in Babylonian times, the fried-fish vendors still did a thriving trade in the narrow, winding streets of Ur. Onions, cucumbers, freshly grilled goat, mutton and pork (not yet taboo in the Near East) were to be had from other food stalls. Meat was commoner in the cities than in the more sparsley populated countryside, since it spoiled so quickly in the heat, but beef and veal were everywhere popular with people who could afford them...although most beef is likely to have been tough and stringy. Cattle were not usually slaughtered until the end of their working lives...Probably tenderer and certainly more common was mutton. The incomers who had first put the Sumerian state on its feet were originally sheep herders..."