Diet of people in the past

Hunter gatherers had a longer life expectancy than early farmers, not great by modern standards but 25-40 ish years compared to 20-30 years. There were lower rates of chronic diseases and fewer epidemics.

You mean the ones that weren't dead!?

Oh, yes! So, so, so many fart jokes in periods where people eat lots of legumes/brassicas.

I think that's why fennel seed is used in quite a few things, too. And not just because it self-seeds madly... People were quite clued up on medicinal uses of plants.

It was probably about more than the taste. Cumin and caraway are carminative (ease digestion and help with wind).

I can pick things up with mine, short and dtibby though they be. A friend who has done a lot of ballet in her life was impressed - apparently it's good for strengthening your toes for dancing. I do it out of laziness, to avoid bending down...

Not that that is anything to do with food.

I can pick things up with mine and people think it's weird

I can do that.

See, now I have a proper, documented skill. I shall venture forth and seek my fortune within the narrow confines of egg-hunting and/or the circus.

What do you think is sentimentality?

I think there's a lot of people conflating different time periods. But someone has already made the point about men in recent times being too malnourished to qualify for active duty. Most of the nostalgic posts about the past being good for food are put in context of someone acknowledging they were talking about a specific situation (eg., being the child of someone trained as a cook, or whatever).

Babies still die from 'failure to thrive,' btw. It's rare, but it hasn't ceased to exist as phrase, even though in the UK I think it's frowned upon.

There's a lot of sentimentality on here when reality was much different. In a well know Scottish city over half of the men were deemed unfit to be soldiers in WW1 due to malnourishment. I have babies dying from that area from " failure to thrive" - mothers were being encouraged to feed tinned milk to their babies. We're not speaking about the Middle Ages or famines - normal times. Shocking.

I just stick to picking things up from the floor with my feet (though my toes are mostly stubby - I had a boyfriend who could sort of curl his toes under, like fingers on a fist.)

I didn’t know that!
This thread is brilliant.

Semi-prehensile toes run in my family. We don't have properly opposable big toes (which I think is pretty rare) but we all have long grippy ones. If I weren't terrible with heights I could test them out.

Woah.
I wonder if they had the same in the Yorkshire coast.
I met an old man at Flamborough whose dad used to be winched down the cliffs for seabird eggs. It was called egging.
St Kilda is another level though.

Yes its essentially why 'UK' tabbouleh is nothing like what it should be. Tabbouleh is a parsley salad, not a salad of carbs with some herbs thrown in it. It should be green with very little bulgur in it.

That sounds lovely and I was actually pondering the way we seem perfectly well able to accept that poor rural people in France and the Mediterranean ate interesting food but are incapable of imagining the same for England.
I suppose it is because we haven’t had a peasant culture for so long due to early industrialisation we have forgotten what one looked like.

Re massive amounts of herbs, there is a plan for an ideal medieval monastery garden and it involves a surprisingly large amount of space devoted to parsley. Someone explained this was probably edible parsley root. But if you were growing that it would still produce the masses of greenery.

Hunter gatherers did have better overall health though than after farming started, were taller, with better bone and dental health and injested a wider range of nutrients and had less infectious disease.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3917328/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9169634

I remember when I was quite young reading a book about the people of St Kilda, and one of the things I particularly remember us that they had developed prehensile toes, which helped with climbing the cliffs when they collected gulls eggs.

I miss him dreadfully.I never met DH's mother as she died before we met. Her culinary legacy for our family is boiled beetroot in white sauce. . They deffo brought different talents to the family. She was the breadwinner and worked for the civil service. The other strong legacy was that all her children were strong feminists.

I mentioned earlier about Max Miller on youtube with his history food channel. I really recommend him- he's amazing. If anyone if interested in food history then he is a researched and entertaining gateway.

I suspect so. And exposure. And from being gored by prey. And from foraging the wrong thing.

If I am right, I think researchers now reckon there was a much longer period when people were not precisely 'farming' the way we think of it now, but they were doing things to harness plant growth seasons and therefore eating a lot of plant-based materials. I mean, I guess, where is the line between farming and picking stuff when you know it is there ... and maybe encouraging it a bit?

I suspect hunters also died from starvation from time to time.

Having grown up in an old farmhouse, with lots of family in farmhouses and cottages, I don't think it was until uni that I realised that houses didn't always have hard earth floors, even though I'd been to plenty of friends houses in town over the years. But then I was also a bit surprised that people called out Dynorod rather than getting their own draining rods out...

I grew up in an area with watercress beds, and we were always warned not to take it wild because of the risk of liver fluke.

I think it all went downhill in the Neolithic period with the shift from hunter gathering to growing crops.

He sounds great. I love handed down recipes and food-as-memory.