Diet of people in the past

[Justpastflouch]

I’m interested in history and quite often get recommended history “reels” on social media. A recent set of these has been AI generated animations of people from history (Roman soldier, Julius Caesar, Albert Einstein, immigrant at Ellis Island) and what they would typically eat in a day.

It really brought home how much manufactured crap we as society pump into ourselves. The food was very simple, all natural, not much meat, nothing very sugary. I’ve been cutting back on UPFs and this has given me another boost.

Most of the poor in early industrial England lived on adultarated bread and not much else. It wasn't always better in the past.

Ever read The Road to Wigan Pier? That might give you a different perspective on how healthy the diet of previous generations often was.

Although it noticeably more simple and natural, I did notice it wasn’t very varied. Very grain based, bread with everything.

Diet you look at the diet of the rich or the poor?

Up until WWI there were a lot of very malnourished people and diseases like rickets were very common. These are things that have been greatly reduced - in part by upf (bread in particular is relevant here).

I'm currently looking through a bunch of records of WWI soldiers. It's stunned me just how many were between 5 and 5'4". These are 18 year old men (yes I have been cross referencing with birth certificates - they are NOT underage - by 1918 when I'm looking this really wasn't common anymore).

I was also surprised by one of the reasons why some men were signing up. Precisely because of the food being so much better than they could otherwise have. And army rations were not known as being great.

I think it's all very well to look at historic diets but you also need to look at how typical and common they were. Even looking at 1940s and 1950s diets and the amounts that were rationed which were actually fairly balanced, the quantities were based on the men and women sizes at the time. Given both are now significantly taller they wouldn't be that suitable for a modern population on that alone (I'm not talking about weight or width just height).

Yes we all could eat better but are we trying to eat like the kings of yesterday or the ordinary people of yesterday because that in itself is important.

One of my ancestors was a baker. He was taken to court over the dodgy shit he put in his bread to make more profit. It was fairly typical of the industry. It wasn't remotely unusual.

Kentwell hall in Suffolk do Tudor reenactment events.

the food they were preparing was not simple.
obviously it wasn’t automatically processed by machine but some of the dishes were very complex.

i’ve also been to various Viking re-enactments. Meat done over spit roast plus grilled fish and milk is about the limit of the diet. Very very few fruit or vegetables. You couldn’t really call it healthy.

The entire reason for school dinners was the realisation in WW1 that most young working class people were malnourished. Bread and butter with tea sufficed for 3 meals a day.

Leslie Thomas wrote about being a Barnardos boy in the 1950s/60s and they were perpetually hungry, kept alive on bread and tea with jam on Sundays.

If you look up bread adultaration in victorian Britain you will see there were often additives in food to make it heavier and make more profit.

I think it depends on what period and whether you're looking at rich, not rich and downright poor

It also depends on whether you're talking about the countryside or towns and cities.

Remember a lot of food we think of as traditional, both here and abroad was 'discovered' in the new world. Imagine Italian cuisine without tomato and potato. Imagine Indian cuisine without tomatoes and chillis. UK food without potatoes etc

One thing I remember about rich Romans is that they used to lie on their sides and eat and I would have really struggled with that due to acid. I have to sit up on a proper chair and table. They liked a lot of sweet and savoury mixed together, as did we right up until recently (which I love but people seem to hate)

Lots of other food was brought to England/UK by the Normans.

What would have been better is far less squeamishness about food, parts of the animal, using left overs, the smell and appearance of food. People these days barely eat enough fish because they dont like the smell or handling it, kippers have more or less died out for example. We are the poorer for it.

This is an extract from Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937, about the diet of an unemployed miner's family (from https://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/5.html):

The miner's family spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables
and tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is a child less
than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend one and nine on
sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a shilling on tea. The
half-crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the materials
for a stew; probably as often as not it would represent four or five tins
of bully beef. The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and
margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes--an appalling diet.

The industrial revolution and it's consequences have been a disaster for the human race

In the same book he also wrote:

"Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t."

"Round about a pound a week" is a brilliant book for finding out about the diets of people on low wages in London in 1909 ~ 1913. It's VERY detailed and shows how very limited their diets were

It also covers housing and how they lived their daily lives . . . absolutely intruiging

You could live before the revolution and easily die on your farm from starvation due to crop failure...

A lot of posters here seem confused about the difference between a modern and a preindustrial diet. I think the OP means pre-modern diets. But it raises the interesting question of whether or not the borderline starvation and malnutrition of the earlier part of the 20th Century was still better for us as a society than the chicken nuggets and Monster diets many of us currently have

https://unherd.com/2022/06/wheat-has-corrupted-humanity/ you might find this an interesting read

Unless you were rich, until well into the 19th century, and well beyond that for the poorest people, diet in the UK would have been dull, dull, dull, especially at this time of year when nothing fresh was easily available. Vegetables would have been restricted to what could be grown in the UK and kept over the winter months, but not of course in refrigerated conditions, frozen, tinned or dehydrated, so after months in a dark shed they'd have been wrinkled and tired and some would have been nibbled by vermin. Cabbages and other brassicas; carrots, turnips, swede etc; no potatoes until Europeans colonised the Americas; dried peas, lentils and beans.

Other food: not much fruit outside the summer months. Small wrinkly wormy apples perhaps. In the winter months salt meat and fish, but probably not every day. Maybe some nuts secreted away in the autumn. Old dry cheese.

Lots and lots of bread, because it was cheap.

Milk spoils very easily if it can't be refrigerated and before Louis Pasteur nobody knew how to preserve it with heat treatment. It was often contaminated so adults wouldn't have drunk it except on farms fresh from the cow.

No tea, no coffee, no sugar until the slave trade made it cheap, next to nothing in the way of spices for most people because they were imported and expensive.

I'm sure it would do us good as a society to eat simpler, less processed food, but giving up the huge variety of food most of us enjoy now would make most people's lives much, much harder and less pleasant.

except they used to add all sorts of things to food to make it economic, chalk for example

recent set of these has been AI generated animations of people from history (Roman soldier, Julius Caesar, Albert Einstein, immigrant at Ellis Island) and what they would typically eat in a day.

Those AI reels are almost always utter nonsense.

My grandparents were born into urban poverty in the 1910s and had terrible diets. They ate vegetables, certainly, but apart from that they mostly ate white bread, potatoes, sugar, cheese, and a shit-ton of saturated fat, and any meat was cheap, fatty and often bulked out with other stuff, or was heavily processed meat like bacon, sausage-meat or corned beef. Nobody had a fridge and if you lived in a city you didn't have the opportunity to forage or shoot rabbits or keep chickens or get fresh milk every day etc.

Malnutrition was absolutely rife in the UK up until the 1940s. It was pretty common to see kids with rickets when my parents were kids.

Also, worth noting that processing foods actually improved nutrition for a lot of people. For example, being able to buy meat, fish and fruit in cans, powdered milk and eggs, or fortified products like Marmite, Bovril etc, meant that poorer people could a) afford and b) store relatively nutritious foods.

Centuries of drinking weak beer because they couldn't trust the water, for a start.

Would it make life harder and less pleasant? I'm not convinced. As long as we had food, I doubt we'd miss what we didn't know.

Roman soldiers weren't around when your grandparents were

Most people would have lived on bread and potatoes

LOL if you think pre-industrial living was a vision of pastoral delight. Most people before the industrial revolution had an extremely limited and exceptionally precarious diet that often left them either literally starving or deficient in vitamins and minerals.

In some ways, yes. But the industrial revolution also laid the groundwork for technologies like refrigeration which had a massive impact on food safety. There was also pasteurisation, huge advances in the development and production of pharmaceuticals, reliable and effective heating in homes, sewage systems, etc etc etc.

Before the industrial revolution the huge level of infant mortality, plus deaths in childbirth, plus deaths due to a massive number of different diseases, caused the average life expectancy to be about 40 years. It's now around 80. That's hard to ignore.

A long cold winter where by February all you've got left are green potatoes, mouldy wheat and rotten apples and you're watching your children die from malnutrition might give a different view.