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.

That’s just the abstract

Thank you. There’s also the connection between this adoption of food containers with the emergence of increasingly sophisticated language and symbolism, and cultural attitudes toward the culinary to consider.

There’s always been a hint of a suggestion that women were the main drivers of early tech, food gathering and storage, because they were the bread winners while the men ponced about having hunts. Anecdotally it’s still men that eat meat more and women eat more salad stuff.

Early agriculture was clearly not a big success resulting in poorer diets and I have seen innumerable suggestions that the labour required for hunter gathering is far less. There have been persistent questions about why it was ever taken up. Religion and other propaganda tools from elites have been mentioned, and I’ve recently been down a few internet rabbit holes about a huge global war wiping out a huge part of the male population and genome after agriculture started. Not too confident on that as it’s not my period. But yes, horticulture was practiced a long time before. It’s only recently we have begun to accept that hunter gatherers could live in towns and cities, such as Catal Huyuk.

Some of the earliest pottery is gorgeous too. Here’s some Jomon stuff. https://www.worldhistory.org/Jomon_Pottery/