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.

Agreed. People hankering after the simple pre-industrial life might change their minds when confronted with the realities of no sewage system, no easy way to keep clothes, bodies and homes clean, lice endemic, no modern medicine including anaesthetics, antiseptic operating conditions or antibiotics, and so on and so forth. For all the problems we face now, I wouldn't want to live at another time.

Roman dinner parties of the kind that julius Caesar would have attended were famous for the number and complexity of the dishes.

we have Roman cookbooks (Apicius) and one of my favourites which I have never tried to make is flamingo.
they also had stuffed larks and dormice.

https://passtheflamingo.com/2017/03/15/ancient-recipe-braised-flamingo-roman-5th-century-ce/

could be interesting trying to eat as the Roman upper classes eat.

Having visited the flamingo pool at Slimbridge recently I'm still trying to recover from the smell. I'd rather not imagine what the meat tastes like.

Pottage was mainly eaten, I love history and love history of food, and love food. Piror to the industrial revolution, although they did have some fruit and nuts, milk, cheese and butter, the mainstay meals would have been pottage for most meals in the day, so eating the same thing several times a day, just kept on a fire. With bread.

Slightly better off people who were perhaps merchants or shop owners or had slightly more money but not rich as such, would have had a bit more supplementation but it would have revolved around the same thing

I think the level of malnutrition would depend on the mixture of veg and pulses and whether there were any physical disorders taht would make absorption difficult too.

If we go back to a good while before the industrial revolution - say, the 1400s - then things really weren't much better for the average English person. If it wasn't grown nearby then you wouldn't get it because transport was so slow that most foods spoiled before they'd travelled 50 miles. As there were no pesticides then crops were often damaged and so had reduced nutritional value.

Diets would be based around cereals and legumes plus seasonal root vegetables and the occasional bit of meat. The typical meal would be pottage - vegetable stew with oats - and brown bread. Maybe a bit of pork or rabbit thrown in if you're lucky and then the whole lot boiled to buggery so a lot of the vitamins would be destroyed. If you happened to live near the sea or a good river then you'd have fish as well. There was also cheese and butter, not least because they were the only realistic way of preserving milk which would otherwise spoil very quickly, and fruit although even that tended to be cooked rather than eaten raw. There were some advances in food preservation using pickling, salting, and/or smoking but they increased the cost.

The diets tended to be poor in protein, vitamins and calories but they did tend to eat a lot of fibre. So while you'd likely have rickets, stunted growth and a short life-span, you'd be unlikely to have constipation.

Well, I dunno. Bulking up with chalk, sawdust, or even white lead. Bit of arsenic to make everything a pretty green colour. If you've got plumbing, it will literally be plumbum, lead piping. No guarantees the water is clean and potable, either. Cholera, typhoid, etc...

The diet might be pretty monotonous. Depending on which bit of history you're looking at, there might not be much meat, unless you're rich, in which case it's mostly meat. Expensive spices were used in part to cover the taste of rotting meat. Risks of salmonella, listeria, botulism...

If you can't afford meat, then peas and beans. Seasonal veg - it's no coincidence that Lent, a time of fasting, coincides with the time of least food availability in the northern hemisphere. You could poach game and get meat that way, but you're risking mantraps up to the late 1820s, and transportation. 1 in 3 harvests failed during the 17th century. 1840s Ireland had the potato famine. People starved.

This week, I've had bananas, citrus, chocolate, peanuts, and probably other things we don't produce here. I do try to eat fairly seasonally and I try to buy British (brought up on a farm,) but I am glad I'm not totally reliant on that, and when I do get food in,it's fresh because it's been refrigerated most of the time since it was picked.

I'm in favour of eating less processed food, but I don't really want to go back to any earlier culinary period, though. I like the choice and freshness being available to me.

That's a good point. People were often riddled with parasites so even if they managed to get a vaguely decent diet they'd lose a bunch of the nutrition to the threadworms they were carrying in their guts.

they also had stuffed larks and dormice.

If life is too short to stuff a mushroom, it's definitely too short to stuff a dormouse or a lark.

...are we not supposed to want to stuff mushrooms?

In Trollope’s novel The Last Chronicle of Barsetshire (basically about an extremely poorly paid clergyman in around the 1850s, accused of stealing a cheque for £20) the cost of his family’s food was mentioned - him and wife, 2 teen girls.
Three pounds of meat a day! At ninepence a pound.*

Almost certainly mutton.

IIRC bread was also mentioned (a lot) but no vegetables, though maybe they’d have grown potatoes and cabbages in the garden.
*He was said to have stolen the cheque in order to settle his butcher’s bill, since the butcher was getting very irate about late payment.
(He hadn’t stolen it BTW, in case anyone’s wondering….)

Food, boots and a coat.

And, of course, cigarettes. Got to have something to quell the hunger.

I recently found a photo of my grandmothers school class in London. The children aged about 7 are thin, drawn, dark circles - they look ill, and my grandmother had had the 'benefit' of 5 years of good food in Great Ormond Street.
If you read 'Round about a pound a week' as referenced by @HoorayHattie https://www.gutenberg.org/files/58691/58691-h/58691-h.htm then you'll see that for these very normal families, and especially for the women and children, diets were very unvarying, short on protein and veg, and heavy on bread and potato

Ever see that show "Back In Time For Dinner"? They'd spend each episode trying to eat like they were in ancient Rome or Tudor England or whatever. It seemed a bit repetitive after a while. My main takeaway was "for most of human history ever since we learnt to farm, poor people have mostly eaten veg and a bit of dairy and whatever they could forage seasonally and whatever staple carb grew wherever they were, and rich people have eaten a lot of red meat, and not much veg because they thought it was peasant food, and (after about 1550) sugar, and enough alcohol to drop a horse". Lots of poor people were malnourished, and lots of rich ones were looking for a cure for their gout.

The beauty of being around now rather than then, is choices. So if you feel you'd be healthier on a historical diet, you can always give it a go.

I think it was a lot more common for people to become ill through vitamin deficiencies before we started fortifying bread, milk, cereals etc. It's not all black and white.

This. It depends on which period you’re looking at, and who was doing the cooking. Medieval pottage could be tasty and nutritious - if the harvest had been good and the food kept well, how much the individuals knew about plants, whether there was a local war on..,

Ha ha. Choicey choices for the well off. The poor are poorer than ever.

Yes. Very fair point.

Sure, if you happened to be lucky enough to have a decent source of protein, sanitary food preparation and storage facilities, had a good harvest and your food stores hadn't been decimated by vermin/mould/rot/etc, the winter hadn't been too harsh or too long, you had the firewood to cook it, you'd already been in reasonably good health and you possessed a sufficiently low load of intestinal parasites, then then pottage could be nutritious. It's basically just a stew after all albeit one that's missing most of the herbs and spices that we'd use today to make it taste good. But that's a very significant list of "if"s.

If you weren't quite that lucky then you'd die of malnutrition, disease, and/or during childbirth. Either way your average life expectancy was 40.

Hmmm. Average life expectancy using which average and has it discounted the huge number dying as children? Another couple of ifs - if you survived childhood and if as a woman you survived childbirth, people lived until their 70s quite regularly.

Salt was used as a cheap "make weight" ingredient well into the 20th C.

Cornflour was a slightly healthier addition for the same purpose.

Btw people interested in this thread may find this book as fascinating as I did . ‘The Workhouse Cookbook’.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Workhouse-Cookbook-Peter-Higginbotham/dp/0752447300

Ooh that book looks fascinating.

i did once do for a weekend away with family a Roman feast. Got a modern version of a Roman cookbook where they’d tried to recreate the recipes using modern ingredients - the Romans had several commercially made sauces a bit like ketchup or teriyaki style things that one would normally buy but obviously nobody makes them anymore.

it was quite an interesting few weeks trying out recipes.

Romans used to put lead in their wine and the urban common people were sometimes so poor all they ate was the free wheat doled out by the state.

Romans were very keen on fish sauce, to flavour sweet and savoury foods, sort of like salt.

I think one of the biggest issues for diet and health over past times was the lack of plain good water. People's kidneys must have been a right state.