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.

Well, yes, that's how averages work. You're going to get outliers. But one of the big causes - or at least a significant contributory factor - of the huge numbers of dead children was malnutrition, parasites and disease. Similarly for maternal deaths. If you're a healthy, well-nourished woman then your body is going to cope with the substantial demands of pregnancy and labour much better than if you're malnourished and ridden with parasites.

It's February in England, there's snow on the ground, you're six months pregnant and the last of the grain and root veg you've got in your stores has gone slimy. You're faced with either eating that yourself, giving it to your two other surviving children, or feeding it to your remaining pig. How well nourished do you think you're going to be?

It's a quote from Shirley Conran (and the title of a Prue Leith or possibly Mary Berry book).

I'm interested in this too. But apparently most people had worms in the past so I'm not sure they were healthier on average. Especially if you eat a reasonably varied diet today.

I think like most historical things we look back with rose coloured glasses. Inwas lucky enough to have my great Grandmother around until.I was in my early 20s. She would talk to me about how her life was and part of that included the food. She essentially lived on bread for the majority of her younger years and then when she had her own children she would very occasionally be able to afford sugar and make them sugar sandwiches. The occasional times meat was in her house as a child it would be given to her father and then her brothers that worked.

Processed foods have a place in society to try and improve the health of the nation. However it has definitely gone to far in some foods. I think we have to look at information regarding food very carefully as the source of the information is very important and where the information originates from is probably the most important thing to look at. As every country has different rules ect around food production.

There is always a food that is made to be the scapegoat for bad diets ect. When I was a child it was fat, so.everyone swapped to fat free which was full of sugar. Now the food devil is sugar and UPF.

I think the real thing that makes a difference is a person's ability to cook from scratch. People don't really understand what this means anymore. Making a lasagne from scratch for example means using jars for the sauce.

We need to reintroduce cooking in schools from as early as we can. As most adults do not have the skills anymore, so they can't teach their children themselves.

People died of starvation a lot. Or scurvy, Beri-Beri, they went blind from Vitamin A deficiency, they got massive goitres, they got rickets or protein energy malnutrition.

The wealthy ate too much meat and fat and believed that vegetables were risky health wise. They ate abortive plants for breakfast and drank alcohol instead of water from morning until night. In the UK anyway for a long time.

I don't think small beer was very alcoholic, but because it had been brewed, it was safer than water straight from the well in many cases. (I grew up in a farmhouse with a well outside the front door. We didn't use it, because we had modern(ish) plumbing, but once in a while, Environmental Health came round to take a sample.)

I went to the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading last year, which had an exhibition on Jane Austen (as did most other museums in the area, for the 250th anniversary of her birth.) There was one exhibit, someone contemporary to Jane, who had said something about her grandfather being the first person to grow potatoes in the village. So while they were a staple by 1850, they weren't so much about 100 -150 years earlier, which makes sense, when you think about it.

The rich didn’t like veg because it was thought veg was only suitable as peasant food. It makes sense to reconsider the impact of the Conquest and having two very hostile peoples in one land.

i don’t agree that processed food was ever a good answer for poverty, its basically just chemicals. Time and again we learn that quick fix chemicals have caused much more problems than they ever hoped to solve. Especially when the solution is plain old cheap oats and gruel. I was pretty much brought up on gruel. No chemicals required thank you, and while it is pretty unpleasant and has put me off porridge for life, it was cheap and nutritious enough.

The children especially died from preventable diseases like TB and measles, compounded by the fact that their diet was poor.

Interesting post and responses ! I had a perceived image (more caricature) when I was young that prehistoric peoples were constantly tearing joints of virtually raw/charred meat off massive, indeterminate of origin, bones. In fact new, non invasive ways of examining ancient human remains show mostly grains and vegetable fibre much more in evidence (cf Bog People, Glacier Man - who was likely hunting when he copped it !) Meat was for high days and holidays, as well as a status symbol - and a high risk venture if tracking and hunting, esp solo.
This is a fascinating topic, taking into account the new(ish) focus on how our microbiome functions. Hence the studies with the Hazda hunter gatherer tribe in Tanzania, as their lifestyle is about to become extinct and they are unique - free of disease caused by inflamation. It is my favourite rabbit hole dive !

@Aintgointogoa The research on pre-historic food is fascinating. I have read (can't remember where) that women and children brought home 80 per cent of the caveperson diet. So much for the myth of dudebros clubbing a bison and feeding the whole tribe. They'd have been lucky to escape becoming dinner themselves. But the little girls crazy about the colour pink -- they'd have been quick to spot ripe fruit 😋

Does anyone remember The Supersizers, the series in which Sue Perkins and Giles Coren cooked recipes from centuries/decades past? The 1660s ep was quite illuminating. Grim stews of butchers' scraps for the Londoners, but people living on the outlying farms ate closer to what we have now -- lean protein and green veg picked daily in summer. I'd take the nice plot in the home counties, thanks.

Quite a few years ago, I visited an exhibition at the Museum of London, I think it was called "London Bodies ". It lined up some skeletons (or replicas of) from each century from Saxon to 20th century. The Saxons were on average, taller than modern people. Then, each century, the average height declined with the shortest being the Victorians. Then in the modern day the height shot up.

From my little knowledge about this, the hunter gatherer way of life may be very good nutritionally and in some other ways, but a tribe needs a large amount of territory for it to be sustainable, and in the past that led to a lot of fighting with other tribes. The idea that hunter gatherers were peaceful people leading an idyllic simple life doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Men and boys in particular have a high chance of dying young from injuries and fighting.

Now that there are billions of humans spread across the globe, it's not feasible for us to abandon agriculture and all our other inventions, and it hasn't been for thousands of years. We started growing our own grains, pulses, fruit and vegetables instead of relying on what we could find, and constantly selecting the seeds from the most reliable crops to improve yields. We domesticated animals for meat, eggs, milk and leather. We learned to process food to make it more palatable and keep longer, and that made it possible to store food for times when the harvest failed or disease wiped out the herd. For example, we turned perishable milk into cheese and yoghourt, which as well as keeping longer had the advantage that many adults could digest it, unlike fresh milk because most adults across the world don't have the enzyme to digest milk (lactase). We learned how to make pottery which could be used for storing foods and keeping them from spoiling and being eaten by vermin. And so on.

Not all good, of course. Once we were living cheek by jowl with animals we picked up a lot of diseases from them. We had a less varied diet. The average height of an ancient hunter gatherer appears to be higher than that of an ancient human living in a village or small town and eating mostly grain. But one of the huge advantages of agriculture was that it freed people up to do other things than constantly look for food. People could specialise in what they were good at, e.g. being a potter, smith, carpenter, miller, builder, weaver, cheesemaker, brewer, bard, and buy or barter food from farmers and shopkeepers.

It always strikes me when looking at tombs, armour or clothing from earlier than the 20th Century, just how tiny people were - not just their height but their frames. For example, waists of 18 inches for women - albeit probably with corsets - but for most modern women that simply wouldn't be possible even with a corset because their rib cages would be too big.

Beer drunk instead of water historically had a very low abv. 2 to 3% tops as a general rule. This seems to be really lost from this conversation. Modern beer is very different.

What we also lose from the conversation is that orange juice naturally has an abv of 0.5% and bread - especially artisan bread - can have an abv of up to 2%.

Your consumption of it is small and spread out across the day though so you don't get pissed.

Old beer also contained various trace nutrients, natural yeast and other elements which are good for gut and general health. There's an argument here that we have evolved in the uk to drink low levels of beers as part of our diet so if genetics you have a very long British background perhaps you should have an occasional beer. Other parts of the world have much higher naturally occurring intolerances to things in a old British diet which make sense in this context too. Old beer wouldn't be something we would actively recognise as beer today either. Hops weren't used to brew until relatively modern times. Prior to that a variety of local herbs (which we still don't know much about in terms of their health benefits as well as harms in scientific terms) were used which also had naturally occurring yeasts growing on them.

Hops is actually an ingredient which is particularly interesting in its own right too. They are currently being researched as having potential benefits for anti-inflammatory conditions, sleep disorders, menopause symptoms, cardiovascular disease and depression. There's a growing market for non alcoholic hop based products ATM. Hopped water is actually really nice (you can make it yourself. You put some hops into water at about 80c - not into boiling water - and let it infused. Different varieties of hops have different flavours and levels of bitterness). Track Brewery Tap room has a free water tap for customers which is actually hopped water - it's lovely.

It's curious to note this in the context of a rising number of inflammatory diseases and gut health related issues too. It makes you wonder if our lack of knowledge in this area and focus on sanitisation and alcohol=bad has led us to drop things from our diets that have properties which are perhaps good for us too.

There's also a certain amount of research that suggests worms in your gut can also aid digestion and reduce inflammation so are not wholly bad to have depending on the type of parasite and the level of infestation. This is something which I think we find really difficult to contemplate and consider.

Adulterated, often mouldy, unrefrigerated in the summer…..
Rose tinted glasses are a bad idea!

A Victorian butcher would not get a hygiene star rating of 1, thats for sure!

That's not what people mean by processed food in this context - it's not about UPF it's about simple processing - canning, tinning, preserving

Ian Mortimer’s historical guides give insights into food and diet.

Harvests if they were bad meant you couldn’t eat.

My mum recalls not having oranges, post war rationing and keeping milk in a bucket of water. She also recalls she could only buy broken biscuits and she once broke eggs she brought home in a paper bag. She was luckier as a child as her father was half German so they had potato salad, frankfurters, sauerkraut and a relative sent over a whole salami every year around Christmas time.

Nothing wrong with processed food. Bottling, canning,drying,salting, pickling, jam making-all ways of processing food.

In Ireland potatoes were the only crop the poor could grow on their tiny parcels of land that would provide nutrition. Potato blight killed 1 million people and caused another 1-2 million famine refugees to flee. This was in one of the most fertile countries in the world.

It didn't affect wealthy people or food exports to Britain.

Varied a lot by income but someone is my position would be eating meat, vegetables, potatoes and a sauce for main meals plus plenty of sweet things, the diet did change for the middle and upper classes much between the 19th and mid 20th centuries or even before (potatoes arrived in Tudor England, tea and more spices available from 17th century). The poor however ate a lot of bad bread, in rural areas a lot of basically vegetable stew with whatever animals they caught (fish I suspect here was prominent) in cities pies were sold etc. hedgerows were peoples larders and medicine cabinets too

DH has a couple of GG uncles who were 6'6" plus in the 1920s. It's absolutely insane and in my research they are complete and utter outliers. Until you realise they were working onboard luxury transatlantic liners from age 10 and clearly were being very very well fed as a result!

A lot would also depend on housewifery - the skill and unending hard work by the women of the house to acquire food, keep it fresh, cook efficiently and appetisingly within their means. Women with the resources to preserve and store food throughout the year and the household budget for fuel could make simple filling dishes from well-cooked staples. It’s easy to overlook the skills and status of a woman who was a “good manager” historically?

Yes, and in pre-industrial times at least food wasn’t an afterthought like it often is today. At least one person in every household would basically have the finding, preparing and storing of food as their full-time occupation in one way or another, and they’d been trained to it since infancy. If there was food around to be eaten, they’d find it, and food was too precious to let it get spoiled if it could be at all helped.

There's a fascinating BBC documentary series called Tales From the Green Valley made by Ruth Goodman and others in about 2005. It's available on YouTube.

They spend an agricultural year on a farm living as if it was the 1620s. The effort that had to made in growing, finding, storing, preparing and cooking relatively small amounts of food that were barely enough to sustain them is a real eye opener.