Page 4 | Diet of people in the past

Justpastflouch · 2026-02-06T17:33:23+00:00

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.

Girasoli · 07/02/2026 12:56

I think a lot of it also depended on whether you lived in the city or the countryside, my nonnas both said that during ww2 they were a lot better off in the countryside than people living in the cities...in the countryside everyone had a vegetable patch, a lot of people had chickens, and some had goats (for cheese and milk). People could also go hunting for game birds. Their diets didn't really change that much in the war.

FunnyOrca · 07/02/2026 13:05

I don’t know if it would be to your interest exactly, but about a decade(?) ago the BBC did two series:

Back in Time for Dinner
Back in Time for Tea

It recreated how a family used to eat according to data collected through the government’s national food surveys. It was very good watching. Might be available online somewhere. It had a good historian, rather than an AI bot.

brightpinkchoc · 07/02/2026 13:10

My maternal Grandmother's family were fisherfolk. They were malnourished. Their diet was basically farinaceous. This led to illnesses associated with arteriosclerosis.

EmeraldShamrock000 · 07/02/2026 13:13

In my grandfather’s home, they weren’t allowed to eat meat until they had a job on a Sunday. It was potatoes and pig feet usually.

BillieWiper · 07/02/2026 13:18

My mum had all her baby teeth pulled out because they were rotten. She says it's because they were always eating sweets, but she also paints a picture of a family who ate healthy, though modest, balanced meals. I think also they didn't have fluoride in water or toothpaste.
This was late 40s- early 50s. Ireland though not UK.

Skybunnee · 07/02/2026 13:20

I’m reading a book about a shepherd in the highlands 1956. They have a milking cow -so milk and butter. Probably make their own bread and bring in oats. Have a small patch to grow some veg, but not enough for more than a month or two.
Mostly seem to live on venison, salted venison. Occasional fish from the loch.

EBearhug · 07/02/2026 13:25

NotMeAtAll · 07/02/2026 10:01

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.

Yes, but it still depends on the date. Potatoes were introduced with the Tudors, but they didn't become widespread straight away. If the blight had come in 1700 rather than the 1840s, it wouldn't have been anything like as catastrophic (politics of supply aside,) because they just weren't as wholly part if the diet yet.

Andouillette · 07/02/2026 13:25

OverCushioned · 07/02/2026 12:41

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.

Indeed, it is excellent. Also worth watching is the series 'The Victorian Slum' if you can find it. Even knowing that it wasn't real and the people on it would not have been allowewd to actually starve, I found it harrowing. Anybody who thinks (as a PP said) that poverty is worse now really needs to learn some history.

ConcernedOfClapham · 07/02/2026 13:28

Octavia64 · 06/02/2026 17:47

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.

I guess the Vilings burned it off with all that looting and pillaging 🤔

fishtank12345 · 07/02/2026 13:31

I always say if they removed all the junk from supermarkets then they shop would be half the size lol... be really, that would be great, all healthy food and then if want treats go to the bakery or make at home. Sweet shop for sweets. And... while I am at it... no toys in supermarkets would be great.......... especially with kids that always ask.

Duckswaddle · 07/02/2026 13:37

My working class family used to live on sugar sandwiches and lard 🤣 it definitely wasn’t better back in the day.

StrawberryJamAndRaspberryPie · 07/02/2026 13:40

RedToothBrush · 07/02/2026 09:22

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.

Show quote history

2-3% is enough to feel the effects! Modern lager is 4%. Radlers are 2% and I’ve been drunk on them…. And in the body alcohol is alcohol.

SarahAndQuack · 07/02/2026 13:42

GasperyJacquesRoberts · 06/02/2026 20:08

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.

Show quote history

I have to come back on that 'missing herbs and spices' bit.

Medieval English food is typically quite high on spices and herbs. If you look at account books and prices, it is obvious that even quite poor people could buy spices and grow herbs in bulk, and they did - in addition to 'pot herbs' which were typically foraged.

(Life expectancy of 40 is skewed by high infant/ childhood mortality, btw. If you reached 20 chances were evens on you'd reach 60).

If you look at studies of skeletons - which is a good way to assess population health - it is obvious that for quite a bit of pre-industrial history, more people than this thread suggets were eating reasonably healthy diets. That's not to deny the obvious issues mentioned, like the 'hungry gap'. But it's really in the post-industrial period that you start seeing people fed on actively harmful things.

VoiceFromThePit · 07/02/2026 13:42

Grains and starchy vegetables have always been the way the rich feed peasants cheaply.

SarahAndQuack · 07/02/2026 13:45

Octavia64 · 06/02/2026 17:47

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.

Kentwell is fab (I know a couple of people who do it every year).

But I don't think a Viking diet would typically be dominated by meat, fish and milk. I expect that looks good to do for re-enactors, but there's tons of skeletal evidence for Vikings eating diets rich in plant foods.

ProfessorLeveretGrey · 07/02/2026 13:50

Right-I have committed the cardinal sin of not reading the thread- watch on Youtube- Max Miller, Tasting History.

He's awesome- well researched, funny, makes certain dishes. Run, don't walk to his channel!!

glitterpaperchain · 07/02/2026 13:54

It really brought home how much manufactured crap we as society pump into ourselves

I thought you were talking about the AI rubbish that's all over social media!

LeftieRightsHoarder · 07/02/2026 15:24

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g · 06/02/2026 18:03

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.

I was about to say the same. People have very romantic ideas about ordinary life in the past.

Death from starvation, or from diseases exacerbated by malnutrition, was not unusual in Britain, even in the 19th and early 20th century.

Several of my aunts and uncles had rickets from malnutrition, not paupers but just urban working class children growing up between the wars.

Sugar provided a quick energy boost to hungry people who still had to do heavy work. Not a healthy diet, but they had little choice.

ColdAsAWitches · 07/02/2026 15:32

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.

And what do you eat in winter? How mouldy are the few remaining vegetables in January?

SarahAndQuack · 07/02/2026 15:34

ColdAsAWitches · 07/02/2026 15:32

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.

And what do you eat in winter? How mouldy are the few remaining vegetables in January?

January isn't the issue. Veg like leeks and some brassica are still perfectly happy in the ground at the moment, and will be good until the weather starts to warm up. Have you ever driven past an allotment? Have a look next time.

RosesAndHellebores · 07/02/2026 15:45

Paradoxically if the early 20th century and 19th century diets of the poor were given over to chicken nuggets, donuts and upfs genwrally, the population woukd likely have been happier and more satiated notwithstanding taller. Argume ts about diabetetes, clogged arteries, etc, woukd have been rendered redundant because many would simply not have survived to the age where those conditions set in. They'd have been seen off by tb, childbirth, polio, small pox and various other infections turning to pneumonia and sepsis in the era before antibiotics.

We need to be careful about the analysis and for what we wosh for.

WaryCrow · 07/02/2026 15:53

RedToothBrush · 07/02/2026 09:22

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.

Show quote history

Ooh I can add to that! Stupid computer not letting me select and quote the relevant bit.

Modern grains are highly bred (nowadays of course engineered versions are out) and apparently this has played a part in concentrating unhelpful substances. Eg gluten is now present in huge quantities compared to in medieval times, hence partly the rise in increase in food allergies. We can compare directly to the descendants of wild and old grains that thankfully are still out there, Einkorn and Emmer and Khorason. Nutrients have been lost due to the selective breeding for feeding masses too, as well as issues with soil quality.

As you say - or someone did, sorry pp - we can’t go back due to population issues. It is remarkable how little is known about native plants though and just how much was lost from Enclosure and the continued isolation from our land itself. I’ll look up hops, thanks. Love love love the Ruth Goodman farming series (there are many now for all different periods but that first one is very special).

What a fascinating thread the op started!

RedToothBrush · 07/02/2026 15:56

Agreed. This thread is great!

HostaCentral · 07/02/2026 16:00

Both sides of my family were farmers, so they ate incredibly well. Fresh, seasonal. Lots of game. Bread all home made. Both in England and Italy.

The women, in particular, have all lived into their latest 90's early 100's.

HilaryThorpe · 07/02/2026 16:21

My grandmother was born in 1883. She lived with us and continued to bottle loads of apples, pears and plums from the garden in a light sugar syrup, cooked in a very low oven for several hours. We also had dried fruit and lots of jam; a spoonful on rice pudding was a family favourite The bottled and dried food lasted all the winter. I think if you look at Eliza Acton you can see that a huge amount of preserving went on. It was obviously much more difficult in an urban environment.