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.

It is frustrating how common it is to believe people rarely lived into old age in the past because infant mortality and death in childbirth skews the figures so much.

Get to age 5 or 6 and you''e got a decent shot at a full life as a boy. Ditto as a girl with the exception of childbirth.

I love Ruth and co's programmes.

I think it would have been fine in a farmhouse - but a lot of rural workers lived in appalling conditions and wouldn't have the ability to safely preserve lots of fruit etc with bottling.

Potato blight did not kill a million and displace many more - it was a man made catastrophe.

As I've already said on this thread many people are getting mixed up between modern and pre-modern diets. It's fascinating to look at how political food actually is. The article I linked further back talks about taxation based on crops while vegetables which stayed in the ground made it far easier to evade.

From my experience of living in very rural Normandy and talking to neighbours in their 80s and 90s I would say that the communal bread oven provided a way of feeding the community and preserving food as the temperature slowly cooled. You started with bread, then meat from the hunt, then you made apple tart, then you put in the tergoule (rice pudding with cinnamon, allegedly a Norman tradition since the seizure of spices from a ship from the Far East moored in Le Havre). The milk was added straight from the udder. Then you dried fruit or cooked it very slowly.
Our cellar had racks for keeping apples over the winter.
Then there was Calvados, also used as medication.

When you look at the menus for rich people’s feasts, it was all meat and puddings. I believe the Victorians thought vegetables were, at best, useful as roughage, with no other nutritional benefits. In the country at least, these low-status plants that no one else wanted would have given poor people a chance of survival.

They were certainly inventive with their cooking skills. I saw a video where someone lived on the ww2 ration diet, powdered eggs were a staple part of the diet, it wouldn’t last an afternoon in this home, especially the butter.

Ruth Goodman's book The Domestic Revolution is fascinating too.

How the shift from wood to coal as a domestic fuel (in London as early as the time of Elizabeth I ) changed not only how we cooked but what we cooked. The increased demand for coal for domestic ranges kick-started the Industrial Revolution and lead to radical shifts in the working lives of men and women, pushing women more firmly into the domestic sphere.

The TV series for that period was ‘Full Steam Ahead’, from the farming gang. Def worth a watch.

Yes, I think I saw the TV series first and then bought the book. Ruth Goodman makes it very real and relatable. And her focus on the impact on women is great.

Goodness no. My mother used to talk about standing over my baby sister, hoping she might leave a bit of her one egg a week.

I don’t know how they managed with so little.

Yeah everyone was ill and horribly deficient in vitamins/minerals etc. all they ate was bread at this time.

What time in history are you talking about?

I dunno, I have my great grandmas old bero cookbook from the 1920’s, there is literally a lard sandwich recipe in it.

Not to mention the life expectancy was extremely low, food shortages were common and actually looking back on photos, everyone looked about 20 years older than they were and they all looked tubby too

It wasn't little, though. Bread was not rationed in the UK during the war (it was in Germany, and in the UK for a time after the war). This was a carefully considered decision, as were all the other decisions about what to ration and how much each household/person could have. It's frequently stated that the health of the average UK citizen actually improved during the war because they were forced to eat far less sugar and fill up on vegetables and other things that could be grown in the UK. Some people topped up their rations by buying on the black market. People who lived in the countryside might be able to supplement their rations by poaching, or getting eggs from a friendly farmer.

@BauhausOfEliottProcessing is usually ok. Ultra processing is not.

Read Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. Poor people have never had a good diet in this country, as is often the case today.

People were more physically active an average farmer would have 2000 calories a day and still be rake thin and lean because of all the manual labour. I read that at a farm once as a fun fact. I mainly sit at a computer desk all day, load the dishwasher and that’s about and I eat half a yogurt and half a soup with no bread and a healthy tea and I’m still a bit overweight due to the inactivity.

It was also very plain, both in terms of texture and flavour.

In labs, we create perfect combinations of these things to light up our brains like blackpool illuminations and we have forgotten what real food actually tastes like.

When was food 'very plain'?

I acknowledge we seem to be talking about 'the past' as a completely homogenous period, but certainly no one would think of medieval or early modern cookery as plain.

If you were poor, certainly. Pottage is very plain. You might have been lucky to have some herbs, if they grew ok that season or if you managed to keep enough dried ones. You wouldnt have had a lot of salt.

A good book to read about this, although its not about this, is Angelas Ashes by Frank McCourt, he talks about growing up in poverty and eating cabbage and potatoes with butter every single day. They survived and I would very much enjoy that food, althought not every single day, but its plain. Nothing wrong with plain, but it is plain.

Peasants in Ireland survived on pretty much nothing but potatoes for generations. They were the easiest and most nutritional food that could grow in poor soil. It was pretty much the definition of a plain diet.

Salt, yes. Herbs and spices, no. In medieval England spices were very common things to eat - people buy them in enormous quantities, far more than we would now, and they were affordable - not all of them, obviously, but many.

I was fairly clear I was talking about medieval/early modern food, so no, I think I'll give Frank McCourt a swerve on the subject. I feel like things might have change a tiny, tiny bit in several centuries, don't you?

I don't think medieval peasants were eating potatoes.

If you mean from medieval to Franks time, for the poor? No

The choice of carb might be different, but other than that, it was carbs with whatever else, usually beans/veg

Salt was available in medieval times yes, but it was expensive, used primarily to store and keep foods, you couldnt just sprinkle it liberally in your cauldron as you liked. Im talking about the poor. The vast majority of the population would have to ration fancies like flavourings.

I think the healthiest generation was my grandparents generation who were around during WW2 and beyond. All my grandparents except one loved into their mid 90’s, they all grew their own fruit and veg, shopped from the local butchers, foraged wild food and ate real butter. Processed foods became a rare treat in their later year.I remember one of my grandad having a fry up most days, meat and 2 veg for dinner and rarely ate sugar. My other grandad was partial to a honey sandwich or even sugar sandwiches but still lived to 96. I recently lost my last grandparent at the age of 97. . I doubt many from my generation will live into their 90’s. My parents are now late 60’s early 70’s and are already looking elderly with medical conditions.

For this reason I try and eat a diet of fresh meat, fish, vegetables and i try and stay clear of UP foods. I grow my own fruit and veg and i try and stay active.