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.

Slightly astonished you are basing your understanding of the past on AI

Natural? Like the victorians bread with alum, plaster of Paris and chalk.

I agreed salt was expensive.

Herbs and spices were not. Honestly - I'm a historian of medieval England; I've read a shit ton of recipes and indeed grocers' accounts. There is a really widespread perception that everything in medieval England was very dull, mud-coloured, lacking in flavour. It's total bullshit.

People used herbs a lot because there wasn't a firm distinction between a herb and a vegetable, but they absolutely knew herbs added flavour in a cheap way.

Ok, fine. For hundreds of years people living on half the island of Ireland ate nothing but potatoes, as that was all they could survive on. What massive variety of foods do you think they lived on before potatoes arrived? And why did they give up all that wonderful flavour when they could eat plain spuds instead?

I don't study Ireland and so I do not know, but it surely isn't a huge surprise to you that different periods of history might be, well, different?

It could be Ireland is very unlike England - I don't know - but in England, herbs and spices were very common and some of them were very cheap, or free. The typical style of cooking was quite highly flavoured. French aristocrats joke, in this period, that peasants eat stews full of garlic and pepper; this joke would have made sense in England too, and I do strongly suspect Ireland would not be so different.

Amazingly enough, times change. That's more or less what history is about.

I dunno why that's such a strange idea? Maybe - shudder the thought - people at some periods in history had different diets from people in other periods in history?

(And FWIW, in England, to generalise massively, it's enclosure and rapid industrialisation, coupled with rapid urbanisation, that fucks up people's diets. I do not know about Ireland, and I would be really hesitant to generalise at all, but often, there are perfectly solid reasons why people's diets get worse over time, not better.)

Agree. Forced into towns and cities when their villages and land were taken over by aristocracy in various parliamentary Acts of Enclosure (or Inclosure).

Oh, well snap then as Ive also studied food history. I dont say that they were not around and not available, but it would depend on the time of year, the storage facilities for that family or group and their status, you know this surely. I dont say they lacked flavour at all, I am very keen on that sort of food myself and dont view it as unflavoured when I use the word plain but your average peasant was not using 'grocers' in that way in any case.

'I've also studied food history'. Good for you.

Peasants (in England or France) were perfectly capable of accessing grocers' wares - that's how spices come into these countries; they'd then be traded around by peddlars going from place to place, if you were rural. People also sometimes paid wages or rents in spices (this is where the phrase 'a peppercorn rent' comes from, btw).

My grandad had a steady job on the railway and only two children in the house. My grandma was an 'invalid' for years before her early death, so grandad ran the household.

My DF was born in 1917. He worked and brought money home from being 14. When he joined the army in 1940 at the age of 22, he was a tad under 5'6", with a 34" chest and weighed 8 stone 4 lbs.

He'd also had most of his top teeth and some of his bottom teeth extracted through a mixture of decay and gum disease, so already had dentures.

The reality of growing up in an industrial city in the inter-war years.

Honestly, no. We live in a welfare state. A few hundred years ago, the poor starved to death periodically.

I listened to a really good chapter about this in The Little Ice Age by Brian Fagan

Before potatoes they lived in grain bases crops. Climate change was a factor in the shift

My Romanian grandfather often told me how his mother’s household book said that vegetables were mostly for colour and flavour, and not really essential for a healthy diet! In early 20th century Romania the important foods were, apparently, meat, grains and fats. He remembers being given cubes of fat in winter. It was considered vitally important to eat fat in winter in order to keep warm.

None of my Romanian relatives were fat. The last to leave Romania left in the early 1970s. I had a couple of dumpy great aunts, but all the others were, and still are, lean. The dumpy aunts claimed that they only got fat after communism took hold. With hindsight I can see that communism probably coincided with menopause for them.

My MSC dissertation was analysing and comparing the diet of early modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. I did this by looking at the stable isotope values in their bones. They were all hunter gatherers and pretty much ate whatever was available in their area with a high proportion of plant material. There was a surprisingly strong carnivore signal in some of the bones, meaning they were eating carnivores or maybe each other?

Im 40 and my own grandmother had rickets as a child raised in a northern industrial town in the early 1930s. She was quite a short woman as an adult, and poor nutrition was likely a factor.

Men had to have minimum physical measurements eg chest for jobs like police and poor men didn't often qualify because they were too thin.

The diet of poor folk at that time was basic. A lot of bread and butter, porridge. Bacon and eggs if you were lucky.

Fruit only really in summer/autumn - limited to the stuff that grows easily in the uk - apples/pears/plums, blackberries & raspberries, strawberries for a brief season in june. Rhubarb and gooseberries. if you were careful with how you stored them apples kept longer through winter.

A lot of cheap root veg - potatoes, turnips, carrots, swede, peas and beans in season. Cabbages.

My grandparents weren't as poor as some and did have meat & fish but it wasn't like today - more herring/kippers & sardines/pilchards. The meat they had included far more offal (heart, liver, kidneys, tripe) and things like tongue. For a special meal they did brisket.

Salting food for preservation uses way way more than you sprinkle on food for flavour; I very much doubt anyone using it for preservation is stinting on it for palatability.

Are you thinking of tapeworms? Threadworms don’t absorb large amounts of nutrients in the same way.

Curious as to what you mean by " around in ww2" - as adults or children ?

Are you splaining to me!!!

I know where peppercorn rent comes from for gods sake!!!

God how patronising are you?

Well absolutely about fat yes, I visited some Icelandic farms many years ago and they were talking about this historically in terms of butter use.

Which I love also, must be ethnically Icelandic!

Speaking of things with extra fat...my great grandma would make me dad (in the 60s) tea with butter and a dash of red wine to warm him up when he came home from skiing or playing in the snow.

thank you OP, for starting this thread!

Also a huge Rith Goodman fan, I was glad to see her mentioned, and to find out that 'Tales from the Green Valley' is available on Youtube.

Someone on there provided a useful list in the comments, of all the TV shows that Ruth & the boys made after that one:
1- Tales from the Green Valley / 1620 (2005)
2- Victorian Farm / 1837-1901 (2009)
3- Victorian Pharmacy / 1837-1901 (2010)
4- Edwardian Farm / 1901-1910 (2011)
5- Wartime Farm / 1938-1946 (2012)
6- Tudor Monastery Farm /1457–1509 (2013)
6.5 - Tudor Monastery Christmas Special (2013)
7- Secrets of the Castle / 13th century (2014)
8- Full Steam Ahead / Early 19th century(2016)
9- Victorian Bakers / 1837 (2016) *this one doesn't involve Ruth Goodman

This. There was a reason people moved to the cities.

Herrings, sardines etc are the most nutritious fish. I haven't had herrings for ages. I asked a fishmonger for some and he saud he didn't stock them anymore as people dont know what to do with them.

My father-in-law told me that at home as a child in the 1920s he ate very good food, as his mother had been trained as a cook in a large house, and knew how to cook well. Not expensive or fancy meals, but everything made at home from scratch, not a scrap wasted. Not a posh/rich home, with 5 children, but they were comfortably off compared with some, his father was a foreman carpenter/joiner with a specialist building firm.

When he was conscripted in WW2, he was horrified at the poor quality of the Army food, though there was plenty of it, but many of the lads conscripted with him said it was marvellous, the best they'd ever eaten.