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.

I think that's why fennel seed is used in quite a few things, too. And not just because it self-seeds madly... People were quite clued up on medicinal uses of plants.

Oh, yes! So, so, so many fart jokes in periods where people eat lots of legumes/brassicas.

You mean the ones that weren't dead!?

Hunter gatherers had a longer life expectancy than early farmers, not great by modern standards but 25-40 ish years compared to 20-30 years. There were lower rates of chronic diseases and fewer epidemics.

It's already been pointed out on this thead, but isn't it misleading to state that life expectancy was 30 because that average is so skewed by the horribly high figures for infant mortality? If you made it past puberty your chances of living to what we could consider late middle age must have been reasonably good if you weren't living in dire poverty and you avoided either a life of crime, getting caught up in war or dying in childbirth.

But if hunter gatherers and early farmers both likely had high infant mortality, you're still comparing like with like.

I'm saying both are oversimplified.

Hunter gatherers lived 50-60 years if survived childhood, early farmers and urban poor both lived 40-50 years.

A thing that always amazes me about Angela's Ashes is the fact that his mother has seven children. She's severely malnourished but still manages to give birth to all those children. Her diet was bread and sweet tea basically.

I have a friend who calls me 'scary monkey feet' when I pick things up with them.

I have arthritis so it hurts all the time but bending / kneeling is particularly tough. He was gobsmacked the first time I spilt something on the kitchen floor, threw a dish cloth on it, used my foot to clean up and then bent my leg to move the cloth to my hand. I'm from Yorkshire.

@CharlotteCollinsneeLucas I like to make pickles and chutneys.

I suppose it’s essential to the survival of the human race that we can still reproduce during lean times.
It must have taken an awful toll on her body, poor woman. I wonder if she died young.

My grandfer joined up in 1918 at 17 1/2. He was 5'4 with a 36" chest.
I'm 6'2 with a 46" chest.

Thing is grandfer was already working on the docks and went back to it once he recovered from the injuries he got...so hard physically manual labour.

And when I meet up with the blokes from dads generation, it was unusual to be tall. 6 foot was considered tall. But they all did hard physical work.

So interesting!
Have you ever been to Japan? The change from short to tall happened over a shorter period so 20 years ago it was very common to meet a family there with a tiny grandparent, small to average parent and properly tall teenager.

I can remember learning in school that the English army were surprised at how Australian soldiers were so much taller and stronger which is what lead to an organised effort to improve diets after the First World War.

In Xinjiang, almost 35 years ago, I drank tea with horse milk butter in a Kazakh herders yurt.
It was... not very nice. But also not as bad as I had feared.
I also came down later with food poisoning that lasted a week, and I suspect the tea was the culprit.

It was the same in southern China as well. The height difference was massive.

I knew this thanks to one of the fabulous Meg and Mog books, which I used to read to my children!

Sorry for spamming the thread like this, but things keep occurring to me...
Most of the thread has been about food in the UK or Europe, so for a bit of variation:
There's a book called "Everyday life in premodern Japan" or some very similar title, which talks about what most people actually ate in Japan. It was not what one thinks of now as "Japanese food" such as rice, fish, pickles or seaweed, though at one point an official wrote a diary entry of such a meal, because at the time he considered it such a feast.

From memory, farmers did grow rice, but it was for their local lord, and they handed it over to him. They themselves usually had a pot suspended over the hearth (a fireplace in the middle of the home, not built into a wall or with a chimney), and boiled up whatever edible plants they could grow or lay their hands on. The mainstay was taro and a couple of related tubers. Meat was basically never consumed, and fish was actually rare unless one lived right by the sea.

Living in China about 35 years ago, in winter pretty much the only fresh vegetables universally available in winter were cabbages and daikon. I was at university in Shanghai at one point during that time, and many of the teaching staff had apartments provided on campus. A truck loaded with cabbages was brought in, and the teaching staff were told to go collect their share of it.
The availability of fresh things did vary quite a lot from place to place. The South has a much shorter winter, and had more fruits and vegetables available in winter.

Not sure that harking after the wonderous diets of the past vs. modern "processed crap" is a good idea.

A lot of people survived on stuff like gruel and bread stuffed with sawdust.

I say "survived" because a lot of them didn't.

If you were unfortunate enough to be in the military you would be fed on the the minimal stuff that was needed to keep you alive to march and shoot a weapon.

Sailors on ships survived on hard tack and rum and often got scurvy.

People drank weakly brewed beer instead of water because then they wouldn't get cholera.

I'm sure a tiny minority of the population (the nobility) did get a more varied diet. But I also remember about reading somewhere that the privvys of royal palaces kept getting blocked because of the amount of meat they ate. So maybe not so many vegetables after all.

Henry VIII got enormously fat, probably by dining out exclusively on roasted meat.

My grandfather joined the army in 1930's for the food. Also, he had a regular wage to send back to his family.

My Romanian grandfather’s family were unusually tall for their time. Men regularly over 6’ and women regularly over 5’7”. My grandfather and his cousins were children during WW2. None of them reached their families’ usual adult heights. The children of those who left Romania immediately after the war all achieved their ‘ancestral’ heights. The children of those who remained, and who grew up under Communism, were similar heights to their parents, but their grandchildren who grew up in the West are again taller than their parents.

Nutrition and calories.

Hi @SarahAndQuack, I know this thread has moved on a bit (and died down a bit!) but this is the abstract of, and link to, an interesting archaeological paper on pottery (‘ceramic container technology’) as food containers, and how the earliest known pottery was a hunter-gatherer-forager innovation in East Asia.

One of the authors is my friend who was involved in the lipid analyses.

It’s from Nature 2013. It’s a fascinating insight into the value of not being Eurocentric and Near-Eastern-focused when looking at the transition period(s) into the ‘Neolithic’ across the planet. It’s also interesting about the archeological potential of lipid science.

Pottery was a hunter-gatherer innovation that first emerged in East Asia between 20,000 and 12,000 calibrated years before present (cal bp), towards the end of the Late Pleistocene epoch, a period of time when humans were adjusting to changing climates and new environments. Ceramic container technologies were one of a range of late glacial adaptations that were pivotal to structuring subsequent cultural trajectories in different regions of the world, but the reasons for their emergence and widespread uptake are poorly understood. The first ceramic containers must have provided prehistoric hunter-gatherers with attractive new strategies for processing and consuming foodstuffs, but virtually nothing is known of how early pots were used. Here we report the chemical analysis of food residues associated with Late Pleistocene pottery, focusing on one of the best-studied prehistoric ceramic sequences in the world, the Japanese Jōmon. We demonstrate that lipids can be recovered reliably from charred surface deposits adhering to pottery dating from about 15,000 to 11,800 cal bp (the Incipient Jōmon period), the oldest pottery so far investigated, and that in most cases these organic compounds are unequivocally derived from processing freshwater and marine organisms. Stable isotope data support the lipid evidence and suggest that most of the 101 charred deposits analysed, from across the major islands of Japan, were derived from high-trophic-level aquatic food. Productive aquatic ecotones were heavily exploited by late glacial foragers, perhaps providing an initial impetus for investment in ceramic container technology, and paving the way for further intensification of pottery use by hunter-gatherers in the early Holocene epoch. Now that we have shown that it is possible to analyse organic residues from some of the world's earliest ceramic vessels, the subsequent development of this critical technology can be clarified through further widespread testing of hunter-gatherer pottery from later periods.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236192153_Earliest_evidence_for_the_use_of_pottery

I will kill the thread with that ^^

Ooh! No, no thread killing! That is amazing.

I had not thought about how important containers would be, but of course they must be. And now I'm thinking (via Pottery Throwdown! ) about how long it must have taken to figure out glazes that'd stop the inside from soaking up things you didn't want it to, and wondering when they started firing things rather than air-drying them, and all of that. It is fascinating how early people were doing things we think of as being really complicated.

It's a lot of words to say that people wanted to move away from the water's edge and take food with them, though. I know it's actually showing evidence of that and that they actually cooked the food rather than eating it raw, but it's still a lot of words.