> "Similarly, some fruits were safer than others: citrus fruits improved digestion, especially in hot weather, while raisins were good for the stomach, lungs and liver. And nuts were nutritious and good for the brain."
My impression is that refined sugar was extremely rare in medieval times and into the renaissance. But everybody loved raisins, and they were used extensively, even though they were usually imported from Italy and other Mediterranean regions. Various forms of raisin bread (often with dried figs, citrus peels, and currants,) were the definitive medieval festival/feast-day food. Their distant descendants are the stollen, panettone, etc., still popular as holiday treats in Europe.
> In thirteenth-century England, Christians were expected to avoid meat every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday during Lent (when eggs and dairy products were also forbidden), Advent and on some saints’ days (or the eves of their feasts)
Every person (back then) could observe farm animals had sex. Since no one had seen fish having sex, it was believed that fish spawned spontaneously from rivers/lakes/oceans and therefore were free from the animal version of "original sin". That's why so much effort was put into catching and preserving fish.
The author has a fascination with Basques & Basque history. Or maybe they really had a large influence in fishing and trans-Atlantic navigation. And that maybe they discovered the huge cod banks by Newfoundland before John Cabot did.
Medieval people were not stupid. They observed that pickled vegetables preserved the veggies for months. And they observed that people who ate pickled vegetables got scurvy (vitamin C deficiency disease) at a much lower rate. The recipes didn't travel too far, so while sauerkraut and kimchi are both pickled cabbage, with different spices they are wildly different.
I remember visiting one of the Tudor palaces, and being told that Henry the 8th's diet was likely majority meat, even with all the days it was banned.
> First Course: Cheat Bread and Manchett, Beare and Ale Wyne, Flesh for Pottage (thick broth), Chines of Beef, Venison in Brew’z or mult’, Pestells of Reed Deere, Carpes of Young Veale in Arm’ farced, Custard garnished, or Fritters
> Second Course: Jelly, Ipocras, Creames of Almonds, Pheasant, Hern, Bitterne, Shovelard, Cocks, Plovers or Gulles, Larkes or Rabbits, Venison in fine past, Tarts, Fritter
> Since no one had seen fish having sex, it was believed that fish spawned spontaneously from rivers/lakes/oceans and therefore were free from the animal version of "original sin".
I don't know who comes up with this stuff.
Aristotle wrote extensively about fish eggs, milt and breeding habits centuries before the Christian era. Not only that, fishermen throughout history were well aware that fish laid eggs.
On the other point, original sin applies exclusively to humans. Animals were never considered moral agents, nor were they subject to the Fall of Man in a way that required spiritual redemption.
> sauerkraut and kimchi are both pickled cabbage
Yes, but one uses Brassica oleracea while the other uses Brassica rapa.
Aristotle thought some fish were spontaneously generated and others not (also all eels and Testacea).
"This occurs in ponds, especially one near Knidos, which, so it is said, on one occasion dried up at the time of the Dogstar and all the mud was taken out; water began to collect in it as the first <rains> came, and at that point tiny fishes appeared, as soon as the water began. This fish was a kind of grey mullet which is not produced as the result of copulation, and its size was about that of a small sprat: none of them had either egg or milt. (...) This evidence shows that certain fishes are produced spontaneously, and do not come out of eggs or from copulation" (HA VI.15 569a13-19, 25-26).
This is something of a problem for Aristotle, since the formal cause appears to be absent in spontaneous generation. He likely would have been happier to discover that spontaneous generation does not, in fact, occur for animals. But he felt that the evidence forced him to concede that it does.
The Basques were whalers. They started from the coast, using watch towers. Once the Bay of Biscay was depleted they moved further and further into the Atlantic.
Whale meat was mediocre and didn't preserve well, and while whale bone (baleen) is useful enough, but the real target was whale oil, the best lubricant and fuel for lighting.
All of this is from The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe by James Belich. (Highly recommended (even to myself – I reread it within a year).
You can ask this about a lot of foods, but probably won't get many satisfying answers. For example cheese goes back many thousands of years, and it's theorized that it was invented accidentally due to storing milk in sheep stomachs or similar.
Probably something similar for pickling. Someone noticed that salted foods last a long time, and vinegar never seems to go bad, so why not try combining them?
What about hakarl? "Rotten" icelandic shark meat. It stinks to high heaven. Yet somebody thought "let's eat this". I can't imagine how hungry they must have been. And, if it doesn't decompose for 6 weeks under sand, it's toxic, so you die if you eat it. I'm sure they knew that. Yet they still tried it... Must've been a helluva famine.
> Yet they still tried it... Must've been a helluva famine.
Humans have lived at subsistence level, one bad harvest away from famine for most of history. Our modern abundance is very recent (1-3 generations) thing depending on where you were born.
So I think a tremendous amount of food discovery was a combination of food accidents didn't want food to go to waste, and desperation level eating anything to delay death from starvation.
i've pickled by accident before. first time it happens by accident and you're brave enough to try it and you're fine, it becomes something you'll try with anything.
Or at least, they weren’t particularly stupid. These are still the people that reportedly ate more fish because they believed these animals were exempt from original sin because they’d never observed them having sex. Thats not particularly smart either.
I am sure that in the past, good or bad food was more about conservation and food borne diseases than it was about nutrition. At least, that's the attitude that would make the most sense. That would explain sugar good / fish bad. There is probably a political aspect too, local food is seen as better than the rival neighbor food.
The modern, first world attitude must be very unusual towards history. We basically solved conservation and food born diseases are now uncommon and mostly treatable, and we have an abundance of anything, so nutrition is the only thing that remains when discussing healthy food.
What didn't change is the made up theories surrounding food. Despite all our science, we still have a lot of these today, in some for or another.
For most of human history calories in was way more important than nutrition since we could barely even manage that. Just the fact that you can buy fresh fruit and vegetables in the middle of a harsh winter is an incredible feat of logistics and technology that has taken a century to develop.
> buy fresh fruit and vegetables in the middle of a harsh winter
This is extremely recent, most people even in my age range (40-50) recall growing up on frozen/canned in the off season for the most part.
The idea of getting year round good fresh produce flown in from other climates is regionally a very recent thing. Peru for example exports 40x more blueberries to the US today than they did even a decade ago.
It was more of a storage problem than a production problem. Plenty of grains and foods people grew throughout known history were more than capable of providing all the calories someone would want or need without crazy effort. The problem is keeping that food good for an entire year, or more if there is unexpected bad growing weather. One person, even using entirely hand tools and no draft animals, could grow 10x more food than they need in a year. But people didn't do that because they knew they had no way of keeping food around for that long, all it would do is attract pests and/or mold and rot after enough time.
It was both storage and transport. The development of international shipping logistics, improved infrastructure and refrigeration were all needed to make this happen.
You can grow the food and you can store the food but that doesn’t do much good if locally you make too much and someone somewhere else is starving but you can’t get from point A to point B, and it has to get there not only unspoiled but intact, or at least undamaged enough to eat.
You’re correct, there needs to be refrigerated trailers, train cars, and ships along with refrigerated warehouses from source to destination. Transportation and storage.
We didn’t have paved roads or railroads until relatively recently, and so a good chunk of goods were being damaged on rickety horse drawn wagons on bumpy, muddy dirt roads.
Dealing with sugar specifically, sufficient concentrations act as a preservative as well. Honey, in particular, can be applied to surface wounds to help promote healing by resisting infection.
Also, it's delicious, and you're less likely to find parasites in it than animal flesh.
And the reason it is delicious is because evolution told us it was the best food there is: safe and tons of readily available calories.
Funny how in the last few decades we turned a system that has benefited us for millions of years into a liability, simply by making that "perfect food" so abundant.
Not just nutrition, over the last ~30 years there's also been a philosophical shift globally where many people went from thinking about impact on humans as the only thing to assess, to considering the impact on the wider ecosystems.
Today not only we discuss nutritional content we also discuss the externalities to produce those calories.
You're talking about the common misconception that this planets ecology is somehow broken, that humans are supernatural (literally above nature) and that only other humans can fix it.
I'm also assuming that you're goodwill for other species ends at insects and bacteria
I hope this never happens, but if one day a cell in your colon maximizes its short-term replication at the expense of the long-term stability of the system it depends on, I hope nobody tells you it's fine because it's "natural."
This article seems unusually misrepresenting of the theory of humours, which was prevalent in medieval Europe, at least in the catholic parts. This theory stated that no food was explicitly bad or good; rather, you should eat food that is suitable for your temperament. In that sense, they did not believe any food is necessarily (at least in terms of the humours) unhealthy; rather, it may be unsuitable or suitable for your temperament and the balance of humours within you. The hesistance of wet was mostly of its association with diseases; but it was recommended to cholerics, whose temperament needed to be balanced with it.
In a sense, it sometimes produces better results (by chance) than modern dietary practices which often held up some types of (seemingly innocent food; like animal fats) to be categorically unhealthy.
> Complexion also determined what a person should eat, so that (for example) garlic and pepper were good for the phlegmatic, but “venym” to a choleric person.
> According to Galen, food “is probably the most important of all medical subjects,”
Just remember that in medieval times growing food was the job of the majority of men. Men also were the people most likely to be educated and actually write and talk about things and so food would be something on their mind. They would be growing it and thus writing about it. contrary to modern ideas men actually appeared to have done a lot of cooking: women were not common in the army (different cultures had different perspectives on women with the army. Some would have more than others, but in any case, you would have men as the vast majority) so men would have had to do at least some cooking. Even your common peasant farmer man would likely spend a significant amount of time out in the field at lunchtime where the women are not around and so would have to fend for themselves for their lunch.
I bring the book up to point out that no one has ever asked what women were doing and what was important. This is something historians are looking at now when trying to piece together what must have been happening. As a general rule, you can say that every woman was spending the vast majority of their working hours making thread so they could have clothes, but since women were rarely the ones who were writing, we have almost no historical record of clothing. What we do have is often from tailors who would be a male and thus something that occasionally a man would write about.
Outside of monasteries, the intersection of men who were literate and men who were directly involved in food production was tiny.
Farming men weren’t cooking their midday meal out in the fields; they took some bread and maybe some protein out with them at the start of their working day.
> Outside of monasteries, the intersection of men who were literate and men who were directly involved in food production was tiny
Higher than that. While the educated men likely did not do much farm labor (depending on the local details they may have been out there during harvest when all hands were needed), they had to ensure there were enough slaves to do that. Most of them were also well aware that they were one bad harvest from starvation and so paid attention to food production.
> Farming men weren’t cooking their midday meal out in the fields; they took some bread and maybe some protein out with them at the start of their working day.
That depends on the culture. The famous Spanish dish Paella was men cooking in the fields.
you would probably like the book Invisible Women. Touches a lot on this subject and how there is so much "missing data" when we talk about these things and it carries through to the modern day
To the best of my knowledge a vanishingly small proportion of historical society was literate and it was an even smaller subset that authored anything of note. It isn't historical women that are invisible it's >90% of everyone. The written accounts are whatever the elite of the elite deigned to write down which those that came after chose to bother preserving.
The whole point of the elite is that they don't have to do the hard work.... It's like Jefferson being out in the fields picking cotton whilst paying for a bunch of slaves.. a highly dubious proposition
That is ONE elite. There have been many elites over history with different levels of wealth and different things they did. Those who could afford a lot of slaves were not out in the field, but not all elite were that wealthy. I'm sure Jefferson wasn't picking cotton, but that doesn't mean no elite were out in the fields.
Yeah you should check out this book, would enhance the best of your knowledge. While you're right, even within that cohort there is a massive gender difference and it impacts how we view society in a big way
> Even your common peasant farmer man would likely spend a significant amount of time out in the field at lunchtime where the women are not around and so would have to fend for themselves for their lunch.
Womem were in the fields. And kids too. Generally men were doing physically most demanding work, but not all of it is like that.
And people working in the fields would also take the food that does not necessitate cooking with them. And kids were tasked to bring food to people working in fields when necessary.
You cant "fend for yourself" in the fields and also do the fields work.
> And textile production was a major activity (indeed, the major activity) for probably around 40% of the population in most pre-modern societies – not merely almost all adult women, but girls too would start spinning and weaving (spinning in particular, again, we’ll get there) at very early ages. Consequently, spinning thread may have been the single most frequently performed work-task in the ancient world
Sure women did get to the fields at times. How much did vary by culture. However there is very good reason (pregnancy and nursing) that most cultures had men's and women's work as separate things. That separation often resulted in men and women being separated by long enough that men would really want to cook their own meals instead of eating a packed meal.
> You cant "fend for yourself" in the fields and also do the fields work.
That depends greatly on what you mean by fend for yourself. You wouldn't be a gatherer, but you could cook a quick meal over a fire, maybe throw some fresh herbs in the pot if you happened to see any.
Spinning and weaving does not exclude your presence in the field when that seasonal work is required. Nor does cooking or childcare or house animals care. Also, that article is not about medieval times.
> However there is very good reason (pregnancy and nursing) that most cultures had men's and women's work as separate things.
I did not said women and men did the same things. I said women were in the fields. That should be uncontroversial considering we have medieval drawings of women working in the fields and historical literature lists field work women were involved in or responsible for (harvesting, planting plants, removing weeds, other similar work).
> That separation often resulted in men and women being separated by long enough that men would really want to cook their own meals instead of eating a packed meal.
We are talking about medieval farm and peasants field work. Even if it was only a man in that field, he was separated for a day and within walking distance. There is zero reason to cook food if you can pack it or if a kid can bring it to you.
> You wouldn't be a gatherer, but you could cook a quick meal over a fire, maybe throw some fresh herbs in the pot if you happened to see any.
Starting fire without matches is not quick. Cooking over fire that you just started is not quick. And it requires you to carry pot and raw food there, dirty one back. You don't do quick meal over a fire in the field from raw materials and have no logical reason to.
Until the Industrial Revolution, there was nothing even close to what we nowadays call "childhood". As children became old enough to walk by themselves, they'd accompany their parents and help with weeding & cultivation.
Apparently we are in the scenario where one parent is on the field and other at home. At home parent could and would tell their 5-11 years old to take the food to the other parent and other field workers. Yes they worked and had chores. They were fully suitable for taking food from place a to place b. They also herded animals by themselves or took care of younger siblings.
> Until the Industrial Revolution, there was nothing even close to what we nowadays call "childhood".
That has nothing to do with what I wrote. The 5-11 years old people existed.
The article kind of misses the forest for the trees: just as today, diet was associated with various conflicting theories and advice - some reasonable, some pure fabrication. In absence of much hard evidence food becomes a playing field for "systems" that assign values to foodstuffs. Also, obviously, sugar played a different role in societies in which the calorie requirements of physical labour were a much bigger challenge than obesity.
Also: "beans, which were thought to cause flatulence"? I'm pretty sure that bit is factual.
you have to wonder how much of these habits we see as strange now are just artifacts of
1) a lack of refrigeration (eg fruits rotting produce a much stronger odor than vegetables esp if concentrated under a fruiting tree) and
2) the revolutions we've had in agriculture wrt breeding for taste and nutrition, and the scale at which this is done now. I'm thinking specifically about the ability to quantify, isolate, and breed out the genes that result in high concentrations of phytotoxins (and the accordant pesticides that must be applied now that the natural defenses are gone)
undercooked beans contain high levels of phytotoxins, for example, and lead to gastrointestinal distress and sometimes even death. if all plants/vegetables/etc in the past had comparably elevated levels of these toxins, it's not hard to imagine that people in the past were doing their best to pattern recognize and thus avoid things they had little-to-no systemic understanding of which then are extrapolated and grown into popular consciousness by word-of-mouth
the obsession with 'health' as measured by the four humors is definitely silly from an empirical POV but the innate drive to not want to shit your guts out after your morning porridge seems like a very normal and valid motivator
It's fascinating how closely this parallels Chinese traditional medicine, where foods are classified as "heaty" or "cooling" and health conditions can be both caused and treated by an excess of one or the other.
This is one of the things that makes the contemporary Chinese treatment of TCM as credible so jarring to me. Many people seem to regard it as some unique inheritance of their culture, but in fact it closely resembles many other pre-scientific medical traditions, including in the "West".
For me, pseudoscience is like comparative religions: historicizing it and situating it in a context alongside comparable traditions tends to deflate its persuasiveness. (Maybe some of that is down to temperament; I'm sure some people study comparative religions and are impressed by the patterns among them as though they suggest more universal or "deeper" truths.)
I think your contemporary "Western" bias is what is jarring you. In fact, the prevalence of these traditional medicine practices gives them credence in my mind.
Most people probably don't have my same view, but I don't see these practices as having 'credibility' in the same way as a pharmaceutical with a phase 3 trial and decades of follow ups. But they DO have credibility in the sense that there's a long history of people following this advice and feeling a little better. Maybe it's just placebo or a coincidence, but if it works it doesn't matter.
Similarly, contemporary western medicine has all sorts of blind spots, is vulnerable to lobbying/agendas/money, and doesn't offer much in the way of a holistic guide towards the feeling that your diet is aligning with your health goals.
This is similar to my view of religion. Any given doctrine isn't factual, but people long for a way to spiritually understand the world, and they aren't wrong for doing so. Science can't and shouldn't provide that.
> But they DO have credibility in the sense that there's a long history of people following this advice and feeling a little better.
There's also long histories of people following folk medicine advice and being hurt by it. And in the case of TCM, the history isn't really that long; TCM as we know it is synthetic and modern, stitched together from various different and often contradictory or mutually exclusive folk medicine traditions. It reminds me of Enlightenment-era philosophers who tried to "rescue" belief in God by retreating to "natural religion"— they were of course accused of atheism!
> This is similar to my view of religion. Any given doctrine isn't factual, but people long for a way to spiritually understand the world, and they aren't wrong for doing so. Science can't and shouldn't provide that.
Sure, you can espouse a kind of enlightened "separate magisteria" view of science and religion's roles in society. But the flip side of that is something like "religion (or folk medicine, in this case) can't and shouldn't provide factual claims about the world". And that's more or less totally divorced from actual practice of those things.
Of course I agree about the weaknesses of contemporary medicine and even of "actually existing science", so-to-speak.
But what you're describing here ("Any given doctrine isn't factual", "I don't see these practices as having 'credibility' in the same way as a pharmaceutical with a phase 3 trial and decades of follow ups") isn't really "credence" in the usual sense so much as affinity, interest, or a kind of "outsider's respect".
Any medical remedy not too dangerous, expensive, or inconvenient is worth trying even if the evidence to support it is weak. Folk medicine traditions are useful sources from which to do reverse pharmacology or other research.
But there are third-rate TCM "journals" churning out (sometimes deliberately) ill-designed papers. TCM isn't merely an operational framework and it doesn't limit itself to operational or practical guidance. It's chock full of extremely dubious ontological claims. (Mainstream actually-existing-science isn't free of dubious ontological claims about invisible entities either, but these are of a different class.) That's not just a different practice, that's industrialized counterfeit science.
Humans, it turns out, are capable of developing a lot of useful tools and practices even with no methodologies or bad methodologies. That's true, and the fact of it is kind of surprising and fun. But the world didn't outgrow pre-scientific folk medicine traditions like that of the four humors by mere accident or happenstance. And when you are familiar with a couple of such folk medicine traditions, TCM doesn't look like part of an alternate modernity so much as yet another outmoded pre-scientific tradition.
Ayurvedic medicine is a similar idea from the indian subcontinent. Foods have different medicinal properties like hot/cold, heavy/light, etc and those foods interact with your body type (which itself is a confluence of three factors called dosha that everyone has but in varying ratios) in order to produce certain effects.
Considering how fast fish without refrigeration would spoil back then, the rarity of access to sugar and the need for energy dense foods, "fish bad, sugar good" makes perfect sense.
People dried and salted alot of food to preserve it. But fish already live in a world of salt, and so I wonder of worms and parasites still survived this proxess.
And I think a lot of salted food was just eaten, not cooked?
Some of the salted food like meat was so salted that even just dragging it in sea water on ships was effective way to lower salt content. So it was definitely cooked most often boiled to remove most of salt content.
I think we largely have not learned just how much salt is needed to properly preserve food outside refrigeration over longer periods.
>fish already live in a world of salt, and so I wonder of worms and parasites still survived this proxess.
As always, dose determines toxicity. While alive and in salt water fish are pretty good about regulating their internal salinity and the parasites that live in them enjoyed the benefits of that regulated environment. When dead and packed in salt, fish are noticeably less able to maintain homeostasis and the concentration of salt is enough to pull the moisture out of both the fish and any parasites via osmosis. This kills the parasites, though there may be some cases where eggs survive that I'm not aware of.
I've read an archeological analysis of a merchant ship rowers-slaves -- every skeleton had perfect teeth. Because slaves were fed only fish, not any bread, bread was a product that merchants traded, while fish was cheap and abundant.
So I think "fish bad" opinion was just because fish was cheap and everyone had it.
It's interesting how some of these came to the right conclusions (given sanitary standards at the time) but for entirely the wrong reasons. A lot of the food that was unhealthy was food that could go bad quickly or carry illnesses
I enjoyed reading this, I found the article equally interesting and amusing. As a curiosity — it says that beef was cheap and suitable for manual labourers, and salmon was a staple of the monastic diet. How did they end up being among the most expensive in their respective groups?
Is this article really about medieval? Sounds very familiar to todays food culture. Everyone makes claims without having a solid justification, yet the observations indicate that it is true.
Nothing has changed, but nowadays we have papers that document observations and sell their theory as the truth; in the past, we had cookbooks.
> "Fish Bad, Sugar Good"
> "Similarly, some fruits were safer than others: citrus fruits improved digestion, especially in hot weather, while raisins were good for the stomach, lungs and liver. And nuts were nutritious and good for the brain."
My impression is that refined sugar was extremely rare in medieval times and into the renaissance. But everybody loved raisins, and they were used extensively, even though they were usually imported from Italy and other Mediterranean regions. Various forms of raisin bread (often with dried figs, citrus peels, and currants,) were the definitive medieval festival/feast-day food. Their distant descendants are the stollen, panettone, etc., still popular as holiday treats in Europe.
Certain regions of medieval Germany (and presumably France) grew grapes but had to resort to ingenious methods to dry them into raisins: https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/27/raisins-in-a-cold-cli...
They had honey and could sweeten things that way but it’s not like table sugar from beets or sugar cane.
> In thirteenth-century England, Christians were expected to avoid meat every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday during Lent (when eggs and dairy products were also forbidden), Advent and on some saints’ days (or the eves of their feasts)
Every person (back then) could observe farm animals had sex. Since no one had seen fish having sex, it was believed that fish spawned spontaneously from rivers/lakes/oceans and therefore were free from the animal version of "original sin". That's why so much effort was put into catching and preserving fish.
Source:
https://www.amazon.com/Cod-Biography-Fish-Changed-World-eboo...
Also history of food:
https://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky-ebo...
The author has a fascination with Basques & Basque history. Or maybe they really had a large influence in fishing and trans-Atlantic navigation. And that maybe they discovered the huge cod banks by Newfoundland before John Cabot did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot
Medieval people were not stupid. They observed that pickled vegetables preserved the veggies for months. And they observed that people who ate pickled vegetables got scurvy (vitamin C deficiency disease) at a much lower rate. The recipes didn't travel too far, so while sauerkraut and kimchi are both pickled cabbage, with different spices they are wildly different.
The fish thing is a carry over from Judaism, which has no such concept of "original sin". I find that a much more convincing explanation.
But his last line was about catching and preserving fish.... Which is the opposite of eating fish. I'm not sure what he was answering
They caught them and preserved them to keep them from spoiling, to eat them later.
And then there were the barnacle geese that, conveniently for Lent, grew on trees...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose_myth
I remember visiting one of the Tudor palaces, and being told that Henry the 8th's diet was likely majority meat, even with all the days it was banned.
> First Course: Cheat Bread and Manchett, Beare and Ale Wyne, Flesh for Pottage (thick broth), Chines of Beef, Venison in Brew’z or mult’, Pestells of Reed Deere, Carpes of Young Veale in Arm’ farced, Custard garnished, or Fritters
> Second Course: Jelly, Ipocras, Creames of Almonds, Pheasant, Hern, Bitterne, Shovelard, Cocks, Plovers or Gulles, Larkes or Rabbits, Venison in fine past, Tarts, Fritter
https://www.hrp.org.uk/hampton-court-palace/history-and-stor...
Honestly it's a wonder there was any royalty without gout.
> Since no one had seen fish having sex, it was believed that fish spawned spontaneously from rivers/lakes/oceans and therefore were free from the animal version of "original sin".
I don't know who comes up with this stuff.
Aristotle wrote extensively about fish eggs, milt and breeding habits centuries before the Christian era. Not only that, fishermen throughout history were well aware that fish laid eggs.
On the other point, original sin applies exclusively to humans. Animals were never considered moral agents, nor were they subject to the Fall of Man in a way that required spiritual redemption.
> sauerkraut and kimchi are both pickled cabbage
Yes, but one uses Brassica oleracea while the other uses Brassica rapa.
Aristotle thought some fish were spontaneously generated and others not (also all eels and Testacea).
"This occurs in ponds, especially one near Knidos, which, so it is said, on one occasion dried up at the time of the Dogstar and all the mud was taken out; water began to collect in it as the first <rains> came, and at that point tiny fishes appeared, as soon as the water began. This fish was a kind of grey mullet which is not produced as the result of copulation, and its size was about that of a small sprat: none of them had either egg or milt. (...) This evidence shows that certain fishes are produced spontaneously, and do not come out of eggs or from copulation" (HA VI.15 569a13-19, 25-26).
This is something of a problem for Aristotle, since the formal cause appears to be absent in spontaneous generation. He likely would have been happier to discover that spontaneous generation does not, in fact, occur for animals. But he felt that the evidence forced him to concede that it does.
Yes, Aristotle thought this about eels and certain kinds of mudfish or grey mullet, but he didn't maintain this about fish in general.
The Basques were whalers. They started from the coast, using watch towers. Once the Bay of Biscay was depleted they moved further and further into the Atlantic.
Whale meat was mediocre and didn't preserve well, and while whale bone (baleen) is useful enough, but the real target was whale oil, the best lubricant and fuel for lighting.
All of this is from The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe by James Belich. (Highly recommended (even to myself – I reread it within a year).
> the real target was whale oil, the best lubricant
and it was used that way until the second half of the 20th century
Right around when the decopods showed up and the whale went extinct....
Wait, sorry.....that was anchovies
> They observed that pickled vegetables preserved the veggies for months.
Kind of a tautology. Why would they think to pickle something in the first place?
You can ask this about a lot of foods, but probably won't get many satisfying answers. For example cheese goes back many thousands of years, and it's theorized that it was invented accidentally due to storing milk in sheep stomachs or similar.
Probably something similar for pickling. Someone noticed that salted foods last a long time, and vinegar never seems to go bad, so why not try combining them?
The acidity in many traditional pickling methods is lactic acid produced by fermentation. No vinegar involved.
Looking it up, ocean water has the right salt content to facilitate this...
What about hakarl? "Rotten" icelandic shark meat. It stinks to high heaven. Yet somebody thought "let's eat this". I can't imagine how hungry they must have been. And, if it doesn't decompose for 6 weeks under sand, it's toxic, so you die if you eat it. I'm sure they knew that. Yet they still tried it... Must've been a helluva famine.
> Yet they still tried it... Must've been a helluva famine.
Humans have lived at subsistence level, one bad harvest away from famine for most of history. Our modern abundance is very recent (1-3 generations) thing depending on where you were born.
So I think a tremendous amount of food discovery was a combination of food accidents didn't want food to go to waste, and desperation level eating anything to delay death from starvation.
"Pickling" things in vinegar is a relatively modern invention.
i've pickled by accident before. first time it happens by accident and you're brave enough to try it and you're fine, it becomes something you'll try with anything.
That is not a tautology.
> Medieval people were not stupid
Or at least, they weren’t particularly stupid. These are still the people that reportedly ate more fish because they believed these animals were exempt from original sin because they’d never observed them having sex. Thats not particularly smart either.
I am sure that in the past, good or bad food was more about conservation and food borne diseases than it was about nutrition. At least, that's the attitude that would make the most sense. That would explain sugar good / fish bad. There is probably a political aspect too, local food is seen as better than the rival neighbor food.
The modern, first world attitude must be very unusual towards history. We basically solved conservation and food born diseases are now uncommon and mostly treatable, and we have an abundance of anything, so nutrition is the only thing that remains when discussing healthy food.
What didn't change is the made up theories surrounding food. Despite all our science, we still have a lot of these today, in some for or another.
For most of human history calories in was way more important than nutrition since we could barely even manage that. Just the fact that you can buy fresh fruit and vegetables in the middle of a harsh winter is an incredible feat of logistics and technology that has taken a century to develop.
> buy fresh fruit and vegetables in the middle of a harsh winter
This is extremely recent, most people even in my age range (40-50) recall growing up on frozen/canned in the off season for the most part.
The idea of getting year round good fresh produce flown in from other climates is regionally a very recent thing. Peru for example exports 40x more blueberries to the US today than they did even a decade ago.
It was more of a storage problem than a production problem. Plenty of grains and foods people grew throughout known history were more than capable of providing all the calories someone would want or need without crazy effort. The problem is keeping that food good for an entire year, or more if there is unexpected bad growing weather. One person, even using entirely hand tools and no draft animals, could grow 10x more food than they need in a year. But people didn't do that because they knew they had no way of keeping food around for that long, all it would do is attract pests and/or mold and rot after enough time.
It was both storage and transport. The development of international shipping logistics, improved infrastructure and refrigeration were all needed to make this happen.
You can grow the food and you can store the food but that doesn’t do much good if locally you make too much and someone somewhere else is starving but you can’t get from point A to point B, and it has to get there not only unspoiled but intact, or at least undamaged enough to eat.
You’re correct, there needs to be refrigerated trailers, train cars, and ships along with refrigerated warehouses from source to destination. Transportation and storage.
Before vapor-compression refrigeration, there was the ice trade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade
Even that is a bit of an advanced step.
We didn’t have paved roads or railroads until relatively recently, and so a good chunk of goods were being damaged on rickety horse drawn wagons on bumpy, muddy dirt roads.
A century? I guess you mean all of human history to develop.
Dealing with sugar specifically, sufficient concentrations act as a preservative as well. Honey, in particular, can be applied to surface wounds to help promote healing by resisting infection.
Also, it's delicious, and you're less likely to find parasites in it than animal flesh.
And the reason it is delicious is because evolution told us it was the best food there is: safe and tons of readily available calories.
Funny how in the last few decades we turned a system that has benefited us for millions of years into a liability, simply by making that "perfect food" so abundant.
Not just nutrition, over the last ~30 years there's also been a philosophical shift globally where many people went from thinking about impact on humans as the only thing to assess, to considering the impact on the wider ecosystems.
Today not only we discuss nutritional content we also discuss the externalities to produce those calories.
You're talking about the common misconception that this planets ecology is somehow broken, that humans are supernatural (literally above nature) and that only other humans can fix it.
I'm also assuming that you're goodwill for other species ends at insects and bacteria
DDT kills both bees and bald eagles. Let's not overuse it, even if we could grow more nutritious food if we did.
It definitely is easier to comment on what you make up than what was written, but don't be lazy.
I hope this never happens, but if one day a cell in your colon maximizes its short-term replication at the expense of the long-term stability of the system it depends on, I hope nobody tells you it's fine because it's "natural."
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This article seems unusually misrepresenting of the theory of humours, which was prevalent in medieval Europe, at least in the catholic parts. This theory stated that no food was explicitly bad or good; rather, you should eat food that is suitable for your temperament. In that sense, they did not believe any food is necessarily (at least in terms of the humours) unhealthy; rather, it may be unsuitable or suitable for your temperament and the balance of humours within you. The hesistance of wet was mostly of its association with diseases; but it was recommended to cholerics, whose temperament needed to be balanced with it. In a sense, it sometimes produces better results (by chance) than modern dietary practices which often held up some types of (seemingly innocent food; like animal fats) to be categorically unhealthy.
It mentions it:
> Complexion also determined what a person should eat, so that (for example) garlic and pepper were good for the phlegmatic, but “venym” to a choleric person.
> According to Galen, food “is probably the most important of all medical subjects,”
Just remember that in medieval times growing food was the job of the majority of men. Men also were the people most likely to be educated and actually write and talk about things and so food would be something on their mind. They would be growing it and thus writing about it. contrary to modern ideas men actually appeared to have done a lot of cooking: women were not common in the army (different cultures had different perspectives on women with the army. Some would have more than others, but in any case, you would have men as the vast majority) so men would have had to do at least some cooking. Even your common peasant farmer man would likely spend a significant amount of time out in the field at lunchtime where the women are not around and so would have to fend for themselves for their lunch.
I bring the book up to point out that no one has ever asked what women were doing and what was important. This is something historians are looking at now when trying to piece together what must have been happening. As a general rule, you can say that every woman was spending the vast majority of their working hours making thread so they could have clothes, but since women were rarely the ones who were writing, we have almost no historical record of clothing. What we do have is often from tailors who would be a male and thus something that occasionally a man would write about.
Outside of monasteries, the intersection of men who were literate and men who were directly involved in food production was tiny.
Farming men weren’t cooking their midday meal out in the fields; they took some bread and maybe some protein out with them at the start of their working day.
> Outside of monasteries, the intersection of men who were literate and men who were directly involved in food production was tiny
Higher than that. While the educated men likely did not do much farm labor (depending on the local details they may have been out there during harvest when all hands were needed), they had to ensure there were enough slaves to do that. Most of them were also well aware that they were one bad harvest from starvation and so paid attention to food production.
> Farming men weren’t cooking their midday meal out in the fields; they took some bread and maybe some protein out with them at the start of their working day.
That depends on the culture. The famous Spanish dish Paella was men cooking in the fields.
you would probably like the book Invisible Women. Touches a lot on this subject and how there is so much "missing data" when we talk about these things and it carries through to the modern day
To the best of my knowledge a vanishingly small proportion of historical society was literate and it was an even smaller subset that authored anything of note. It isn't historical women that are invisible it's >90% of everyone. The written accounts are whatever the elite of the elite deigned to write down which those that came after chose to bother preserving.
True, but farming was still somewhat visible to many of the elite. The bible (old testament) has a number of farmers who were also elite.
The whole point of the elite is that they don't have to do the hard work.... It's like Jefferson being out in the fields picking cotton whilst paying for a bunch of slaves.. a highly dubious proposition
That is ONE elite. There have been many elites over history with different levels of wealth and different things they did. Those who could afford a lot of slaves were not out in the field, but not all elite were that wealthy. I'm sure Jefferson wasn't picking cotton, but that doesn't mean no elite were out in the fields.
Yeah you should check out this book, would enhance the best of your knowledge. While you're right, even within that cohort there is a massive gender difference and it impacts how we view society in a big way
> Even your common peasant farmer man would likely spend a significant amount of time out in the field at lunchtime where the women are not around and so would have to fend for themselves for their lunch.
Womem were in the fields. And kids too. Generally men were doing physically most demanding work, but not all of it is like that.
And people working in the fields would also take the food that does not necessitate cooking with them. And kids were tasked to bring food to people working in fields when necessary.
You cant "fend for yourself" in the fields and also do the fields work.
A real historian has written on this. https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
> And textile production was a major activity (indeed, the major activity) for probably around 40% of the population in most pre-modern societies – not merely almost all adult women, but girls too would start spinning and weaving (spinning in particular, again, we’ll get there) at very early ages. Consequently, spinning thread may have been the single most frequently performed work-task in the ancient world
Sure women did get to the fields at times. How much did vary by culture. However there is very good reason (pregnancy and nursing) that most cultures had men's and women's work as separate things. That separation often resulted in men and women being separated by long enough that men would really want to cook their own meals instead of eating a packed meal.
> You cant "fend for yourself" in the fields and also do the fields work.
That depends greatly on what you mean by fend for yourself. You wouldn't be a gatherer, but you could cook a quick meal over a fire, maybe throw some fresh herbs in the pot if you happened to see any.
Spinning and weaving does not exclude your presence in the field when that seasonal work is required. Nor does cooking or childcare or house animals care. Also, that article is not about medieval times.
> However there is very good reason (pregnancy and nursing) that most cultures had men's and women's work as separate things.
I did not said women and men did the same things. I said women were in the fields. That should be uncontroversial considering we have medieval drawings of women working in the fields and historical literature lists field work women were involved in or responsible for (harvesting, planting plants, removing weeds, other similar work).
> That separation often resulted in men and women being separated by long enough that men would really want to cook their own meals instead of eating a packed meal.
We are talking about medieval farm and peasants field work. Even if it was only a man in that field, he was separated for a day and within walking distance. There is zero reason to cook food if you can pack it or if a kid can bring it to you.
> You wouldn't be a gatherer, but you could cook a quick meal over a fire, maybe throw some fresh herbs in the pot if you happened to see any.
Starting fire without matches is not quick. Cooking over fire that you just started is not quick. And it requires you to carry pot and raw food there, dirty one back. You don't do quick meal over a fire in the field from raw materials and have no logical reason to.
Until the Industrial Revolution, there was nothing even close to what we nowadays call "childhood". As children became old enough to walk by themselves, they'd accompany their parents and help with weeding & cultivation.
Apparently we are in the scenario where one parent is on the field and other at home. At home parent could and would tell their 5-11 years old to take the food to the other parent and other field workers. Yes they worked and had chores. They were fully suitable for taking food from place a to place b. They also herded animals by themselves or took care of younger siblings.
> Until the Industrial Revolution, there was nothing even close to what we nowadays call "childhood".
That has nothing to do with what I wrote. The 5-11 years old people existed.
The article kind of misses the forest for the trees: just as today, diet was associated with various conflicting theories and advice - some reasonable, some pure fabrication. In absence of much hard evidence food becomes a playing field for "systems" that assign values to foodstuffs. Also, obviously, sugar played a different role in societies in which the calorie requirements of physical labour were a much bigger challenge than obesity.
Also: "beans, which were thought to cause flatulence"? I'm pretty sure that bit is factual.
> lettuce was dangerous because it was so cold and moist
Joke's on us, I guess.
https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investi...
you have to wonder how much of these habits we see as strange now are just artifacts of
1) a lack of refrigeration (eg fruits rotting produce a much stronger odor than vegetables esp if concentrated under a fruiting tree) and
2) the revolutions we've had in agriculture wrt breeding for taste and nutrition, and the scale at which this is done now. I'm thinking specifically about the ability to quantify, isolate, and breed out the genes that result in high concentrations of phytotoxins (and the accordant pesticides that must be applied now that the natural defenses are gone)
undercooked beans contain high levels of phytotoxins, for example, and lead to gastrointestinal distress and sometimes even death. if all plants/vegetables/etc in the past had comparably elevated levels of these toxins, it's not hard to imagine that people in the past were doing their best to pattern recognize and thus avoid things they had little-to-no systemic understanding of which then are extrapolated and grown into popular consciousness by word-of-mouth
the obsession with 'health' as measured by the four humors is definitely silly from an empirical POV but the innate drive to not want to shit your guts out after your morning porridge seems like a very normal and valid motivator
It's fascinating how closely this parallels Chinese traditional medicine, where foods are classified as "heaty" or "cooling" and health conditions can be both caused and treated by an excess of one or the other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_food_therapy
This is one of the things that makes the contemporary Chinese treatment of TCM as credible so jarring to me. Many people seem to regard it as some unique inheritance of their culture, but in fact it closely resembles many other pre-scientific medical traditions, including in the "West".
For me, pseudoscience is like comparative religions: historicizing it and situating it in a context alongside comparable traditions tends to deflate its persuasiveness. (Maybe some of that is down to temperament; I'm sure some people study comparative religions and are impressed by the patterns among them as though they suggest more universal or "deeper" truths.)
I think your contemporary "Western" bias is what is jarring you. In fact, the prevalence of these traditional medicine practices gives them credence in my mind.
Most people probably don't have my same view, but I don't see these practices as having 'credibility' in the same way as a pharmaceutical with a phase 3 trial and decades of follow ups. But they DO have credibility in the sense that there's a long history of people following this advice and feeling a little better. Maybe it's just placebo or a coincidence, but if it works it doesn't matter.
Similarly, contemporary western medicine has all sorts of blind spots, is vulnerable to lobbying/agendas/money, and doesn't offer much in the way of a holistic guide towards the feeling that your diet is aligning with your health goals.
This is similar to my view of religion. Any given doctrine isn't factual, but people long for a way to spiritually understand the world, and they aren't wrong for doing so. Science can't and shouldn't provide that.
> But they DO have credibility in the sense that there's a long history of people following this advice and feeling a little better.
There's also long histories of people following folk medicine advice and being hurt by it. And in the case of TCM, the history isn't really that long; TCM as we know it is synthetic and modern, stitched together from various different and often contradictory or mutually exclusive folk medicine traditions. It reminds me of Enlightenment-era philosophers who tried to "rescue" belief in God by retreating to "natural religion"— they were of course accused of atheism!
> This is similar to my view of religion. Any given doctrine isn't factual, but people long for a way to spiritually understand the world, and they aren't wrong for doing so. Science can't and shouldn't provide that.
Sure, you can espouse a kind of enlightened "separate magisteria" view of science and religion's roles in society. But the flip side of that is something like "religion (or folk medicine, in this case) can't and shouldn't provide factual claims about the world". And that's more or less totally divorced from actual practice of those things.
Of course I agree about the weaknesses of contemporary medicine and even of "actually existing science", so-to-speak.
But what you're describing here ("Any given doctrine isn't factual", "I don't see these practices as having 'credibility' in the same way as a pharmaceutical with a phase 3 trial and decades of follow ups") isn't really "credence" in the usual sense so much as affinity, interest, or a kind of "outsider's respect".
Any medical remedy not too dangerous, expensive, or inconvenient is worth trying even if the evidence to support it is weak. Folk medicine traditions are useful sources from which to do reverse pharmacology or other research.
But there are third-rate TCM "journals" churning out (sometimes deliberately) ill-designed papers. TCM isn't merely an operational framework and it doesn't limit itself to operational or practical guidance. It's chock full of extremely dubious ontological claims. (Mainstream actually-existing-science isn't free of dubious ontological claims about invisible entities either, but these are of a different class.) That's not just a different practice, that's industrialized counterfeit science.
Humans, it turns out, are capable of developing a lot of useful tools and practices even with no methodologies or bad methodologies. That's true, and the fact of it is kind of surprising and fun. But the world didn't outgrow pre-scientific folk medicine traditions like that of the four humors by mere accident or happenstance. And when you are familiar with a couple of such folk medicine traditions, TCM doesn't look like part of an alternate modernity so much as yet another outmoded pre-scientific tradition.
Ayurvedic medicine is a similar idea from the indian subcontinent. Foods have different medicinal properties like hot/cold, heavy/light, etc and those foods interact with your body type (which itself is a confluence of three factors called dosha that everyone has but in varying ratios) in order to produce certain effects.
Considering how fast fish without refrigeration would spoil back then, the rarity of access to sugar and the need for energy dense foods, "fish bad, sugar good" makes perfect sense.
People dried and salted alot of food to preserve it. But fish already live in a world of salt, and so I wonder of worms and parasites still survived this proxess.
And I think a lot of salted food was just eaten, not cooked?
Some of the salted food like meat was so salted that even just dragging it in sea water on ships was effective way to lower salt content. So it was definitely cooked most often boiled to remove most of salt content.
I think we largely have not learned just how much salt is needed to properly preserve food outside refrigeration over longer periods.
You don’t know dried cod is extremely popular in many parts of the world? They seem to know that exactly.
>fish already live in a world of salt, and so I wonder of worms and parasites still survived this proxess.
As always, dose determines toxicity. While alive and in salt water fish are pretty good about regulating their internal salinity and the parasites that live in them enjoyed the benefits of that regulated environment. When dead and packed in salt, fish are noticeably less able to maintain homeostasis and the concentration of salt is enough to pull the moisture out of both the fish and any parasites via osmosis. This kills the parasites, though there may be some cases where eggs survive that I'm not aware of.
> Fish bad
I've read an archeological analysis of a merchant ship rowers-slaves -- every skeleton had perfect teeth. Because slaves were fed only fish, not any bread, bread was a product that merchants traded, while fish was cheap and abundant.
So I think "fish bad" opinion was just because fish was cheap and everyone had it.
Considering how quickly poultry and fish go bad, they weren't entirely wrong.
Fish and/or poultry have been eaten in every civilization we've ever known about....
> Fish Bad, Sugar Good
Florida politics? [0]
[0] https://civileats.com/2019/06/25/toxic-red-tide-is-back-in-f...
You can base an entire food brand on that article. The Tik Tok channel alone would be massive.
Paleo diets are passé. The new fad diet is medieval. And frankly the science isn't any worse.
It's interesting how some of these came to the right conclusions (given sanitary standards at the time) but for entirely the wrong reasons. A lot of the food that was unhealthy was food that could go bad quickly or carry illnesses
If you recognize something is bad but lack the knowledge to explain it, it isn't completely crazy to invent a taboo against it.
"Medieval Ideas" spanned million square miles and thousand years. Hardly uniform culture.
i don't feel like this ever claimed to be exhaustive or representative of a monolith, only that the ideas they discussed did exist prominently.
I enjoyed reading this, I found the article equally interesting and amusing. As a curiosity — it says that beef was cheap and suitable for manual labourers, and salmon was a staple of the monastic diet. How did they end up being among the most expensive in their respective groups?
Is this article really about medieval? Sounds very familiar to todays food culture. Everyone makes claims without having a solid justification, yet the observations indicate that it is true.
Nothing has changed, but nowadays we have papers that document observations and sell their theory as the truth; in the past, we had cookbooks.
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