What Did Peasants Eat in Medieval Times?

[Chris]

For the history buffs, I found this interesting.

[Peter1469]

Food and history. My two favorite things.

Funny that people think you cook over open flame.

[Common]

That damn salmon looked good

[jimmyz]

One thing I wonder about is salt. I know it was very expensive in certain times throughout history. This video mentioned bacon and ham so I wounder where the salt came from and if it was very costly during that period. Did the wealthy landowner provide it to the peasants in exchange for labor on a monetary compensation basis?

Great thread and educational to boot. Thanks Chris.

[Captdon]

I always thought the peasants ate mush three times a day; a little cheese and maybe a chicken once in a while.

[Chris]

I figured they ate a lot of bread.

Interesting how the type of bread was associated with class and how that has reversed.

[Mister D]

Medieval peasants had a very good diet. It consisted of whole grains , vegetables, fish and occasionally meat. The problem was famine.

[Mister D]

I figured they ate a lot of bread.

Interesting how the type of bread was associated with class and how that has reversed.

Starchy staples lie at the root of civilization.

[Ethereal]

(Discover) The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

The advent of agriculture was a watershed moment for the human race. It may also have been our greatest blunder.

By Jared Diamond | Saturday, May 01, 1999

...One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5'' for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3'' for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.

Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was about twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."

The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don't think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it's become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."

...

[midcan5]

My grandparents cooked in a wood burning stove, had a garden and ate simply, and grandpa liked his beer and whisky, seems little changed till modern corporations figured out ways to make processed foods, people fat, and lots of profit, oh progress....


"America is a country where half the money is spent buying food, and the other half is spent trying to lose weight." Anonymous