We live a in time of relative plenty (for industrialized nations) where our biggest dietary concern is eating too much not too little. In this context I was wondering about what mankind’s diet was like before modernity.
What did medieval serfs and peasants get to eat? How about ancient Roman and Greek working class people? Did they eat three meals a day like we (usually) do? Did they get much protein? Were they always starving to death or not?
Also what did city dwellers in the American colonial era eat? If they weren’t farmers and were working all day, where and how did a young, unmarried urban man get his breakfast, lunch and dinner?
I can’t help you with too much, but I believe ancient Romans ate quite a bit of bread, no cow, but did eat fowl and pork and fish and snails. In colonial times, I would imagine your young man about town ate either at the table of the lady that ran his boarding house or at the local saloon.
In the medieval period, he’d get a lot of grain- but whole grain and mixed oats, barley and wheat. Bread, gruel, “cakes” and so forth. He’d likely get some bones to use to make the grule have a bit of meat base. Some odd veggies, like turnips. He drank a LOT of weak beer.
Roman’s got a daily(or was it weekly?) wheat ration, which most of them took to certain public bakeries which I think took one loaf of ten or something like that.
So, carbs weren’t a problem- but fats and protiens were. But if you mix your grains- and eat whole grains- you can get a pretty good amount of protiens. It’s rice and corn which have the cruddy amounts of protien, and neither romans nor peasants had either.
In later times, many young unmarried men would eat breakfast and dinner at his boarding house (as ivylass mention) and either get a “free lunch” with beer at a tavern/bar, or his employer would provide lunch. Many jobs included “room & board.”
They would have eaten a lot of rye bread. White flour was expensive and exclusively for the rich. Since rye doesn’t have the gluten structure to capture gas, it would have been very dense and hard to chew. The bread would have usually been soaked in soup to make it easier to chew and also occasionally used to thicken soup.
If your living near the sea, most of your protien would come from seafood. Otherwise, a lot of offal and off cuts would have been eaten, the choicer cuts being reserved for the rich.
Problem is we don’t have that much information on the eating habits of the poor throughout the ages. Most literature is devoted to food for the upper class so we have to rely on archeological information.
For medieval serfs I have seen numerous references to Turnips, Cheeses and Breads when available. There was more, but these are the items I have seen referenced the most. A common grain was apparently a barley like grain called Bear.
For medieval craftsman, add boiled and roasted chicken.
As for Roman diets, the Herculaneum and Pompeii digs revealed a number of “snack bars” (or “thermopolia”) comprising a counter with built-in amphorae for keeping food warm. Some of these still had food in them such as sauces, nuts, dates, figs, and pastries.
This link, from a Roman re-enactment society, purports to have some typical recipes intended for Roman soldiers, which include lamb and beef.
From your 1st link (this relates directly to OPs question) “At the other end of the social spectrum, peasants survived on broths thickened with barley or other grains, and oatcakes cooked in the ashes of fires or on heated stones.”
Nitpick: corn can help supply more nutritious, complex proteins when eaten with beans (as in Mexican food), whose short protein chains complement those found in corn.
I’ve also read that some native Americans discovered the helpful practice in farming and nutrition known as the “corn-beans-squash complex,” in which these foods were synergistically grown together on low-maintenance raised mounds, with the squash shading the mound, suppressing weed growth and regulating temperature, and with the beans ascending the corn stalks. (I dunno how this could work without the beans suppressing the corn yield, at least to some extent.) This method of farming is said to have required very little effort beyond the initial set-up, and yielded a combination of foods which were very nutritious.
It’s interesting to note that Egypt, the ancient civilization most commonly associated with slavery and cruel mistreatment, actually provided a better standard of living for laborers than Rome or most other pre-modern civilizations. In an article in Harvard Magazine a couple years ago, one archaeologist described the results of his digs in the workman’s housing complexes near the Great Pyramid and other massive construction sites. He found that the laborers had spacious housing, and that their diet included meat, fish and vegetables on a daily basis, as well as alcohol.
Let’s see… a Roman soldier/workman would probably eat things like bread, olive oil, olives, and watered wine. Roman soldiers also used garum, which is some kind of fish sauce. They were more likely to eat fish than beef or pork or chicken, I believe.
You hear of complaints about too much salmon elsewhere, such as during the American expansion, ads proffering employment for railroad gangs and lumber camps in the form, “Salmon to be provided no more than two times a week.”
It comes with a little hint of “wow, this tender tasty luxury dish is so common the men get tired of it, and don’t have to eat tough venison and corned beef all the time.”
This is a WAG on the subject of marketing and may not apply to Quartz’s post, let alone the OP.
So, IIR “Guns, Germs and Steel”, or it might have been “Plagues and Peoples”, the population of Europe increased shortly after the introduction of the American calorie crops maize and potatoes, beans, tomatoes, etc. This effect would have begun in the 1500s, and would show that the population was at least somewhat limited by food constraints before then.
Roman citizens were entitled to a monthly grain dole, which the State provided at a cheap price. The only reason is was more availed by the poor than the rich was convenience. I beleive they got enough grain to make two one-pound loaves a day for thirty days.
I suspect this was because these are the sorts of things that survive well being preserved in bogs and in stomaches. Rasberry seeds go through ones entire digestive canal untouched (I think they are designed to do that, ending up in a nice bit of manure to start growing in at the end of it.
Given that the skin, bone and muscle of the bodies themselves is also well preserved, I would imagine this would extend somewhat to the stomach contents; sure, digestive juices would have something of a head start, but if they’d been eating lots of meat, I think we’d find traces of it in the stomach contents.
Another word for offal is umbles; I know it sounds like one of those fake etymologies, but apparently ‘umble pie’ was a real dish (a sort of offal stew, eaten by the lower classes) and this is the origin of the term (‘umble’ coming from the Latin lumbus(loin) as distinct from the word ‘humble’ which comes from a different root).
No, I think its more a case of salmon being plentiful, easy to catch and therefore dirt cheap - stretch a net across a river in season and you’d catch tonnes. Think of all those bears standing by the riverside during the run, cramming themselves full of fish.
Similarly oysters and lobsters were at one point dredged up and sold in poor areas by the bucket, until this practice eventually depleted stocks to point where they became a rarity, hence expensive, hence consumed by the upper classes only.
Apparently when the first europeans sailed into Chesapeake Bay, the enormous oyster beds there kept the water filtered to the point they could see the bottom as they sailed along. Makes ya think, don’t it?