Not necessarily understand in the sense of germ theory, but rather, draw consistent connections between food being left at room temperature for too long and the resulting stomach pain/vomiting that ensued.
Especially with food for nobles or royals, for instance - privileged people who must not be sickened - did their servers/staff generally know what sort of time limit that food prepared for them had to be consumed by, or else discarded?
If you eat cycad kernels you are pretty likely to ingest several very toxic, carcinogenic compounds. Nonetheless there is archaeological evidence of processing by Australian Aboriginal people of Macrozamia and other cycad genera, to remove the poisonous element going back archaeologically at least 5,000 years before present.
Pointing out the obvious; a lot of foods smell bad when they’ve gone bad. It wouldn’t take too long to work out that that funny-smelling pork caused illness and/or death.
Ok, but by food poisoning, I mean food spoilage (good food gone bad), not foods that always contained some poisonous component to begin with.
I think it is innate. Pre-mammalian. At least, in the species I have observed, animals given a choice will not eat food that will make them sick. It is obviously an evolutionary advantage.
Despite the title, it appears OP is asking about food-borne illness.
Don’t assume that people in earlier times were stupid.
If food looks, smells, or tastes bad and you eat it and get ill, you don’t have to be a genius to draw the obvious conclusion.
If it doesn’t look, smell, or taste bad it’s unlikely to do you any harm.
It’s unlikely food would be sitting around very long in a fully functioning medieval castle. The entire complex would be crawling with hungry mouths day and night, and generally everyone ate together, servants and lords of the house alike. It was only toward the end of the Middle Ages that the wealthy and elite would dine apart.
Wolves understand the idea of food or water that’s gone bad. I’m pretty sure early humans figured it out.
The way things worked at the courts of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I:
The King (or Queen) ate first - 8-10 dishes were offered as a sort of buffet for each of first course, main course, dessert.
Whatever wasn’t eaten went to members of the nobility and members of the privy council, plus more dishes according the numbers.
Whatever they didn’t eat went to the common table in the hall, along with more dishes according to the numbers who ate there.
Anything left over at the end of meal was given away to beggars at the gates, by a special official appointed for that purpose.
Nothing was wasted, and whatever was cooked on the day was eaten on the day.
I’d argue that it’s clear that the OP is asking about food-borne illness because of the title.
This isn’t the JAMA, and I’d be mildly astonished to hear a non-specialist use “food poisoning” to mean anything other than “food-borne illness” in this context. When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.
To bring this back around, whatever happened to the ptomaine of yesteryear?
Yes: People used to believe that food poisoning was caused by an actual poison, an alkaloid body, which formed in decaying plant and animal matter. An Agatha Christie wiki has more information:
Here’s Popular Science Monthly from April 1912 on the subject:
These days, talk of ptomaine is rarer than GPs who can diagnose fourth disease, and for good reason, but it’s proof that the modern knowledge of how “food poisoning” works is modern indeed.
Yeah, and it goes further than that even: almost everything that smells bad to us is spoiled food or things from our everyday environment that would otherwise look like food but are harmful.
The whole notion of “smells bad” is based around our hardwired aversion to these things.
“It was a brave man who first ate an oyster.”
As to actual food poisoning, no doubt there was a great deal of trial and error before connections were made. Until relatively recent history people blamed gods and demons for bad health outcomes.
:dubious:
Can you give an example from any time or culture of someone getting ill from food poisoning and blaming gods or demons? Cite?
What I was wondering was, if perhaps kings or nobles that left food that had been left out at room temperature too long and got salmonella, etc., then accused the cooks of having poisoned the food.
There was no such thing as “left out at room temperature” because there was no refrigeration. Food was always at room temperature.
They usually didn’t keep food for long (unless it was dried or pickled), or eat it raw. Usually it was eaten the day it was cooked, or at most the next day. You could smell if there was a problem with it.
Step 1, cook it and feed it to the dog.
Step 2, make soup.
Step 3, try it raw.
While people did blame things on gods, demons, humors and such, they knew food. Ensuring a plentiful supply of non-poisonous food was near the top of the list of things to figure out.
Food history website http://www.foodtimeline.org/ lists oysters as one of the very first foods eaten by humans
“Archaeological evidence suggests oysters were consumed from the dawn of humanity forwards. Easy to collect, nourishing and tasty, these versatile molluscs were consumed raw, cooked, and preserved.”
According to this site, Food Poisoning: An On-going Saga | History and Policy,
“Salmonella was first identified as a food poisoner in 1885”
There are lots of sites about Ancient Egyptian methods of food preservation so they must have had an understanding of the dangers of spoiled food.
Do you suppose it’s a coincidence that multiple ancient religions have prohibitions against eating pork, beef, milk, and shellfish?
They knew that eating certain foods made them sick even if they didn’t know why.