The History of Greco-Roman Vegetarianism (2010) | Hacker News Reader

The History of Greco-Roman Vegetarianism (2010)

advocacy.britannica.com

46 pointsplasticchris21 comments

> only the wealthiest citizens could afford to eat large amounts of meat on a regular basis

Same thing in modern day Germany. My dad told me that until the 1950s, most families in Bavaria could not afford meat, or only had it a few times a year. This must have changed when people became wealthier (and meat cheaper) from the 1960s. Still, it’s astounding that Bavarian food is mainly associated with heavy meat dishes like roast pork or knuckles today. Seems like many vegetarian dishes have been forgotten in recent decades.

It's probably not so much that they've been forgotten (in Bavaria) but that many people not from Bavaria don't associate the vegetarian recipes with Bavaria, but other regions - here are a few traditional Bavarian dishes:

Dampfnudel, Käsespätzle, Germknödel, Bread soup, Reiberdatschi, Schuxen, Pancake soup

(All from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_cuisine)

Also: Obatzda.

It's the same in the neighboring bundesland Baden-Württemberg. Lots of spätzle, lentils and cabbage, and growing vegetables in your own garden is well-regarded.

Same for the large majority of people in Europe up to the 1940s.

People would often "eat" meat only on Sundays by cooking a chunk in a soup. Then the elder in the family would eat the meat and everybody else would just taste it in the soup.

On the other hand, according to Julius Caesar in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico [1]:

[The Germani] do not pay much attention to agriculture, and a large portion of their food consists in milk, cheese, and flesh.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_peoples#Collision_wit...

Indeed, eating beans instead of meat was a mark of civilization for the Romans because legumes are an agricultural product, whereas meat is hunted and only savages go hunting. This extended to the legions, they ran on legumes and wheat. There are reports of mutinies, when the legume ration ran out in the field.

I could see the pork knuckles actually supporting that fact since I associate them with being what people eat when they cannot afford "conventional" cuts of meat. (I realize this is probably somewhat a cultural bias on my part as well. For example, I recently learned that Chinese style pig's feet are delicious).

I know in Cincinnati (which has a very strong German influence) one of the signature foods is goetta which is a sausage stuffed with steel cut oats. I wonder if some other German dishes that we think of as indicating heavy meat consumption could actually have been ways of stretching out the available meat.

Actually this is the reason New Zealand was a strong sporting nation in the early 20th century. Meat and butter were cheap enough that normal people were able to eat them regularly.

I don't really understand why meat became so much cheaper, is it purely intensive farming of animals? Or was there other factors?

Intensive farming is a big part of it. Chicken meat used to be fairly expensive until after WWII, when the Americans invented factory farming. Mechanisation is the other side of the equation.

We require less workers per hectare for agriculture and horticulture, it's been going down steadily since the industrial revolution. At the same time, intensive farming techniques have been developed. Chicken used to be a fairly expensive meat until after WWII when the Americans invented factory farming.

Intensive farming, technology (machines, antibiotics), breeding of extreme animals, cheap food and water and land for animals, subsidies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcA3P6abmjY&t=817

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctdaxvewng

That was a large portion of the western world until the late 20th century.

It was common for people to commonly eat offal (hearts, kidneys, livers etc.) in New Zealand until the around 80s because it was more affordable than meat. As a student, I rediscovered the traditional offal recipes and saved a lot of money by eating hearts and livers instead of steaks.

I think that a lot of "traditional" foods are the foods that were saved for special occasions, they were something that specifically needed remembering in cultural memory of the society. Lambs fry (liver) and bacon used to be a very common food in New Zealand, it was standard household fare. However, you'd struggle to find a millennial who's even eaten it, let alone knows how to cook it. It was never something for special occasions.

My pet hypothesis is that as people got wealthier, the special-occasions meals became more affordable more often. Since these are the foods people preferred, instead of the cheap stuff that they thought of as the food of poverty, these are the foods to which cultural significance got attached.

Few people look back fondly on the foods they ate daily because it was the only stuff available.

"What this hidden history teaches is that many Greeks and Romans survived without eating animal flesh or using animal products."

So, I get it, this post has a particular point of view to advance. But this is a terrible argument. The average Greco-Roman was impoverished and had a life expectancy of around 35-40. The average Greco-Roman happily ate meat when given a chance. Today, at least in many parts of the world, meat is pretty cheap, so the idea of meat being a decedent luxury doesn't follow the way it would have 2500 years ago. Further, in the Greco-Roman world, animals and animal products were used for lots of things - leather for sandals, honey from bees, oxen and mules to produce the grain that made up the basis of the vegetarian diet. So even the people who had a vegetarian diet (by constraint, not by choice) very much benefited from animals in ways that many activist groups today would object to.

>> The average Greco-Roman was impoverished and had a life expectancy of around 35-40

This is more a problem with statistics than anything else. If anything, the median life expectancy should be measured. The reason that the average life expectancy is so low, is that infant mortality was very high (and the procedure of childbirth was extremely dangerous). This means an unusual high percentage of humans, that die very early in their lives. So the 'average', while being a correct average, skews the number downward and thus gives the false impression that the average person only got 30-40.

If a peasant survived into his 30ies, chances were high he would get into his 50ies.[0]

For the rest of your post: Yeah, I concur, the last thing any roman would have had in mind are animal rights. Not only was slavery the norm, this was a society where you could kill your slaves without repercussions. Human sacrifices in the form of gladiatorial games were not only common but THE social event. And the army had a punishment known as decimation (every 10th of a unit was selected by lot and killed). So, all in all a society with very little regard for human life, never mind the life of an animal...

[0]: https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins...

50 years old is still a very low number for a life expectancy.

It's old enough to raise the next generation to self-sufficient adulthood. That's all that's really necessary for a population to survive and grow.

I find it interesting to read various vegetarian-related quotes. One begins to see how much a part of the history of human thought it really is. Here's a collection I found with a quick search: http://notable-quotes.com/v/vegetarianism_quotes.html

I was pleasantly surprised by some of the names I came across - Leo Tolstoy, for instance.

archive: https://archive.fo/LiDep

text-only cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...

Rather one-sided source, perhaps? And their references are literary rather than historical.

They didn't imply vegetarianism beliefs were widespread to the masses for this to matter.

They reference what historical figures of literature and philosophy thought and suggested to others about the subject.

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