Cambridge University study finds Anglo-Saxon kings were mostly vegetarian
bbc.com
bbc.com
> "We should imagine a wide range of people livening up bread with small quantities of meat and cheese, or eating pottages of leeks and whole grains with a little meat thrown in."
This isn't a "mostly vegetarian" diet as most people would understand "vegetarian".
Intentionally so. That's the most worrisome part.
> This isn't a "mostly vegetarian" diet as most people would understand "vegetarian".
Amazing how they turned, "anglo-saxon kings ate a human diet ( meat, dairy, vegetables, grains, fruits, etc )" into "anglo-saxon kings ate a mostly vegetarian diet".
I admit I'm not a fan of the bbc, but if they are willing to be this misleading about vegetarian diets, how misleading are they on other stories.
> The BBC misrepresented my views this morning, and I admit I'm stunned. [...] I spent three years doing field research on that myth and wrote an Oxford University Press book debunking it. [1]
[1] http://www.chinaafricarealstory.com/2021/12/bbc-misrepresent...
I then asked my teacher what I should write if I meant to convey that something was probably true, but that I actually wasn't certain or all that confident about it. She was stumped.
I can easily see how advice like that leads to "reporting" like this. Some editor goes "Hey, cut this segment, we can't use this, it's confusing, and the story will sound better without it."
The author's postscript, where he seems to forgive the BBC, is also pretty bad. Imagine what the editor will learn - "I edited a story to make it clearer and punchier. The expert complained, but the complaint went away when we said 'Sorry'. " If the editor realizes he inverted the meaning of his expert and completely got away with it - well, that will be a counter-productive lesson from the standpoint of accuracy in news.
The news has the incentive to be interesting, simple, engaging - all that. None of this nuance stuff. If editors get carte blanche for being new... I don't think that even a new editor should have trouble with the concept of "Don't invert what your expert says."
Not for school papers, but how about: "I guess [something]."
I think "probably" is completely fine though.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/anglo-saxon-england/...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/anglo-saxon-england/...
Bedeck'd with bays and rosemary.
And I pray you, my masters, be merry
Quot estis in convivio ..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boar's_Head_Carol
The idea that anglo-saxon kings were mostly vegetarian seems like historical revisionism to peddle vegan/vegetarian propaganda. Certainly "esteemed" institutions like cambridge university and bbc wouldn't be involved in pushing such agendas?
They argue that the lack of indicators of gout, and analysis of bones of people who might have been kings based on the nature of their burials, doesn't fit with the notion of someone who over-indulges in red meat.
> Cambridge University bioarchaeologist Sam Leggett drew her conclusions after analysing chemical signatures of diets preserved in the bones of 2,023 people buried in England from the 5th to 11th Centuries.
> She then cross-referenced these with evidence for social status such as grave goods, body position and grave orientation and found no correlation between social status and high protein diets.
Later on in the article, it examines the historical evidence that royalty ate lots of meat- meal plannings and so forth, which they believe would have led to different chemical analyses had that been a daily regimen.
I'm skeptical of the idea that they can confidently state they found a representative sample of kings, or that "not over indulging every single day" constitutes a vegetarian diet (it most certainly does not). All it really shows is that they had more moderate diets than we see in movies. What a surprise!
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/anglo-saxon-england/...
There's no real problem with that.
But the BBC says this:
> Cambridge University researchers analysed more than 2,000 skeletons and found elites ate no more meat than other social groups.
And this is not reasonable at all. Historical sources everywhere in the world are happy to tell us, over and over again, that one of the primary benefits of having money is that you can eat more meat. It is not credible that early medieval England could somehow have been an exception to this; to the extent that the study's methodology indicated that "elites ate no more meat than other social groups", that should be viewed as a fault in the methodology.
I think a more likely explanation, rather than pushing an agenda, is that the correct headline, "Anglo-saxon kings at a normal amount of meat" would not drive clicks.
Saxon Kings had diets with very little meat, similar to peasants of the era. How do they know this? By studying bones in graves.
Why was this surprising? Because writings of the era described large meat heavy feasts. But conclusion that a they must have been just that. Rare feasts.
Mostly vegetarian in this case simply means they mostly ate vegetables, bread etc. But yes they also had small quantities of meat. Nothing like the large quantities us modern humans eat.
If they had said "Anglo-Saxon kings ate a diet that was mostly vegetarian", that would correctly convey that all kings still ate meat.
They instead said "Anglo-Saxon kings were mostly vegetarian", which is ambiguous. Were most kings wholly vegetarian or were all kings mostly vegetarian?
After you resolve that, there's still the question of what "mostly vegetarian" means. For most people, eating meat every day disqualifies you, even if it's only a little bit of meat per meal. "Vegetarian" means a lot more than "consisting of vegetables" in today's world, and the BBC knows that.
This study is a truly fascinating case of motivated reasoning.
Sure, if one believed that these kings were going around feasting every night of the week, maybe this evidence came as a shock big enough to motivate a sensationalized headline. But no one coming from a more moderate previous position could possibly reach the headline conclusion without motivated reasoning.
I'm not saying they came to the right conclusion, but it's far from as bad as you say.
From the article:
> Cambridge University bioarchaeologist Sam Leggett drew her conclusions after analysing chemical signatures of diets preserved in the bones of 2,023 people buried in England from the 5th to 11th Centuries.
> She then cross-referenced these with evidence for social status such as grave goods, body position and grave orientation and found no correlation between social status and high protein diets.
There's an observation that meat in ancient Rome was apparently not expensive at all:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653366 ("What things cost in Ancient Rome (2007)")
At "Anglo-Saxon kings" time, even kings and queens are "poor" respect of the richness we imaging, but most of the food production where meat and cheese, cereals used as long term reserves since they last longer than almost anything else etc. We can't do much more than speculation on details but we can say enough about practical possibilities. The rest is just propaganda to push a diet or another depending on the moment of the food market. Really, I'm not joking.