So fascinating! TIL that:
1. People farmed pigeons in the 17th century, which makes me wonder at what point chickens were introduced.
2. England and France seemingly have no native root vegetables to plant for winter.
In southern Europe, early iron age, circa 800BCE.
Pigeons were farmed because their meat was considered to be better than that of chickens, which were a "lower class" meat.
That said - is there a volume challenge with pigeons (vs. chickens)?
Like, I feel like now-a-days I can get a reasonably good volume of chicken meat on the bone (breasts, drumsticks to some extent, maybe some wings?) but pigeons seem small enough that you'd need like 4-10 for a single meal for a 4 person family.
It feels like it's easier to produce more chicken meat, and more cheaply (is this why it's less desirable than pigeon meat)?
Also, it's time for lunch apparently :)
Want to live like we used to? Eat way less protein in meats. This is the solution.
I just built a set of chairs that were in a picture from a shaker museum. I managed to get the scale correct because there was a soda next to one in the photo.
It turns out that 1840's people were WAAAAY smaller than they are today. Not fat. But overall dimensions.
Why?
Eat less protein.
> The Old English word neep – a name now only seen in Scotland alongside tatties and haggis – goes back to at least the 10th century, but turnip (“turn-neep”) is only about 500 years old.
> Historically, the word “turnip” didn’t only refer to the round purple root, but root vegetables of various shapes, colours and sizes. Sixteenth-century botanist John Gerard was particularly keen on “small turneps”, which he said were much sweeter than the large kind and grown in a village called Hackney outside London.
From: https://theconversation.com/turnips-how-britain-fell-out-of-...
Turnips? Carrots? Onions? All existed in Western Europe by the time of the Romans, and mostly way before.