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Comment by foolfoolz | Hacker News Reader

i think there’s another component to this that most food sucked. your daily food was probably bad because it had few seasonings. it was likely starch (rice/bread), and stew. you don’t need a recipe for soup, it’s boil water and throw in whatever vegetables you have on hand. maybe meat if you had it

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Recipes go back millennia, and seasonings were also common, but varied by region. It’s easy to grow your own herbs a, or even forage for some things.

I don’t think it’s true that most food sucked at any point, except for people in exceptional circumstances.

Recipes were the province of the wealthy. The average person would have had a very repetitive, bland, and potentially malnourishing diet. They might have had some herbs or even foraged like you say, that still is very bland and boring compared to what we’re used to.

From what I have read the diet of people in classical antiquity was only terrible for the very poor. Most people in ancient Rome got to, at least rarely, eat honey cakes and fresh fruit and dried fish and maybe once a year at festivals even a small chunk of meat. They grew chives, dill, garlic, asparagus, radish, parsley, thyme, mustard, cumin and many other spices. And they made vinegar and olive oil and garum (fermented fish sauce) on an industrial scale. Mostly these would be used as sparing garnish to the grain-centric diet. But usually present.

The very poor far outnumber the wealthy.

False dichotomy. There exist the somewhat-poor through middle class.

one thing to note is that while they may have consumed it they probably weren't making it. Particularly for urban dwellers, kitchens were very rudimentary if you even had one.

Pretty much every castle, house, and hovel had a firesource, and cooking was centered around it.

Ancient poor Romans did not have kitchens, both for space reasons (Ancient Rome had a million people in it in a fairly tight spot) and for fire risk. https://liisaeyerly.com/2025/10/22/poor-vs-wealthy-dining-in...

Similarly, poor people in Victorian England often ate out or ate cold meals, either because they did not have the means to cook, or because they could not afford to; pots were not really cheap, nor was cooking fuel. https://victorianweb.org/science/health/health8.html

Certain types of implements, like ovens, were not super practical or cheap for a lot of people to have dedicated to their own house. https://food52.com/story/17568-the-centuries-old-form-of-pub...

Citation required.

Medieval Europeans had several times as many sorts of herbs and vegetables as we do. I can forage 20-100 species on my block alone in the city; none of those species are in our markets.

Our supermarkets specialize in those that provide maximum bang-for-buck, including transport costs. That really thins the selection.

up until maybe 200 years ago famines were a genuine and consistent threat even to places like Europe.

food wouldn't just have sucked, in many cases all you could eat would be some dried grain boiled to porridge, or the handful of semi-mouldy veggies that made it through winter months -- and many would often be lucky to even have that

You're buying into the "everyone else was drab misery" image of the past.

Even the poor wore colored clothing, not the uniform drab depicted in movies. Dyeing cloth with common weeds is a worldwide custom.

All but the truly poor lived indoors with a fire, either in a fireplace or centrally located beneath a peak smoke hole in the roof.

In all but the leanest times, chickens were easily raised by most people. Hogs were also common - there are even laws about raising them inside cities! That being said, its possible many meals were meatless, but the prevalence of meatless fasting rules suggest most people had access to meat - you can't "prove your faith through deprivation" if you're always deprived. Furthermore, serfs had access to the low-grade meats from butchering, and could keep it fresh with fat preservation, salting, or smoking.

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