Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food
lithub.com
lithub.com
> "Similarly, some fruits were safer than others: citrus fruits improved digestion, especially in hot weather, while raisins were good for the stomach, lungs and liver. And nuts were nutritious and good for the brain."
My impression is that refined sugar was extremely rare in medieval times and into the renaissance. But everybody loved raisins, and they were used extensively, even though they were usually imported from Italy and other Mediterranean regions. Various forms of raisin bread (often with dried figs, citrus peels, and currants,) were the definitive medieval festival/feast-day food. Their distant descendants are the stollen, panettone, etc., still popular as holiday treats in Europe.
Certain regions of medieval Germany (and presumably France) grew grapes but had to resort to ingenious methods to dry them into raisins: https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/27/raisins-in-a-cold-cli...
Every person (back then) could observe farm animals had sex. Since no one had seen fish having sex, it was believed that fish spawned spontaneously from rivers/lakes/oceans and therefore were free from the animal version of "original sin". That's why so much effort was put into catching and preserving fish.
Source:
https://www.amazon.com/Cod-Biography-Fish-Changed-World-eboo...
Also history of food:
https://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky-ebo...
The author has a fascination with Basques & Basque history. Or maybe they really had a large influence in fishing and trans-Atlantic navigation. And that maybe they discovered the huge cod banks by Newfoundland before John Cabot did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot
Medieval people were not stupid. They observed that pickled vegetables preserved the veggies for months. And they observed that people who ate pickled vegetables got scurvy (vitamin C deficiency disease) at a much lower rate. The recipes didn't travel too far, so while sauerkraut and kimchi are both pickled cabbage, with different spices they are wildly different.
Kind of a tautology. Why would they think to pickle something in the first place?
Probably something similar for pickling. Someone noticed that salted foods last a long time, and vinegar never seems to go bad, so why not try combining them?
Humans have lived at subsistence level, one bad harvest away from famine for most of history. Our modern abundance is very recent (1-3 generations) thing depending on where you were born.
So I think a tremendous amount of food discovery was a combination of food accidents didn't want food to go to waste, and desperation level eating anything to delay death from starvation.
Looking it up, ocean water has the right salt content to facilitate this...
Or at least, they weren’t particularly stupid. These are still the people that reportedly ate more fish because they believed these animals were exempt from original sin because they’d never observed them having sex. Thats not particularly smart either.
I don't know who comes up with this stuff.
Aristotle wrote extensively about fish eggs, milt and breeding habits centuries before the Christian era. Not only that, fishermen throughout history were well aware that fish laid eggs.
On the other point, original sin applies exclusively to humans. Animals were never considered moral agents, nor were they subject to the Fall of Man in a way that required spiritual redemption.
> sauerkraut and kimchi are both pickled cabbage
Yes, but one uses Brassica oleracea while the other uses Brassica rapa.
"This occurs in ponds, especially one near Knidos, which, so it is said, on one occasion dried up at the time of the Dogstar and all the mud was taken out; water began to collect in it as the first <rains> came, and at that point tiny fishes appeared, as soon as the water began. This fish was a kind of grey mullet which is not produced as the result of copulation, and its size was about that of a small sprat: none of them had either egg or milt. (...) This evidence shows that certain fishes are produced spontaneously, and do not come out of eggs or from copulation" (HA VI.15 569a13-19, 25-26).
This is something of a problem for Aristotle, since the formal cause appears to be absent in spontaneous generation. He likely would have been happier to discover that spontaneous generation does not, in fact, occur for animals. But he felt that the evidence forced him to concede that it does.
Whale meat was mediocre and didn't preserve well, and while whale bone (baleen) is useful enough, but the real target was whale oil, the best lubricant and fuel for lighting.
All of this is from The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe by James Belich. (Highly recommended (even to myself – I reread it within a year).
and it was used that way until the second half of the 20th century
Wait, sorry.....that was anchovies
> First Course: Cheat Bread and Manchett, Beare and Ale Wyne, Flesh for Pottage (thick broth), Chines of Beef, Venison in Brew’z or mult’, Pestells of Reed Deere, Carpes of Young Veale in Arm’ farced, Custard garnished, or Fritters
> Second Course: Jelly, Ipocras, Creames of Almonds, Pheasant, Hern, Bitterne, Shovelard, Cocks, Plovers or Gulles, Larkes or Rabbits, Venison in fine past, Tarts, Fritter
https://www.hrp.org.uk/hampton-court-palace/history-and-stor...
Honestly it's a wonder there was any royalty without gout.
The modern, first world attitude must be very unusual towards history. We basically solved conservation and food born diseases are now uncommon and mostly treatable, and we have an abundance of anything, so nutrition is the only thing that remains when discussing healthy food.
What didn't change is the made up theories surrounding food. Despite all our science, we still have a lot of these today, in some for or another.
Today not only we discuss nutritional content we also discuss the externalities to produce those calories.
I'm also assuming that you're goodwill for other species ends at insects and bacteria
Likewise the biomass of humans and cattle have an impact that can definitely be considered at the extremes of what nature has to offer.
Do you think that a 1.5C+ increase in global temperature in a century is also something typical of the natural cycles?
Yes. By definition, we are part of nature. But it wouldn't matter even if it wasn't, my contention is that it won't be the apocalypse it's made out to be.
Against the evidence of every branch of the natural sciences that studies the problem from every conceivable angle and consistently say the effects are actually going to be much worse.
I don't hold it that you're the kind of person that goes out there every day pointing out issues in the ECMWF models, or telling biologists that their understanding of crop performance is actually _all wrong_ and crops will magically create new adaptability measures out of nowhere, or showing that the human body can actually stand nighttime temperatures that we already know it can't stand.
I'm not talking about meteorological outcomes but sociopolitical ones like massive migrations, outbreaks of political unrest. I also think climatologists step outside their remit when they make such claims.
I don't doubt 1.5c, I doubt the end of humanity
It's just too vague to rebuff...
This is extremely recent, most people even in my age range (40-50) recall growing up on frozen/canned in the off season for the most part.
The idea of getting year round good fresh produce flown in from other climates is regionally a very recent thing. Peru for example exports 40x more blueberries to the US today than they did even a decade ago.
You can grow the food and you can store the food but that doesn’t do much good if locally you make too much and someone somewhere else is starving but you can’t get from point A to point B, and it has to get there not only unspoiled but intact, or at least undamaged enough to eat.
Before vapor-compression refrigeration, there was the ice trade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade
We didn’t have paved roads or railroads until relatively recently, and so a good chunk of goods were being damaged on rickety horse drawn wagons on bumpy, muddy dirt roads.
Also, it's delicious, and you're less likely to find parasites in it than animal flesh.
Funny how in the last few decades we turned a system that has benefited us for millions of years into a liability, simply by making that "perfect food" so abundant.
> Complexion also determined what a person should eat, so that (for example) garlic and pepper were good for the phlegmatic, but “venym” to a choleric person.
Also: "beans, which were thought to cause flatulence"? I'm pretty sure that bit is factual.
Just remember that in medieval times growing food was the job of the majority of men. Men also were the people most likely to be educated and actually write and talk about things and so food would be something on their mind. They would be growing it and thus writing about it. contrary to modern ideas men actually appeared to have done a lot of cooking: women were not common in the army (different cultures had different perspectives on women with the army. Some would have more than others, but in any case, you would have men as the vast majority) so men would have had to do at least some cooking. Even your common peasant farmer man would likely spend a significant amount of time out in the field at lunchtime where the women are not around and so would have to fend for themselves for their lunch.
I bring the book up to point out that no one has ever asked what women were doing and what was important. This is something historians are looking at now when trying to piece together what must have been happening. As a general rule, you can say that every woman was spending the vast majority of their working hours making thread so they could have clothes, but since women were rarely the ones who were writing, we have almost no historical record of clothing. What we do have is often from tailors who would be a male and thus something that occasionally a man would write about.
Farming men weren’t cooking their midday meal out in the fields; they took some bread and maybe some protein out with them at the start of their working day.
Higher than that. While the educated men likely did not do much farm labor (depending on the local details they may have been out there during harvest when all hands were needed), they had to ensure there were enough slaves to do that. Most of them were also well aware that they were one bad harvest from starvation and so paid attention to food production.
> Farming men weren’t cooking their midday meal out in the fields; they took some bread and maybe some protein out with them at the start of their working day.
That depends on the culture. The famous Spanish dish Paella was men cooking in the fields.
Womem were in the fields. And kids too. Generally men were doing physically most demanding work, but not all of it is like that.
And people working in the fields would also take the food that does not necessitate cooking with them. And kids were tasked to bring food to people working in fields when necessary.
You cant "fend for yourself" in the fields and also do the fields work.
> Until the Industrial Revolution, there was nothing even close to what we nowadays call "childhood".
That has nothing to do with what I wrote. The 5-11 years old people existed.
> And textile production was a major activity (indeed, the major activity) for probably around 40% of the population in most pre-modern societies – not merely almost all adult women, but girls too would start spinning and weaving (spinning in particular, again, we’ll get there) at very early ages. Consequently, spinning thread may have been the single most frequently performed work-task in the ancient world
Sure women did get to the fields at times. How much did vary by culture. However there is very good reason (pregnancy and nursing) that most cultures had men's and women's work as separate things. That separation often resulted in men and women being separated by long enough that men would really want to cook their own meals instead of eating a packed meal.
> You cant "fend for yourself" in the fields and also do the fields work.
That depends greatly on what you mean by fend for yourself. You wouldn't be a gatherer, but you could cook a quick meal over a fire, maybe throw some fresh herbs in the pot if you happened to see any.
> However there is very good reason (pregnancy and nursing) that most cultures had men's and women's work as separate things.
I did not said women and men did the same things. I said women were in the fields. That should be uncontroversial considering we have medieval drawings of women working in the fields and historical literature lists field work women were involved in or responsible for (harvesting, planting plants, removing weeds, other similar work).
> That separation often resulted in men and women being separated by long enough that men would really want to cook their own meals instead of eating a packed meal.
We are talking about medieval farm and peasants field work. Even if it was only a man in that field, he was separated for a day and within walking distance. There is zero reason to cook food if you can pack it or if a kid can bring it to you.
> You wouldn't be a gatherer, but you could cook a quick meal over a fire, maybe throw some fresh herbs in the pot if you happened to see any.
Starting fire without matches is not quick. Cooking over fire that you just started is not quick. And it requires you to carry pot and raw food there, dirty one back. You don't do quick meal over a fire in the field from raw materials and have no logical reason to.
Joke's on us, I guess.
https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investi...
1) a lack of refrigeration (eg fruits rotting produce a much stronger odor than vegetables esp if concentrated under a fruiting tree) and
2) the revolutions we've had in agriculture wrt breeding for taste and nutrition, and the scale at which this is done now. I'm thinking specifically about the ability to quantify, isolate, and breed out the genes that result in high concentrations of phytotoxins (and the accordant pesticides that must be applied now that the natural defenses are gone)
undercooked beans contain high levels of phytotoxins, for example, and lead to gastrointestinal distress and sometimes even death. if all plants/vegetables/etc in the past had comparably elevated levels of these toxins, it's not hard to imagine that people in the past were doing their best to pattern recognize and thus avoid things they had little-to-no systemic understanding of which then are extrapolated and grown into popular consciousness by word-of-mouth
the obsession with 'health' as measured by the four humors is definitely silly from an empirical POV but the innate drive to not want to shit your guts out after your morning porridge seems like a very normal and valid motivator
For me, pseudoscience is like comparative religions: historicizing it and situating it in a context alongside comparable traditions tends to deflate its persuasiveness. (Maybe some of that is down to temperament; I'm sure some people study comparative religions and are impressed by the patterns among them as though they suggest more universal or "deeper" truths.)
Most people probably don't have my same view, but I don't see these practices as having 'credibility' in the same way as a pharmaceutical with a phase 3 trial and decades of follow ups. But they DO have credibility in the sense that there's a long history of people following this advice and feeling a little better. Maybe it's just placebo or a coincidence, but if it works it doesn't matter.
Similarly, contemporary western medicine has all sorts of blind spots, is vulnerable to lobbying/agendas/money, and doesn't offer much in the way of a holistic guide towards the feeling that your diet is aligning with your health goals.
This is similar to my view of religion. Any given doctrine isn't factual, but people long for a way to spiritually understand the world, and they aren't wrong for doing so. Science can't and shouldn't provide that.
There's also long histories of people following folk medicine advice and being hurt by it. And in the case of TCM, the history isn't really that long; TCM as we know it is synthetic and modern, stitched together from various different and often contradictory or mutually exclusive folk medicine traditions. It reminds me of Enlightenment-era philosophers who tried to "rescue" belief in God by retreating to "natural religion"— they were of course accused of atheism!
> This is similar to my view of religion. Any given doctrine isn't factual, but people long for a way to spiritually understand the world, and they aren't wrong for doing so. Science can't and shouldn't provide that.
Sure, you can espouse a kind of enlightened "separate magisteria" view of science and religion's roles in society. But the flip side of that is something like "religion (or folk medicine, in this case) can't and shouldn't provide factual claims about the world". And that's more or less totally divorced from actual practice of those things.
Of course I agree about the weaknesses of contemporary medicine and even of "actually existing science", so-to-speak.
But what you're describing here ("Any given doctrine isn't factual", "I don't see these practices as having 'credibility' in the same way as a pharmaceutical with a phase 3 trial and decades of follow ups") isn't really "credence" in the usual sense so much as affinity, interest, or a kind of "outsider's respect".
Any medical remedy not too dangerous, expensive, or inconvenient is worth trying even if the evidence to support it is weak. Folk medicine traditions are useful sources from which to do reverse pharmacology or other research.
But there are third-rate TCM "journals" churning out (sometimes deliberately) ill-designed papers. TCM isn't merely an operational framework and it doesn't limit itself to operational or practical guidance. It's chock full of extremely dubious ontological claims. (Mainstream actually-existing-science isn't free of dubious ontological claims about invisible entities either, but these are of a different class.) That's not just a different practice, that's industrialized counterfeit science.
Humans, it turns out, are capable of developing a lot of useful tools and practices even with no methodologies or bad methodologies. That's true, and the fact of it is kind of surprising and fun. But the world didn't outgrow pre-scientific folk medicine traditions like that of the four humors by mere accident or happenstance. And when you are familiar with a couple of such folk medicine traditions, TCM doesn't look like part of an alternate modernity so much as yet another outmoded pre-scientific tradition.
And I think a lot of salted food was just eaten, not cooked?
I think we largely have not learned just how much salt is needed to properly preserve food outside refrigeration over longer periods.
As always, dose determines toxicity. While alive and in salt water fish are pretty good about regulating their internal salinity and the parasites that live in them enjoyed the benefits of that regulated environment. When dead and packed in salt, fish are noticeably less able to maintain homeostasis and the concentration of salt is enough to pull the moisture out of both the fish and any parasites via osmosis. This kills the parasites, though there may be some cases where eggs survive that I'm not aware of.
I've read an archeological analysis of a merchant ship rowers-slaves -- every skeleton had perfect teeth. Because slaves were fed only fish, not any bread, bread was a product that merchants traded, while fish was cheap and abundant.
So I think "fish bad" opinion was just because fish was cheap and everyone had it.
Florida politics? [0]
[0] https://civileats.com/2019/06/25/toxic-red-tide-is-back-in-f...
Nothing has changed, but nowadays we have papers that document observations and sell their theory as the truth; in the past, we had cookbooks.