The Medieval Diet

June 5, 2005 10:28 PM

Scotlands diet was healthier in 1405 (within a lifetime of the Black Death) than today, according to archaeologists. Might we see the "Medieval diet" replace the "Mediterranean diet"? Some traditional food practitioners think so.
posted by stbalbach (40 comments total)

Imagine that, chemical, sugar, and preservative free is healthy. Who'd-a-thunk that nature knew what it was doing?

Mmmm....hormone filled hamburgers, fries, and a shake.... what was I talking about?
posted by gunthersghost at 10:36 PM on June 5, 2005

Toss another hunk o' peat on the hearth and bring me m' haggis!
posted by beelzbubba at 11:04 PM on June 5, 2005

For being so smart, we're all incredibly stupid.
posted by nightchrome at 11:19 PM on June 5, 2005

MMmmmm Haggis.
posted by Balisong at 11:21 PM on June 5, 2005

Yeah, but was it Lo-Carb™?
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 11:23 PM on June 5, 2005

I'd like to point out that Scotland is home to some of the least healthy foodstuffs on the planet. Didn't they invent the deep-fried Mars bar? I also seem to recall they have one of the highest rates of cardiovascular disease.
posted by mek at 11:53 PM on June 5, 2005

As mek hinted, this may simply be because Scotland's diet is so incredibly unhealthy now, not because it was so spectacularly healthy then.

Now, off to read the article.
posted by spazzm at 12:00 AM on June 6, 2005

A scottish lunch is apparently something deep friend and a couple of cigarettes.
posted by Justinian at 12:08 AM on June 6, 2005

mmmmm.... deep-fried cigarettes....
posted by Parannoyed at 12:17 AM on June 6, 2005

Realistically, if you consider all the health aspects of the modern diet versus the medieval one, the modern diet should demolish the medieval one simply on the basis of drinking and cooking with clean water.

That doesn't mean there's no room to improve our current diet, but I think the more productive route is probably to push it forward with research and technology, rather than try to convince people to regress from today's pleasant foods to yesterday's unpleasant ones. Convincing people to reduce their short-term quality of life almost never works, for any reason.
posted by Mitrovarr at 12:20 AM on June 6, 2005

How about moving from today's unpleasant foods to yesterday's pleasant ones?
posted by nightchrome at 12:34 AM on June 6, 2005

Speaking as a Glaswegian Scot I would have to say that most of the dietary problems in Glasgow are ones related to class and poverty. For the middle classes eating healthily is not a problem- with 99% of supermarkets and delis selling things like fresh tomatoes, olives, fresh fish and all the vegetables and other goodies that you associate with the healthy Mediterranean diet. Fortunately I am well off enough (just!) to buy the decent food that is a key constituent of a healthy diet. Its the poor buggers to whom £70 a week is all they've got to live on for everything (electricity, council tax, microwave meals with fuck knows what in them) that end up scoffing the shite.

It seems to me to be a cheap point to compare a diet where people ate what they could when they could 600 years ago to the glut of crap foods manufactured by Megacorps where the focus is on salt, sugar and shelf life of 6 months and is the only thing that some people can afford.


There is still no excuse for the deep fried pizza in batter which is a favourite with the school kids at lunch time around my way (it's called a Pizza Crunch btw).
posted by ClanvidHorse at 1:04 AM on June 6, 2005

Spot on ClanvidHorse - especially that last point. I used to live on a street near two schools which has three chip shops on it, and the fact that already overweight kids would be buying lunch there every day, plus a bag of chips for the way home, made me hang my head in despair. (This in the leafy West End of Glasgow, too, so we're talking kids ranging from lower middle class backgrounds to full on posh kids in private schools, rather than those with no choice but to eat crap due to income and location.)

I quite seriously think that children under the age of 18 shouldn't be allowed in chip shops and fast food outlets unless accompanied by an adult. We control cigarettes and booze in that manner, lethal food shouldn't be any different.

That said, I've been remiss in never having tried a pizza crunch after ten years living in Glasgow!
posted by jack_mo at 2:16 AM on June 6, 2005

"deep fried pizza in batter"... mmmm - sounds intriguing! :-)
posted by Chunder at 2:50 AM on June 6, 2005

told you. is there anything those scots won't batter and deep-fry?
posted by mek at 2:57 AM on June 6, 2005

mmmm - sounds intriguing! :-)

In the sense that your username is a mission statement, Chunder?
posted by jack_mo at 3:09 AM on June 6, 2005

ClanvidHorse : "There is still no excuse for the deep fried pizza in batter which is a favourite with the school kids at lunch time around my way (it's called a Pizza Crunch btw)."

I missed out during my trip to Scotland. Damn! I was mighty impressed by the deep fried Mars bar, though. They absolutely ROCKED!
posted by Bugbread at 3:20 AM on June 6, 2005

How healthy could the Scots diet of 1405 be when not a single person who followed that lifestyle is alive today?
posted by Faint of Butt at 3:55 AM on June 6, 2005

How healthy could the Scots diet of 1405 be when not a single person who followed that lifestyle is alive today?

hehe.
posted by knapah at 5:18 AM on June 6, 2005

But I don't want to be exposed to boiled heron!
posted by shawnj at 5:59 AM on June 6, 2005

Mitrovarr writes "Realistically, if you consider all the health aspects of the modern diet versus the medieval one, the modern diet should demolish the medieval one simply on the basis of drinking and cooking with clean water."

The diet may have been better in some absolute sense, but I'm sure more people died of food-borne pathogens. These kind of "golden age" stories always leave out the explosive diarrhea.
posted by OmieWise at 6:05 AM on June 6, 2005

OmieWise : "These kind of 'golden age' stories always leave out the explosive diarrhea."

Most good stories do.

That's why they're good stories, and not great stories.
posted by Bugbread at 6:55 AM on June 6, 2005

Harriet Michaels: Do you actually like haggis?
Charlie Mackenzie: No, I think it's repellent in every way. In fact, I think most Scottish cuisine is based on a dare.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:15 AM on June 6, 2005

But I don't want to be exposed to boiled heron!

It's far more appealing to have every iota of flesh blasted off a dead cow to give a legally edible slurry that can be formed into patties. How did these historical yokels ever get by?
posted by biffa at 7:26 AM on June 6, 2005

A fun article, but wasn't the average lifespan in medieval Europe about 30?
posted by LarryC at 7:34 AM on June 6, 2005

While we're waxing romantic about how great it would be if everyone ate healthy, I think we're really fooling ourselves. Our ancestors would have gladly enjoyed a deep-fried mars bar if only they could.

They weren't smarter than we are, they just lacked the technology to ensure that they developed cardiac disease before age 25.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 7:37 AM on June 6, 2005

This article ignores the actual change in this dietary shift: food production in northern europe was so chancy that the descriptions of medieval diets need an asterisk with the legend "among those actually eating."

Today, food production is so well developed that every single person in most industrialized nations has acess to many more calories than they need, no matter how poor they are. But it shows that too much is only marginally better than not enough.
posted by Mayor Curley at 8:01 AM on June 6, 2005

A fun article, but wasn't the average lifespan in medieval Europe about 30?

No, actually. That is a misconception about the middle ages. As is the myth that they were short. Short lifespan and stature came with the development of cities.

Cities began to develop in the late middle ages, about the time of the black death and that is no coincidence. The plague could only be spread through close contact and squalor, that which is only found when people concentrate. Prior to those days people had been living a relatively remote and rural lifestyle.

1405 would be more in the renaissance period though. The latest anyone considers the middle ages to extend is 1403 when Florence was spared invasion by Milan and decided that they were God's chosen people (I'm not making that up).
posted by Pollomacho at 8:41 AM on June 6, 2005

I should say cities and towns began to redevelop, as the Greeks and Romans obviously lived in cities. They also faced plagues.
posted by Pollomacho at 8:44 AM on June 6, 2005

Thanks for the correction, Pollomacho.
posted by LarryC at 9:21 AM on June 6, 2005

All joking aside,

I think that the benefit of "medieval" diets, or the notion that medieval people were healthier than we are comes entirely from the fact that they didn't have a whole lot of refined sugar, whereas people today consume SO MUCH processed sugar. Just look at how many products have corn syrup in them. That stuff's just plain not good for you.

Also, people were more active before this century. Not as much sitting on the couch, watching tv, and eating candy-bars.

Additionally, the consequences of poverty have changed. In earlier centuries, if you were poor, that mean that you had less. In todays day and age, if you're poor, you have just as much stuff as anyone else, it's just of a drastically lower quality. Today, you're not starving. You're just eating 3 McDonalds meals per day (and killing yourself).

/end seriousness

Personally, I think that burning witches has something to do with it. Witches are tasty and healthy. And they feed a small community.
posted by Jon-o at 9:24 AM on June 6, 2005

Witches are tasty and healthy. And they feed a small community.

I heard the Scots deep-fried their witches.
posted by QuietDesperation at 11:11 AM on June 6, 2005

QuietDesperation : "I heard the Scots deep-fried their witches."

Only nowadays. In 1405 they were lightly broiled (enough to seal in the vitamins, but not enough to add carcinogenic skin blackening).
posted by Bugbread at 12:22 PM on June 6, 2005

I heard the Scots deep-fried their witches.

I heard the Scots deep-fry everything. Even their soup.
posted by Jon-o at 1:37 PM on June 6, 2005

Advice for people moving to Scotland: Buy all the consumer electronics you think you'll need before you arrive in Scotland. The batter and grease from deep frying televisions has been known to reduce image quality, and deep fried cellular phones can cause ear burns if the oil is not allowed to cool before use.
posted by Bugbread at 1:46 PM on June 6, 2005

Pollomacho - I think that the length of the middle ages depends on where in Europe you are talking about. Most historians of Europe north of the Alps would take the middle ages right through to the Reformation (c.1500), at least judging by the orals fields and research of my medievalist friends. The concept of the "Rennaisance" as a distinct period really isn't often used in North-western European history - you might refer, for example, to an English Rennaisance, but that would be in literature and
simultaneous with the later Reformation/early modern period. But periodization is arbitary anyways :)

I don't know Scottish history as well as I should, but if it follows similar demographic patterns to English, eating might have improved in the fourteenth century, following the Black Death, when the low population relieved pressure on the land and raised real wages. There is also some intriguing recent research (on the seventeenth century, but maybe applicable earlier, as the two periods have some similarities wage-wise) which shows that the idea of "enough to eat" could be higher in the past than now - commentators would talk about the poor not having enough to eat or a decent diet, but looking at accounts for food purchases for poorhouses, even there they had 2-3000 calories a day (and they were mostly elderly and children) - working people might have had as much as 4000 calories. The archeological research showing a healthy diet is really interesting, but at the same times makes sense with what else I've been hearing about pre-modern living conditions lately.

That said, it may be that the healthiness of a diet isn't related to wealth - when southern English real wages increased in the late seventeenth century, they consumed more white bread, sugar and tobacco. It also happens that the diet of the poor in Northern England and Scotland relied heavily on oats, which could be amazingly monotonous, but is a very nutritious grain. I wonder if the contemporary English, Dutch or French diets would be as healthy?

I also have no idea about the extent of water borne diseases - though a book on contours of death and disease in England in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries shows that mortality due to disease seems to have been most of concern in urban or low lying (marshy) areas (in fact, mortality increase between c.1550 and c.1700 -mostly due to the growth of deadly London). It may have been less of a problem in rural Scotland (especially since they would be more used to certain levels of parasites/bacteria in water than we are).
posted by jb at 4:30 PM on June 6, 2005

I heard the Scots deep-fried their witches.

No , we date them.
posted by sgt.serenity at 4:30 PM on June 6, 2005

jb-- good points on periodization issues, it's a pointless and endless discussion to talk about things that never existed. There was no Renaissance. Almost all periodization terms are at their core pejorative, created by future generations as a way to express disfavour with the "old ways" and implicit favour of the "new ways". Propaganda. Renaissance for example is a Humanist term designed to express disfavour with the "dark ages" (another pejorative term of propaganda).

An illustrative point about the health and strength of medieval people. The English (Welsh) longbow was the uber-weapon of the late Medieval period, but then it vanished from use. Not because of gunpowder, in fact longbowmen could lay down a more deadly melee of firepower then guns of the age. But because England was not producing the men capable of pulling the bows (because the theory goes of the transition to weaker shepards from tougher farmers, and it was easier to train and find gunmen then longbowmen). Evidence has shown bows with draw weights of over 100 pounds, nothing like that exists today. Skeletons show deformed arm bones from the use of these bows by archers. There is an account of a single arrow going through a wooden shield, into the and through the leg and bone of a man on a horse (who was armoured), into the horse killing it. Most bullets would not do that. These arrows could be shot at 3 a minute and go for 100s of yards with accuracy. A few hundred longbowmen even today would be a serious threat to a modern (non-calvary) military.
posted by stbalbach at 8:02 PM on June 6, 2005

In short, then, we're all sorry wimps nowadays.
posted by troutfishing at 11:06 PM on June 6, 2005

Availability of fresh fruits and vegetables at decent prices is the problem. A helpful government could curb this by supporting low prices in problem areas, especially around schools and residential areas -- make it profitable to open a fruit and veggies stand where they are needed. Allow other businesses (McDonald's or whoever) to sell fruits and veggies in such areas at the supported prices. Pricing could be two-tiered, using a discount card available to locals (and the government paying the difference). Make sure everyone on government assistance gets paid partly in food credits good only at places like this. To make up for the cost and to encourage local growing, the government could make sure the fruit and veggie stands buy locally (or at least nationally) whenever possible.

A few hundred longbowmen even today would be a serious threat to a modern (non-calvary) military.

Not really. Guns are pretty fast, powerful, and accurate these days, and a "modern (non-calvary) military" could have drones hanging over the bowmen to direct all sorts of evil fiery shredding death on to them. And I doubt there were many, if any, men in any era who could shoot any arrow hundreds of yards with any accuracy. Put a few hundred longbowmen up against a few hundred modern soldiers and their modern arsenal, and the longbowmen will soon be latebowmen. I'm assuming we're not talking about longbowmen appearing magically and unexpectedly from the middle ages, because if the modern army knew they were coming, the modern army could have effective shields and so on.

But if longbows were actually useful now and if the only problem was the strength of modern bowmen, I'm sure it would be fairly easy to make a bow that draws itself to whatever hundred pounds you need. If you can build a robot or a car or a whatever, you can build a lightweight bow that quietly flexes itself with little humming motors, so that the bowman need only point and release.
posted by pracowity at 12:25 AM on June 7, 2005