It's fascinating how closely this parallels Chinese traditional medicine, where foods are classified as "heaty" or "cooling" and health conditions can be both caused and treated by an excess of one or the other.
Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food
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Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food
#32I am sure that in the past, good or bad food was more about conservation and food borne diseases than it was about nutrition. At least, that's the attitude that would make the most sense. That would explain sugar good / fish bad. There is probably a political aspect too, local food is seen as better than the rival neighbor food. The modern, first world attitude must be very unusual towards history. We basically solve…
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Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food
#33I am sure that in the past, good or bad food was more about conservation and food borne diseases than it was about nutrition. At least, that's the attitude that would make the most sense. That would explain sugar good / fish bad. There is probably a political aspect too, local food is seen as better than the rival neighbor food. The modern, first world attitude must be very unusual towards history. We basically solve…
Not just nutrition, over the last ~30 years there's also been a philosophical shift globally where many people went from thinking about impact on humans as the only thing to assess, to considering the impact on the wider ecosystems. Today not only we discuss nutritional content we also discuss the externalities to produce those calories.
You're talking about the common misconception that this planets ecology is somehow broken, that humans are supernatural (literally above nature) and that only other humans can fix it.
I'm also assuming that you're goodwill for other species ends at insects and bacteria
Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food
#34It's fascinating how closely this parallels Chinese traditional medicine, where foods are classified as "heaty" or "cooling" and health conditions can be both caused and treated by an excess of one or the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_food_therapy
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Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
To the best of my knowledge a vanishingly small proportion of historical society was literate and it was an even smaller subset that authored anything of note. It isn't historical women that are invisible it's >90% of everyone. The written accounts are whatever the elite of the elite deigned to write down which those that came after chose to bother preserving.
True, but farming was still somewhat visible to many of the elite. The bible (old testament) has a number of farmers who were also elite.
The whole point of the elite is that they don't have to do the hard work.... It's like Jefferson being out in the fields picking cotton whilst paying for a bunch of slaves.. a highly dubious proposition
Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food
#36> In thirteenth-century England, Christians were expected to avoid meat every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday during Lent (when eggs and dairy products were also forbidden), Advent and on some saints’ days (or the eves of their feasts) 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 therefor…
The fish thing is a carry over from Judaism, which has no such concept of "original sin". I find that a much more convincing explanation.
Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food
#37Considering how quickly poultry and fish go bad, they weren't entirely wrong.
Fish and/or poultry have been eaten in every civilization we've ever known about....
Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food
#38> In thirteenth-century England, Christians were expected to avoid meat every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday during Lent (when eggs and dairy products were also forbidden), Advent and on some saints’ days (or the eves of their feasts) 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 therefor…
> They observed that pickled vegetables preserved the veggies for months.
Kind of a tautology. Why would they think to pickle something in the first place?
Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food
#39> In thirteenth-century England, Christians were expected to avoid meat every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday during Lent (when eggs and dairy products were also forbidden), Advent and on some saints’ days (or the eves of their feasts) 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 therefor…
The fish thing is a carry over from Judaism, which has no such concept of "original sin". I find that a much more convincing explanation.
But his last line was about catching and preserving fish.... Which is the opposite of eating fish. I'm not sure what he was answering
Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food
#40It's fascinating how closely this parallels Chinese traditional medicine, where foods are classified as "heaty" or "cooling" and health conditions can be both caused and treated by an excess of one or the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_food_therapy
Ayurvedic medicine is a similar idea from the indian subcontinent. Foods have different medicinal properties like hot/cold, heavy/light, etc and those foods interact with your body type (which itself is a confluence of three factors called dosha that everyone has but in varying ratios) in order to produce certain effects.