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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

#51

Post by ratelimitsteve »

b112 wrote: post #22
coldtea wrote: post #12

Considering how fast fish without refrigeration would spoil back then, the rarity of access to sugar and the need for energy dense foods, "fish bad, sugar good" makes perfect sense.

People dried and salted alot of food to preserve it. But fish already live in a world of salt, and so I wonder of worms and parasites still survived this proxess. And I think a lot of salted food was just eaten, not cooked?

>fish already live in a world of salt, and so I wonder of worms and parasites still survived this proxess.

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.

Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food

#52

Post by paimapi »

you have to wonder how much of these habits we see as strange now are just artifacts of

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

Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food

#53

Post by ratelimitsteve »

throw83930489 wrote: post #44

"Medieval Ideas" spanned million square miles and thousand years. Hardly uniform culture.

i don't feel like this ever claimed to be exhaustive or representative of a monolith, only that the ideas they discussed did exist prominently.

Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food

#54

Post by watwut »

Tangurena2 wrote: post #28
watwut wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 co…

Until the Industrial Revolution, there was nothing even close to what we nowadays call "childhood". As children became old enough to walk by themselves, they'd accompany their parents and help with weeding & cultivation.

Apparently we are in the scenario where one parent is on the field and other at home. At home parent could and would tell their 5-11 years old to take the food to the other parent and other field workers. Yes they worked and had chores. They were fully suitable for taking food from place a to place b. They also herded animals by themselves or took care of younger siblings.

> 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.

Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food

#55

Post by snapcaster »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #17
snapcaster wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you would probably like the book Invisible Women. Touches a lot on this subject and how there is so much "missing data" when we talk about these things and it carries through to the modern day

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.

Yeah you should check out this book, would enhance the best of your knowledge. While you're right, even within that cohort there is a massive gender difference and it impacts how we view society in a big way

Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food

#56

Post by brabel »

bobthepanda wrote: post #46
GuB-42 wrote: post #20

I 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…

For most of human history calories in was way more important than nutrition since we could barely even manage that. Just the fact that you can buy fresh fruit and vegetables in the middle of a harsh winter is an incredible feat of logistics and technology that has taken a century to develop.

A century? I guess you mean all of human history to develop.

Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food

#57

Post by mock-possum »

Tangurena2 wrote: post #27

> 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…

> Medieval people were not stupid

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.

Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food

#58

Post by brabel »

Ekaros wrote: post #23
b112 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People dried and salted alot of food to preserve it. But fish already live in a world of salt, and so I wonder of worms and parasites still survived this proxess. And I think a lot of salted food was just eaten, not cooked?

Some of the salted food like meat was so salted that even just dragging it in sea water on ships was effective way to lower salt content. So it was definitely cooked most often boiled to remove most of salt content. I think we largely have not learned just how much salt is needed to properly preserve food outside refrigeration over longer periods.

You don’t know dried cod is extremely popular in many parts of the world? They seem to know that exactly.

Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food

#59

Post by stirfish »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #33
vasco wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I hope this never happens, but if one day a cell in your colon maximizes its short-term replication at the expense of the long-term stability of the system it depends on, I hope nobody tells you it's fine because it's "natural."

Re: Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food

#60

Post by isityettime »

decimalenough wrote: post #31

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_food_therapy

This is one of the things that makes the contemporary Chinese treatment of TCM as credible so jarring to me. Many people seem to regard it as some unique inheritance of their culture, but in fact it closely resembles many other pre-scientific medical traditions, including in the "West".

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.)

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