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The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

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Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#61

Post by schmidt_fifty »

card_zero wrote: post #7
legitster wrote: post #3

I feel like some of these debunkings need debunking! I don't think anyone is truly arguing that medieval people never drank water. But they did drink beer in quantities that would be untenable today. The author is also muddling points - medieval people didn't have to understand microbiology to know that beer was safer to drink. And it was! Not only would the brewer have access to better water, it would be boiled as p…

You're just shoehorning in the assumption that people had diarrhea a lot, because that's the trope about medieval Europe. But if everybody lives in a well-established traditional way (and there's no current war or plague in the area) then they will also know by tradition the springs, streams and wells that yield clean water. In Georgian times, around 1800, coal-based industry gets under way, there's a population expl…

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Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#62

Post by schmidt_fifty »

anthk wrote: post #13
card_zero wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just shoehorning in the assumption that people had diarrhea a lot, because that's the trope about medieval Europe. But if everybody lives in a well-established traditional way (and there's no current war or plague in the area) then they will also know by tradition the springs, streams and wells that yield clean water. In Georgian times, around 1800, coal-based industry gets under way, there's a population expl…

Even "natural springs" could give you tons of diarrhea due to some animals taking a dump nearby.

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Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#63

Post by legitster »

cardanome wrote: post #52
legitster wrote: post #3

I feel like some of these debunkings need debunking! I don't think anyone is truly arguing that medieval people never drank water. But they did drink beer in quantities that would be untenable today. The author is also muddling points - medieval people didn't have to understand microbiology to know that beer was safer to drink. And it was! Not only would the brewer have access to better water, it would be boiled as p…

> Yes, people drank water. But (especially in urban settings) they drank A LOT of low abv drinks. The vast majority of people in the medieval period did NOT live in cities. Furthermore the cities that did exists where way less densely populated and would more look like bigger villages to the modern eye. It is the modern world with it's industrialization and high population density that has the problem of getting safe…

While cities were smaller, I think people forget the inverse, which is that rural areas were much more densely populated. The farms were very small, required lots of labor, and were always close to the manor of a lord or parish. Which almost invariably had a bakery, brewery, and a well present. These services were very convenient to the average peasant, and I was surprised to learn how few medieval homes even had a hearth or oven for baking.

Even in the preindustrial days, you could not just grab water from any old surface stream and drink it raw without some risk (as any avid hiker could tell you). Even the most crystal clear stream will have some sort of wild animal refuse in it that could leave you sick for days.

We know that early settlers in America basically refused to drink the local water except when forced. Even going back to the Roman period, where they were obsessive about fresh water, even then the average peasant might be drinking posca (vinegar water) all day instead of water. Roman troops would make and haul the stuff around with them rather than risk local water on the march. So I think it would be weird to assume there was a middle medieval period where the water was always pristine and everyone drank it.

> Many people today would rather drink soft-drinks or a beer even when having access to perfectly safe tab water.

I mean, if you went to a jobsite today, I would not be shocked if less than a third of what people drink during the course of the day is tap water. But if I may posit something - the average person's distaste for drinking plain water is somewhat universal across time and cultures and might very well be a human adaptation.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#64

Post by legitster »

fuzztester wrote: post #37
legitster wrote: post #3

I feel like some of these debunkings need debunking! I don't think anyone is truly arguing that medieval people never drank water. But they did drink beer in quantities that would be untenable today. The author is also muddling points - medieval people didn't have to understand microbiology to know that beer was safer to drink. And it was! Not only would the brewer have access to better water, it would be boiled as p…

>With workplaces themselves providing it by the truckload . Also probably doing that to keep them working there longer too.

Still a tradition in some parts of the world!

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

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#65

Post by legitster »

card_zero wrote: post #7
legitster wrote: post #3

I feel like some of these debunkings need debunking! I don't think anyone is truly arguing that medieval people never drank water. But they did drink beer in quantities that would be untenable today. The author is also muddling points - medieval people didn't have to understand microbiology to know that beer was safer to drink. And it was! Not only would the brewer have access to better water, it would be boiled as p…

You're just shoehorning in the assumption that people had diarrhea a lot, because that's the trope about medieval Europe. But if everybody lives in a well-established traditional way (and there's no current war or plague in the area) then they will also know by tradition the springs, streams and wells that yield clean water. In Georgian times, around 1800, coal-based industry gets under way, there's a population expl…

> they will also know by tradition the springs, streams and wells that yield clean water

I once drank water from a mountain stream and spent a week sick from some sort of phage associated with beavers.

As any avid hiker can tell you, even crystal clear, pristine surface waters still run the risk of making you sick. Even without the need of human intervention.

Almost every human culture has some traditional drink that involves something boiled. It's weird to assume Europeans were magically different.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#66

Post by kergonath »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #23
hnlmorg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bacteria wasn’t known about thousand of years ago. Nor were nutrients (in the sense that we know it now). There are a plethora of other reasons food might have been cooked, not least of all being flavour. The fact that it also killed bacteria would have been an accidental benefit. Also a lot of food actually loses nutrients when cooked.

I think you're underestimating humans who for hundreds of thousands (!) of years have been as smart as you and I.

Being smart and knowing stuff are not equivalent. The smartest person alive 300 years ago had no clue about bacteria and viruses. Or anything like horizontal gene transfer. Sure, they were not stupid. They still did not know a lot of things, which occasionally made them do stupid things. For example, it is well documented that people believed diseases were transmitted by “bad air” (i.e. pestilence, or bad smells) up until the mid-19th century (not to mention demons). They were not stupid, but there were some things they did not know.

I am not saying that we are any better; there are a lot of things we don’t know that will be taken for granted in 200 years. If there is still a human race.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#67

Post by kergonath »

scarby2 wrote: post #40
closewith wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have diarrhoea a lot today, in developed countries with stable access to clean water and food. If anything, people massively underestimate the amount of diarrhoea premodern living involved.

>People have diarrhoea a lot today, in developed countries with stable access to clean water and food My personal experience suggests it's pretty uncommon. Maybe once every few years, and I eat all sorts of questionable things.

I would suggest your personal experience is not representative of what billions of people are living e.g. in Nigeria and most of tropical Africa and India.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#68

Post by kergonath »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #30
deepsun wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in all of those places you'd usually noted how bad is the taste of water, so many people knew it's unsafe not just from tradition, but also from the bad taste. The difference between now and medieval England is that we know taste is not everything, that even "sweet water" can be dangerous unboiled.

> And in all of those places you'd usually noted how bad is the taste of water, so many people knew it's unsafe not just from tradition, but also from the bad taste. Considering the strength of the Chinese taboo on cold water, I find that fairly unlikely.

We often say that the US are not the world and that we should not assume that something is natural just because American do it. Well, it’s also true for China and overall people in a specific place having a specific taboo tells us very little about human health or their understanding of it.

So no, a Chinese taboo on cold water does not tell us anything about a human tendency to drink water any more that a people’s taboo about pork is any indication that pork is unsafe (yes, this also is an urban legend).

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#69

Post by rexpop »

scarby2 wrote: post #40
closewith wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have diarrhoea a lot today, in developed countries with stable access to clean water and food. If anything, people massively underestimate the amount of diarrhoea premodern living involved.

>People have diarrhoea a lot today, in developed countries with stable access to clean water and food My personal experience suggests it's pretty uncommon. Maybe once every few years, and I eat all sorts of questionable things.

What a tedious over-inflation of personal significance. It's utterly depressing that literate people such as yourself could be so unimaginative as to presume the representative significance of your own experience.

Although they're less common among the insufferably narcissistic rich, diarrhoeal diseases account for 1.5 million deaths, annually ranking them as the 8th leading cause of death globally.[0]

0. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-...

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