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The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

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Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#91

Post by Wytwwww »

kergonath wrote: post #66
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> For example, it is well documented that people believed diseases were transmitted by “bad air” (i.e. pestilence, or bad smells) up

But that's not particularly stupid. Bad smells are certainly a proxy for diseases to some extent and avoiding them/removing their sources would also decrease the likelihood of getting sick.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#92

Post by coldtea »

jeltz wrote: post #77
coldtea wrote: post #22

> As it happens, drinking water was commonplace throughout history. We have to remember that the notion that water could carry diseases is a fairly modern one No, it's anything but new. People in the past might not know about viruses and bacteria and such, but they very well knew about clean vs dirty water, the dangers of some animal corpse upstream, and many other such things... Ancient people had knowledge from exp…

Yeah, otherwise why would well poisoning be an ancient practice?

And purposefully using mechanisms like dead animals too, so they knew it was harmful.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#93

Post by willcipriano »

legitster wrote: post #80
cardanome wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having access to fresh water is not the same as saying any puddle of water was 100% safe. You bring up traveling when the vast majority of people did not travel. At all. Maybe to the next market if we talk later medieval period but that was it really. (I do use bottled water when traveling because I am only used to the local bacteria and it is easy to get sick at first when going to a new country.) As you write most…

If we both went into a time machine, and had to make the choice, I think both of us would still end up drinking the small-beer over even the most pristine local water. But regardless, this is still not a strong argument that we need to "debunk" the history as the original author is trying to do. We have written primary sources from the dawn of writing until the modern temperance movements in the 1800s that all basica…

Im not the guy you are talking to but I drink water directly from streams now. Have done it since I was little.

I'm not a big beer guy, I'd find a moving, hopefully relatively cold water source.

I've never gotten sick from drinking water like that.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#94

Post by kergonath »

Wytwwww wrote: post #91
kergonath wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> For example, it is well documented that people believed diseases were transmitted by “bad air” (i.e. pestilence, or bad smells) up But that's not particularly stupid. Bad smells are certainly a proxy for diseases to some extent and avoiding them/removing their sources would also decrease the likelihood of getting sick.

> Bad smells are certainly a proxy for diseases to some extent

No, they are not. Because smell and germs are completely unrelated. There is a limited case where they are correlated (don’t play with organic waste or too old corpses), but even then it is not really helpful. This is why it took so long to understand how to stop cholera: you can have things in your water even if it looks pristine. The air is just a red herring.

It is not even helpful with airborne pathogens, as once they start spreading among humans all bets are off.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#95

Post by adonovan »

closewith wrote: post #19
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…

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.

Acquired immunity is a thing. If you always drink from the same river, you are more likely to become immune to its pathogens. That’s why travellers to places with poorer sanitation often get sick eating food that is fine for the locals.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#96

Post by hnlmorg »

resolutebat wrote: post #45
hnlmorg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t make tea to kill bacteria. You make it because of the flavour.

Porque no los dos? And as noted, in China drinking hot water is common, while drinking cold water is (traditionally) frowned on.

Someone has already addressed how that wasn’t for health reasons until relatively recently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40418347

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#97

Post by hnlmorg »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #87
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.

Ancient cultures relied on observation-based trial-and-error knowledge passed down from generation to generation, mostly involving people dying. They didn't have to understand the causes in order to be correct about the effect. E.g., if you eat raw meat that's been sitting there a while, you get sick and might die. How do we know? Because X and Y people died after eating it. But if you cook it, you don't get sick and…

A lot of what our evolved tastes are today actually comes from biological repulsion for stuff that isn’t safe for consumption.

This is why smell was so important.

Unfortunately smell isn’t an accurate gauge for whether a source is safe or not.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#98

Post by hnlmorg »

mywittyname wrote: post #75
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.

> Bacteria wasn’t known about thousand of years ago. Nor were nutrients (in the sense that we know it now). And yet, processed like nixtamalization (the processed used to make the nutrients in maize available to humans) were discovered over 3000 years ago. If ancient humans figured that complex process out, they certainly would have been able to figure out that boiling water made it safer to drink, even if they didn'…

Northern China didn’t figure it out until long after the Middle Ages.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40418347

To accurately gauge if something is safe, you need a quick and direct result that is consistent. Unsafe food and liquid isn’t that. Often it’s more a percentage problem. So to solve the percentage problem you then need a larger sample size. And people simply weren’t organised enough to accurately measure at that scale in the periods you’re suggesting.

As an aside, this is why people got thrown into volcanos and such like. If you don’t have measurements that are easy to correlate then you’re effectively left to guesswork.

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