[Sca-cooks] Abysmally wrong EDiets article on medieval diet

[Decker, Terry D.]

I couldn't resist.  Here's my rebuttal.

Bear


Mr. Hoffman,

Having just read your article, "Good Knight:  The Middle Ages Diet!", I can
only say that historically, it is an appalling piece of claptrap.  While you
may have been attempting humor, it falls flat in knowledge and honesty.  

No one in their right mind, then or now, partakes of rotten meat except in
the most dire emergency.  An examination of various town ordinances show
Medieval butchers were strictly controlled by law with harsh penalties for
selling tainted meat with one exception to the rule.  Rotten meat could be
sold precisely for what it was before the city stocks.  Selling bad meat was
a more common practice in the 19th Century than during the Middle Ages.

Those fancy French sauces are a late Renaissance or Early Modern invention
to produce richer flavors than those available in the more acerbic sauces of
the Middle Ages.  They also came at a time when the average wealth in Europe
was higher than at any time until the late 20th Century.  They would not
have been wasted on bad meat.

The term "upper crust" comes from the fact that the upper portion of a loaf
of bread was served to people of rank, because the bottom of the loaf might
be scorched or dirtied from the floor of the oven.  The bottom crust was
served to the lesser folk at the household meal.

The poor vassels got not only the bottom crust of bread, but were served
rather decent meals as part of their due for their service to their lord.
Households tended to eat together with the exception that the grooms, a
rowdy bunch, might eat seperately from the main meal.  A lord or lady might
have 30 to 300 meals served at each sitting, depending on the size of their
household.  Portions were ample and after each course, the almoner would see
that the tables were cleared of used trenchers and uneaten food, which were
given to beggars outside of the kitchen as part of the lord's religious
obligation to provide charity for his people.  So much for letting people
starve.

In Medieval art, persons of rank are shown as being larger than surrounding
figures not because they are fat, but because that was the convention
artist's used to show power and privilege.  That convention fell by the
wayside in the Renaissance when proportion and realism came into art.  One
might say, they got a better perspective.

Grain was the chief foodstuff, served as bread or porridge.  If the harvest
was good, people ate well.  If it was average, people survived.  If it was
poor or failed, people starved.  Meat and vegetables were supplements.  Meat
was expensive and would have been more common in a lord's household, but it
was available to all.  

The high carbohydrate diet (2 1/2 lbs of grain and a gallon of beer or wine
per person per day by some estimates) probably accounts for more of the fat
present in 16th Century paintings (which are Renaissance rather than
Medieval) than any of the sauces.  The stout, phlegmatic person was
considered the ideal of health by the standards of the day and shows up
across the broad spectrum of classes depicted.

As a small point of history, the Black Death of the mid 14th Century did
increase discretionary income for the survivors by inheritance and by a
labor shortage and appears to have led (in the 15th and 16th Centuries) into
the most prosperous period in European history until the 20th Century.  Your
jest on job openings really isn't a joke.

Having prepared recipes from texts ranging from the 5th Century through the
17th Century, I can state the food does not suck.  Properly prepared, it is
quite good and no odder than eating modern Persian or Thai cooking.

Fortunately, your health and diet advice is better than your history, so the
article is not a total waste of time.

Please, in future, if you are going to make pronouncements about history, do
some real research and get the facts, or even the speculations, right.
Don't contribute to the poor quality of education in this country.

Yours,

Terry Decker
terryd at health.state.ok.us