[Sca-cooks] The dangers of synthetic dyes

[Stefan li Rous]

  Christianna commented:
> I says to myself 'Duh! How many times have I taught that in medieval
> food classes - they didn't have supermarkets bringing them foods from 
> all
> over the world, they ate what was fresh, local, and in season'.
No, take off the rose-tinted glasses. I think the best that can be said 
is that they sometimes ate what was fresh, local and in season. They 
ate an awfully large amount of salted and pickled foods, especially in 
the winter when fresh foods weren't available. Not all foods were grown 
locally and those that were brought in were preserved in some way. They 
didn't have the transportation to bring in fresh food from another 
region. We can. Sometimes our processed food is less nutritious than 
fresh, sometimes it is better. Frozen vegetables being one good example 
of the latter. You can get fresh California vegetables in Texas or the 
East Coast when are better quality when they are in season in the 
remote location, that are better than the urban folks in say medieval 
Paris could from even the surrounding countryside and as the cities 
grew the situation got worse.

Just as now, the quality of one's diet depended upon individual things 
like economic standing and location as well as one's choices and 
tastes. Both our time period and the medieval time period had 
advantages and disadvantages in food quality compared to the other.

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****