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> Rich or poor, holy or not, food changed according to the season. Tha's true. > Vegetables were only available at certain times of the year. The rest of the
by zeveb 8y ago
> Rich or poor, holy or not, food changed according to the season.
Tha's true.
> Vegetables were only available at certain times of the year. The rest of the time it would be a combination of bread (grain) and meat.
That's not. Plenty of fruits & vegetables can be put up for quite a long time. Root vegetables can be stored for many months (almost a year) by digging them up and piling in 'silos,' which alternate layers of soil or sand & vegetables. Apples can be stored in barrels. Cabbages can be covered in leaves, or fermented. Beans & peas can be dried. Almonds can be used to make milk (in fact, in the middle ages almond milk was more common than cows' milk).
Christians have been fasting on Wednesdays & Fridays, Lent & Advent for millennia, well before refrigeration and modern foodstuffs.
- sandworm101 8y agoTry storing food that way for a few months. The results aren't pretty. What survives are carbs. All the vitamins are gone. You have carrots suitable for pottage, not salad. Seeds (peas, nuts, grains etc) can indeed be stored but they too are just blobs of carbs. When we talk about "eating vegetables" we don't mean porridge and dried nuts. Scurvy was a thing for a reason.
- perl4ever 8y agoScurvy was a thing on sailing ships. If it had been universal for everybody everywhere, wouldn't we have retained the ability to produce vitamin C like other creatures do - and not lost it through evolution? I am amazed if you truly cannot imagine a root cellar, just a generation or two ago.
- gascan 8y agoScurvy "was a thing" because for centuries they didn't know why it happened in the first place. A Scottish surgeon in the Royal Navy, James Lind, is generally credited with proving that scurvy can be successfully treated with citrus fruit in 1753.
- toasterlovin 8y ago> in fact, in the middle ages almond milk was more common than cows' milk Got a link for that? Seems highly unlikely to me...
- Bedon292 8y agoI don't know about more common, but this was in the related links: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/almond-milk-obsession-origins-middle-ages https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/almond-milk-obsession-...