6 ms·

Cambridge University study finds Anglo-Saxon kings were mostly vegetarian

38 points by benbreen 4y ago

bryanrasmussen 4y ago
mostly vegetarian means sensible omnivores in this case.
lolinder 4y ago
This headline is very misleading. "Study finds Anglo-Saxon kings ate less meat than previously thought" or "kings didn't eat more meat than peasants" would be better. > "We should imagine a wide range of people livening up bread with small quantities of meat and cheese, or eating pottages of leeks and whole grains with a little meat thrown in." This isn't a "mostly vegetarian" diet as most people would understand "vegetarian".
- qiskit 4y ago
  > This headline is very misleading. Intentionally so. That's the most worrisome part. > This isn't a "mostly vegetarian" diet as most people would understand "vegetarian". Amazing how they turned, "anglo-saxon kings ate a human diet ( meat, dairy, vegetables, grains, fruits, etc )" into "anglo-saxon kings ate a mostly vegetarian diet". I admit I'm not a fan of the bbc, but if they are willing to be this misleading about vegetarian diets, how misleading are they on other stories.
  - thablackbull 4y ago
    Quite a lot actually. > The BBC misrepresented my views this morning, and I admit I'm stunned. [...] I spent three years doing field research on that myth and wrote an Oxford University Press book debunking it. [1] [1] http://www.chinaafricarealstory.com/2021/12/bbc-misrepresents-my-views-on-debt-trap.html http://www.chinaafricarealstory.com/2021/12/bbc-misrepresent...
    - ALittleLight 4y ago
      In high school an essay was returned to me with a word I had used, "probably", struck out in red. I went to ask the teacher about it and she told me that I should not use the word "probably" when writing as it did not sound confident. My writing would be better without the word. I reread the sentence and it did sound more assertive and direct without "probably." I then asked my teacher what I should write if I meant to convey that something was probably true, but that I actually wasn't certain or all that confident about it. She was stumped. I can easily see how advice like that leads to "reporting" like this. Some editor goes "Hey, cut this segment, we can't use this, it's confusing, and the story will sound better without it." The author's postscript, where he seems to forgive the BBC, is also pretty bad. Imagine what the editor will learn - "I edited a story to make it clearer and punchier. The expert complained, but the complaint went away when we said 'Sorry'. " If the editor realizes he inverted the meaning of his expert and completely got away with it - well, that will be a counter-productive lesson from the standpoint of accuracy in news. The news has the incentive to be interesting, simple, engaging - all that. None of this nuance stuff. If editors get carte blanche for being new... I don't think that even a new editor should have trouble with the concept of "Don't invert what your expert says."
      - bumbledraven 4y ago
        > I then asked my teacher what I should write if I meant to convey that something was probably true, but that I actually wasn't certain or all that confident about it. Not for school papers, but how about: "I guess [something]."
        ALittleLight 4y ago
        I think the right choice is to quantify or bound what you mean. "The chance of X is 52%" sounds pretty confident and assertive. If you can't be that precise, then "For reasons X, Y, and Z this is likely, though not certain." I think "probably" is completely fine though.
- mr_toad 4y ago
  The title of the paper is “Food and Power in Early Medieval England: Rethinking Feorm”, and the abstract doesn’t mention vegetarianism. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/anglo-saxon-england/article/food-and-power-in-early-medieval-england-rethinking-feorm/92CCDA9706D8F0858B0DE4CB4D51FB72 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/anglo-saxon-england/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_render https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_render
  - lolinder 4y ago
    Yes. There's a companion article which does mention vegetarians, but in the modern context (samples used for comparison): https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/anglo-saxon-england/article/food-and-power-in-early-medieval-england-a-lack-of-isotopic-enrichment/46263E5BB81F455CD873220C0B7601B9 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/anglo-saxon-england/...
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  In what way does a diet that has "small quantities of meat" not seem "mostly vegetarian?"
  - naniwaduni 4y ago
    Is a diet that contains a small quantity of ricin mostly nontoxic?
  - akvadrako 4y ago
    Vegetarians don't eat meat. A meal that's 95% vegetables/grains but 5% meat is 0% vegetarian.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  The title is misleading on purpose. I consider this straight out misinformation from the BBC, they are misrepresenting what a study says, for clickbait reasons.
qiskit 4y ago
"The boar's head in hand bring I Bedeck'd with bays and rosemary. And I pray you, my masters, be merry Quot estis in convivio ..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boar's_Head_Carol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boar's_Head_Carol The idea that anglo-saxon kings were mostly vegetarian seems like historical revisionism to peddle vegan/vegetarian propaganda. Certainly "esteemed" institutions like cambridge university and bbc wouldn't be involved in pushing such agendas?
- zdragnar 4y ago
  It seems more like faulty reasoning than an actual agenda. They argue that the lack of indicators of gout, and analysis of bones of people who might have been kings based on the nature of their burials, doesn't fit with the notion of someone who over-indulges in red meat. > Cambridge University bioarchaeologist Sam Leggett drew her conclusions after analysing chemical signatures of diets preserved in the bones of 2,023 people buried in England from the 5th to 11th Centuries. > She then cross-referenced these with evidence for social status such as grave goods, body position and grave orientation and found no correlation between social status and high protein diets. Later on in the article, it examines the historical evidence that royalty ate lots of meat- meal plannings and so forth, which they believe would have led to different chemical analyses had that been a daily regimen. I'm skeptical of the idea that they can confidently state they found a representative sample of kings, or that "not over indulging every single day" constitutes a vegetarian diet (it most certainly does not). All it really shows is that they had more moderate diets than we see in movies. What a surprise!
  - decremental 4y ago
    I never attribute to faulty reasoning that which is adequately explained by propaganda when the information comes from government news sources. I'm sure at some point there will be a revised piece stating that, actually, Anglo-Saxon kings mostly ate bugs.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    The flaws you point out are largely a case of the science news cycle in action (https://phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174 https://phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174), not the fault of the researchers. In their actual paper[0] and in the quotes the BBC uses, they don't use the word "vegetarian", and don't really make any unreasonable claims about their findings. [0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/anglo-saxon-england/article/food-and-power-in-early-medieval-england-a-lack-of-isotopic-enrichment/46263E5BB81F455CD873220C0B7601B9 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/anglo-saxon-england/...
puffoflogic 4y ago
A few moments reading the article reveals that the chief and only evidence for the headline is the overwhelming evidence that they ate a lot of meat. Too much, you see. So clearly all the evidence for meat-eating is really talking about special occasions. And since this leaves no evidence of meat-eating on other occasions, they must have been mostly vegetarian. This study is a truly fascinating case of motivated reasoning. Sure, if one believed that these kings were going around feasting every night of the week, maybe this evidence came as a shock big enough to motivate a sensationalized headline. But no one coming from a more moderate previous position could possibly reach the headline conclusion without motivated reasoning.
- lolinder 4y ago
  The article is very poorly written, but the study it's about was a chemical analysis which seemed to contradict the documents that had previously been studied. The reinterpretation of those documents as referencing special occasions was their attempt to bring them into alignment with this new evidence. I'm not saying they came to the right conclusion, but it's far from as bad as you say. From the article: > Cambridge University bioarchaeologist Sam Leggett drew her conclusions after analysing chemical signatures of diets preserved in the bones of 2,023 people buried in England from the 5th to 11th Centuries. > She then cross-referenced these with evidence for social status such as grave goods, body position and grave orientation and found no correlation between social status and high protein diets.
IndySun 4y ago
Mostly vegetarian is not, in any way, shape, or form, a 'thing'. Mostly vegetarian is a meat eater.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- akvadrako 4y ago
  It is a thing. If 90% of the kings were vegetatian than "kings were mostly vegetarian"
socialdemocrat 4y ago
Puzzling that so many had issues with this story. I am not a native English speaker but found no problems reading it and getting the point. Saxon Kings had diets with very little meat, similar to peasants of the era. How do they know this? By studying bones in graves. Why was this surprising? Because writings of the era described large meat heavy feasts. But conclusion that a they must have been just that. Rare feasts. Mostly vegetarian in this case simply means they mostly ate vegetables, bread etc. But yes they also had small quantities of meat. Nothing like the large quantities us modern humans eat.
- lolinder 4y ago
  The problem is a nuance in the phrase "mostly vegetarian". That you are a second language speaker might actually have helped you here. If they had said "Anglo-Saxon kings ate a diet that was mostly vegetarian", that would correctly convey that all kings still ate meat. They instead said "Anglo-Saxon kings were mostly vegetarian", which is ambiguous. Were most kings wholly vegetarian or were all kings mostly vegetarian? After you resolve that, there's still the question of what "mostly vegetarian" means. For most people, eating meat every day disqualifies you, even if it's only a little bit of meat per meal. "Vegetarian" means a lot more than "consisting of vegetables" in today's world, and the BBC knows that.
perihelions 4y ago
Was meat expensive? Are there useful price lists for foodstuffs in this medieval period? There's an observation that meat in ancient Rome was apparently not expensive at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653366 ("What things cost in Ancient Rome (2007)")
chmod600 4y ago
How available was salt? Meat without salt is often not very tasty.
kkfx 4y ago
I find it sickening how propaganda goes today, using science as Eduard Bernays have used for cigarettes and co. At "Anglo-Saxon kings" time, even kings and queens are "poor" respect of the richness we imaging, but most of the food production where meat and cheese, cereals used as long term reserves since they last longer than almost anything else etc. We can't do much more than speculation on details but we can say enough about practical possibilities. The rest is just propaganda to push a diet or another depending on the moment of the food market. Really, I'm not joking.

38 points by benbreen 4y ago

mostly vegetarian means sensible omnivores in this case.

This headline is very misleading. "Study finds Anglo-Saxon kings ate less meat than previously thought" or "kings didn't eat more meat than peasants" would be better. > "We should imagine a wide range of people livening up bread with small quantities of meat and cheese, or eating pottages of leeks and whole grains with a little meat thrown in." This isn't a "mostly vegetarian" diet as most people would understand "vegetarian".

qiskit 4y ago
> This headline is very misleading. Intentionally so. That's the most worrisome part. > This isn't a "mostly vegetarian" diet as most people would understand "vegetarian". Amazing how they turned, "anglo-saxon kings ate a human diet ( meat, dairy, vegetables, grains, fruits, etc )" into "anglo-saxon kings ate a mostly vegetarian diet". I admit I'm not a fan of the bbc, but if they are willing to be this misleading about vegetarian diets, how misleading are they on other stories.
- thablackbull 4y ago
  Quite a lot actually. > The BBC misrepresented my views this morning, and I admit I'm stunned. [...] I spent three years doing field research on that myth and wrote an Oxford University Press book debunking it. [1] [1] http://www.chinaafricarealstory.com/2021/12/bbc-misrepresents-my-views-on-debt-trap.html http://www.chinaafricarealstory.com/2021/12/bbc-misrepresent...
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    In high school an essay was returned to me with a word I had used, "probably", struck out in red. I went to ask the teacher about it and she told me that I should not use the word "probably" when writing as it did not sound confident. My writing would be better without the word. I reread the sentence and it did sound more assertive and direct without "probably." I then asked my teacher what I should write if I meant to convey that something was probably true, but that I actually wasn't certain or all that confident about it. She was stumped. I can easily see how advice like that leads to "reporting" like this. Some editor goes "Hey, cut this segment, we can't use this, it's confusing, and the story will sound better without it." The author's postscript, where he seems to forgive the BBC, is also pretty bad. Imagine what the editor will learn - "I edited a story to make it clearer and punchier. The expert complained, but the complaint went away when we said 'Sorry'. " If the editor realizes he inverted the meaning of his expert and completely got away with it - well, that will be a counter-productive lesson from the standpoint of accuracy in news. The news has the incentive to be interesting, simple, engaging - all that. None of this nuance stuff. If editors get carte blanche for being new... I don't think that even a new editor should have trouble with the concept of "Don't invert what your expert says."
    - bumbledraven 4y ago
      > I then asked my teacher what I should write if I meant to convey that something was probably true, but that I actually wasn't certain or all that confident about it. Not for school papers, but how about: "I guess [something]."
      - ALittleLight 4y ago
        I think the right choice is to quantify or bound what you mean. "The chance of X is 52%" sounds pretty confident and assertive. If you can't be that precise, then "For reasons X, Y, and Z this is likely, though not certain." I think "probably" is completely fine though.
mr_toad 4y ago
The title of the paper is “Food and Power in Early Medieval England: Rethinking Feorm”, and the abstract doesn’t mention vegetarianism. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/anglo-saxon-england/article/food-and-power-in-early-medieval-england-rethinking-feorm/92CCDA9706D8F0858B0DE4CB4D51FB72 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/anglo-saxon-england/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_render https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_render
- lolinder 4y ago
  Yes. There's a companion article which does mention vegetarians, but in the modern context (samples used for comparison): https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/anglo-saxon-england/article/food-and-power-in-early-medieval-england-a-lack-of-isotopic-enrichment/46263E5BB81F455CD873220C0B7601B9 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/anglo-saxon-england/...
actually_a_dog 4y ago
In what way does a diet that has "small quantities of meat" not seem "mostly vegetarian?"
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  Is a diet that contains a small quantity of ricin mostly nontoxic?
- akvadrako 4y ago
  Vegetarians don't eat meat. A meal that's 95% vegetables/grains but 5% meat is 0% vegetarian.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
throw_m239339 4y ago
The title is misleading on purpose. I consider this straight out misinformation from the BBC, they are misrepresenting what a study says, for clickbait reasons.

qiskit 4y ago

"The boar's head in hand bring I Bedeck'd with bays and rosemary. And I pray you, my masters, be merry Quot estis in convivio ..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boar's_Head_Carol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boar's_Head_Carol The idea that anglo-saxon kings were mostly vegetarian seems like historical revisionism to peddle vegan/vegetarian propaganda. Certainly "esteemed" institutions like cambridge university and bbc wouldn't be involved in pushing such agendas?

zdragnar 4y ago
It seems more like faulty reasoning than an actual agenda. They argue that the lack of indicators of gout, and analysis of bones of people who might have been kings based on the nature of their burials, doesn't fit with the notion of someone who over-indulges in red meat. > Cambridge University bioarchaeologist Sam Leggett drew her conclusions after analysing chemical signatures of diets preserved in the bones of 2,023 people buried in England from the 5th to 11th Centuries. > She then cross-referenced these with evidence for social status such as grave goods, body position and grave orientation and found no correlation between social status and high protein diets. Later on in the article, it examines the historical evidence that royalty ate lots of meat- meal plannings and so forth, which they believe would have led to different chemical analyses had that been a daily regimen. I'm skeptical of the idea that they can confidently state they found a representative sample of kings, or that "not over indulging every single day" constitutes a vegetarian diet (it most certainly does not). All it really shows is that they had more moderate diets than we see in movies. What a surprise!
- decremental 4y ago
  I never attribute to faulty reasoning that which is adequately explained by propaganda when the information comes from government news sources. I'm sure at some point there will be a revised piece stating that, actually, Anglo-Saxon kings mostly ate bugs.
- lolinder 4y ago
  The flaws you point out are largely a case of the science news cycle in action (https://phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174 https://phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174), not the fault of the researchers. In their actual paper[0] and in the quotes the BBC uses, they don't use the word "vegetarian", and don't really make any unreasonable claims about their findings. [0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/anglo-saxon-england/article/food-and-power-in-early-medieval-england-a-lack-of-isotopic-enrichment/46263E5BB81F455CD873220C0B7601B9 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/anglo-saxon-england/...

puffoflogic 4y ago

A few moments reading the article reveals that the chief and only evidence for the headline is the overwhelming evidence that they ate a lot of meat. Too much, you see. So clearly all the evidence for meat-eating is really talking about special occasions. And since this leaves no evidence of meat-eating on other occasions, they must have been mostly vegetarian. This study is a truly fascinating case of motivated reasoning. Sure, if one believed that these kings were going around feasting every night of the week, maybe this evidence came as a shock big enough to motivate a sensationalized headline. But no one coming from a more moderate previous position could possibly reach the headline conclusion without motivated reasoning.

lolinder 4y ago
The article is very poorly written, but the study it's about was a chemical analysis which seemed to contradict the documents that had previously been studied. The reinterpretation of those documents as referencing special occasions was their attempt to bring them into alignment with this new evidence. I'm not saying they came to the right conclusion, but it's far from as bad as you say. From the article: > Cambridge University bioarchaeologist Sam Leggett drew her conclusions after analysing chemical signatures of diets preserved in the bones of 2,023 people buried in England from the 5th to 11th Centuries. > She then cross-referenced these with evidence for social status such as grave goods, body position and grave orientation and found no correlation between social status and high protein diets.

IndySun 4y ago

Mostly vegetarian is not, in any way, shape, or form, a 'thing'. Mostly vegetarian is a meat eater.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
akvadrako 4y ago
It is a thing. If 90% of the kings were vegetatian than "kings were mostly vegetarian"

socialdemocrat 4y ago

Puzzling that so many had issues with this story. I am not a native English speaker but found no problems reading it and getting the point. Saxon Kings had diets with very little meat, similar to peasants of the era. How do they know this? By studying bones in graves. Why was this surprising? Because writings of the era described large meat heavy feasts. But conclusion that a they must have been just that. Rare feasts. Mostly vegetarian in this case simply means they mostly ate vegetables, bread etc. But yes they also had small quantities of meat. Nothing like the large quantities us modern humans eat.

lolinder 4y ago
The problem is a nuance in the phrase "mostly vegetarian". That you are a second language speaker might actually have helped you here. If they had said "Anglo-Saxon kings ate a diet that was mostly vegetarian", that would correctly convey that all kings still ate meat. They instead said "Anglo-Saxon kings were mostly vegetarian", which is ambiguous. Were most kings wholly vegetarian or were all kings mostly vegetarian? After you resolve that, there's still the question of what "mostly vegetarian" means. For most people, eating meat every day disqualifies you, even if it's only a little bit of meat per meal. "Vegetarian" means a lot more than "consisting of vegetables" in today's world, and the BBC knows that.

perihelions 4y ago

Was meat expensive? Are there useful price lists for foodstuffs in this medieval period? There's an observation that meat in ancient Rome was apparently not expensive at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653366 ("What things cost in Ancient Rome (2007)")

chmod600 4y ago

How available was salt? Meat without salt is often not very tasty.

kkfx 4y ago

I find it sickening how propaganda goes today, using science as Eduard Bernays have used for cigarettes and co. At "Anglo-Saxon kings" time, even kings and queens are "poor" respect of the richness we imaging, but most of the food production where meat and cheese, cereals used as long term reserves since they last longer than almost anything else etc. We can't do much more than speculation on details but we can say enough about practical possibilities. The rest is just propaganda to push a diet or another depending on the moment of the food market. Really, I'm not joking.