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Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food

• ceejayoz 1mo ago
  > lettuce was dangerous because it was so cold and moist Joke's on us, I guess. https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investigation-multistate-outbreak-cyclospora-illnesses-iceberg-lettuce-july-2026 https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investi...
• A_D_E_P_T 1mo ago
  > "Fish Bad, Sugar Good" > "Similarly, some fruits were safer than others: citrus fruits improved digestion, especially in hot weather, while raisins were good for the stomach, lungs and liver. And nuts were nutritious and good for the brain." My impression is that refined sugar was extremely rare in medieval times and into the renaissance. But everybody loved raisins, and they were used extensively, even though they were usually imported from Italy and other Mediterranean regions. Various forms of raisin bread (often with dried figs, citrus peels, and currants,) were the definitive medieval festival/feast-day food. Their distant descendants are the stollen, panettone, etc., still popular as holiday treats in Europe. Certain regions of medieval Germany (and presumably France) grew grapes but had to resort to ingenious methods to dry them into raisins: https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/27/raisins-in-a-cold-climate/ https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/27/raisins-in-a-cold-cli...
  • wil421 1mo ago
    They had honey and could sweeten things that way but it’s not like table sugar from beets or sugar cane.
• rnd0 1mo ago
  Considering how quickly poultry and fish go bad, they weren't entirely wrong.
  • bcjdjsndon 1mo ago
    Fish and/or poultry have been eaten in every civilization we've ever known about....
• aqme28 1mo ago
  It's interesting how some of these came to the right conclusions (given sanitary standards at the time) but for entirely the wrong reasons. A lot of the food that was unhealthy was food that could go bad quickly or carry illnesses
  • maxerickson 1mo ago
    If you recognize something is bad but lack the knowledge to explain it, it isn't completely crazy to invent a taboo against it.
• millitzer 1mo ago
  You can base an entire food brand on that article. The Tik Tok channel alone would be massive.
  • aqme28 1mo ago
    Paleo diets are passé. The new fad diet is medieval. And frankly the science isn't any worse.
• heja2009 1mo ago
  The article kind of misses the forest for the trees: just as today, diet was associated with various conflicting theories and advice - some reasonable, some pure fabrication. In absence of much hard evidence food becomes a playing field for "systems" that assign values to foodstuffs. Also, obviously, sugar played a different role in societies in which the calorie requirements of physical labour were a much bigger challenge than obesity. Also: "beans, which were thought to cause flatulence"? I'm pretty sure that bit is factual.
• bluGill 1mo ago
  > According to Galen, food “is probably the most important of all medical subjects,” Just remember that in medieval times growing food was the job of the majority of men. Men also were the people most likely to be educated and actually write and talk about things and so food would be something on their mind. They would be growing it and thus writing about it. contrary to modern ideas men actually appeared to have done a lot of cooking: women were not common in the army (different cultures had different perspectives on women with the army. Some would have more than others, but in any case, you would have men as the vast majority) so men would have had to do at least some cooking. Even your common peasant farmer man would likely spend a significant amount of time out in the field at lunchtime where the women are not around and so would have to fend for themselves for their lunch. I bring the book up to point out that no one has ever asked what women were doing and what was important. This is something historians are looking at now when trying to piece together what must have been happening. As a general rule, you can say that every woman was spending the vast majority of their working hours making thread so they could have clothes, but since women were rarely the ones who were writing, we have almost no historical record of clothing. What we do have is often from tailors who would be a male and thus something that occasionally a man would write about.
  • snapcaster 1mo ago
    you would probably like the book Invisible Women. Touches a lot on this subject and how there is so much "missing data" when we talk about these things and it carries through to the modern day
    • fc417fc802 1mo ago
      To the best of my knowledge a vanishingly small proportion of historical society was literate and it was an even smaller subset that authored anything of note. It isn't historical women that are invisible it's >90% of everyone. The written accounts are whatever the elite of the elite deigned to write down which those that came after chose to bother preserving.
      • bluGill 1mo ago
• coldtea 1mo ago
  Considering how fast fish without refrigeration would spoil back then, the rarity of access to sugar and the need for energy dense foods, "fish bad, sugar good" makes perfect sense.
  • b112 1mo ago
    People dried and salted alot of food to preserve it. But fish already live in a world of salt, and so I wonder of worms and parasites still survived this proxess. And I think a lot of salted food was just eaten, not cooked?
    • Ekaros 1mo ago
      Some of the salted food like meat was so salted that even just dragging it in sea water on ships was effective way to lower salt content. So it was definitely cooked most often boiled to remove most of salt content. I think we largely have not learned just how much salt is needed to properly preserve food outside refrigeration over longer periods.
      • brabel 1mo ago
        You don’t know dried cod is extremely popular in many parts of the world? They seem to know that exactly.
    • ratelimitsteve 1mo ago
      >fish already live in a world of salt, and so I wonder of worms and parasites still survived this proxess. As always, dose determines toxicity. While alive and in salt water fish are pretty good about regulating their internal salinity and the parasites that live in them enjoyed the benefits of that regulated environment. When dead and packed in salt, fish are noticeably less able to maintain homeostasis and the concentration of salt is enough to pull the moisture out of both the fish and any parasites via osmosis. This kills the parasites, though there may be some cases where eggs survive that I'm not aware of.
• krater23 1mo ago
  Is this article really about medieval? Sounds very familiar to todays food culture. Everyone makes claims without having a solid justification, yet the observations indicate that it is true. Nothing has changed, but nowadays we have papers that document observations and sell their theory as the truth; in the past, we had cookbooks.
• alexaholic 1mo ago
  I enjoyed reading this, I found the article equally interesting and amusing. As a curiosity — it says that beef was cheap and suitable for manual labourers, and salmon was a staple of the monastic diet. How did they end up being among the most expensive in their respective groups?
• mik1998 1mo ago
  This article seems unusually misrepresenting of the theory of humours, which was prevalent in medieval Europe, at least in the catholic parts. This theory stated that no food was explicitly bad or good; rather, you should eat food that is suitable for your temperament. In that sense, they did not believe any food is necessarily (at least in terms of the humours) unhealthy; rather, it may be unsuitable or suitable for your temperament and the balance of humours within you. The hesistance of wet was mostly of its association with diseases; but it was recommended to cholerics, whose temperament needed to be balanced with it. In a sense, it sometimes produces better results (by chance) than modern dietary practices which often held up some types of (seemingly innocent food; like animal fats) to be categorically unhealthy.
  • alexaholic 1mo ago
    It mentions it: > Complexion also determined what a person should eat, so that (for example) garlic and pepper were good for the phlegmatic, but “venym” to a choleric person.
• GuB-42 1mo ago
  I am sure that in the past, good or bad food was more about conservation and food borne diseases than it was about nutrition. At least, that's the attitude that would make the most sense. That would explain sugar good / fish bad. There is probably a political aspect too, local food is seen as better than the rival neighbor food. The modern, first world attitude must be very unusual towards history. We basically solved conservation and food born diseases are now uncommon and mostly treatable, and we have an abundance of anything, so nutrition is the only thing that remains when discussing healthy food. What didn't change is the made up theories surrounding food. Despite all our science, we still have a lot of these today, in some for or another.
  • vasco 1mo ago
    Not just nutrition, over the last ~30 years there's also been a philosophical shift globally where many people went from thinking about impact on humans as the only thing to assess, to considering the impact on the wider ecosystems. Today not only we discuss nutritional content we also discuss the externalities to produce those calories.
    • bcjdjsndon 1mo ago
      You're talking about the common misconception that this planets ecology is somehow broken, that humans are supernatural (literally above nature) and that only other humans can fix it. I'm also assuming that you're goodwill for other species ends at insects and bacteria
      • Zarathustra30 1mo ago
        DDT kills both bees and bald eagles. Let's not overuse it, even if we could grow more nutritious food if we did.
      • stirfish 1mo ago
        I hope this never happens, but if one day a cell in your colon maximizes its short-term replication at the expense of the long-term stability of the system it depends on, I hope nobody tells you it's fine because it's "natural."
• hnrprtlpdb 1mo ago
  [dead]
• Tangurena2 1mo ago
  > In thirteenth-century England, Christians were expected to avoid meat every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday during Lent (when eggs and dairy products were also forbidden), Advent and on some saints’ days (or the eves of their feasts) Every person (back then) could observe farm animals had sex. Since no one had seen fish having sex, it was believed that fish spawned spontaneously from rivers/lakes/oceans and therefore were free from the animal version of "original sin". That's why so much effort was put into catching and preserving fish. Source: https://www.amazon.com/Cod-Biography-Fish-Changed-World-ebook/dp/B001QWFY9I/ https://www.amazon.com/Cod-Biography-Fish-Changed-World-eboo... Also history of food: https://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky-ebook/dp/B00BPDN33W/ https://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky-ebo... The author has a fascination with Basques & Basque history. Or maybe they really had a large influence in fishing and trans-Atlantic navigation. And that maybe they discovered the huge cod banks by Newfoundland before John Cabot did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot Medieval people were not stupid. They observed that pickled vegetables preserved the veggies for months. And they observed that people who ate pickled vegetables got scurvy (vitamin C deficiency disease) at a much lower rate. The recipes didn't travel too far, so while sauerkraut and kimchi are both pickled cabbage, with different spices they are wildly different.
  • Anonyneko 1mo ago
    And then there were the barnacle geese that, conveniently for Lent, grew on trees... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose_myth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose_myth
  • user19282 1mo ago
    The fish thing is a carry over from Judaism, which has no such concept of "original sin". I find that a much more convincing explanation.
    • bcjdjsndon 1mo ago
      But his last line was about catching and preserving fish.... Which is the opposite of eating fish. I'm not sure what he was answering
• hnisjafx40 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• decimalenough 1mo ago
  It's fascinating how closely this parallels Chinese traditional medicine, where foods are classified as "heaty" or "cooling" and health conditions can be both caused and treated by an excess of one or the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_food_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_food_therapy
  • deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  • ratelimitsteve 1mo ago
    Ayurvedic medicine is a similar idea from the indian subcontinent. Foods have different medicinal properties like hot/cold, heavy/light, etc and those foods interact with your body type (which itself is a confluence of three factors called dosha that everyone has but in varying ratios) in order to produce certain effects.
  • isityettime 1mo ago
    This is one of the things that makes the contemporary Chinese treatment of TCM as credible so jarring to me. Many people seem to regard it as some unique inheritance of their culture, but in fact it closely resembles many other pre-scientific medical traditions, including in the "West". For me, pseudoscience is like comparative religions: historicizing it and situating it in a context alongside comparable traditions tends to deflate its persuasiveness. (Maybe some of that is down to temperament; I'm sure some people study comparative religions and are impressed by the patterns among them as though they suggest more universal or "deeper" truths.)
    • mekdoonggi 1mo ago
      I think your contemporary "Western" bias is what is jarring you. In fact, the prevalence of these traditional medicine practices gives them credence in my mind. Most people probably don't have my same view, but I don't see these practices as having 'credibility' in the same way as a pharmaceutical with a phase 3 trial and decades of follow ups. But they DO have credibility in the sense that there's a long history of people following this advice and feeling a little better. Maybe it's just placebo or a coincidence, but if it works it doesn't matter. Similarly, contemporary western medicine has all sorts of blind spots, is vulnerable to lobbying/agendas/money, and doesn't offer much in the way of a holistic guide towards the feeling that your diet is aligning with your health goals. This is similar to my view of religion. Any given doctrine isn't factual, but people long for a way to spiritually understand the world, and they aren't wrong for doing so. Science can't and shouldn't provide that.
• throw83930489 1mo ago
  "Medieval Ideas" spanned million square miles and thousand years. Hardly uniform culture.
  • ratelimitsteve 1mo ago
    i don't feel like this ever claimed to be exhaustive or representative of a monolith, only that the ideas they discussed did exist prominently.
• dataviz1000 1mo ago
  > Fish Bad, Sugar Good Florida politics? [0] [0] https://civileats.com/2019/06/25/toxic-red-tide-is-back-in-florida-is-big-sugar-to-blame/ https://civileats.com/2019/06/25/toxic-red-tide-is-back-in-f...
• paimapi 1mo ago
  you have to wonder how much of these habits we see as strange now are just artifacts of 1) a lack of refrigeration (eg fruits rotting produce a much stronger odor than vegetables esp if concentrated under a fruiting tree) and 2) the revolutions we've had in agriculture wrt breeding for taste and nutrition, and the scale at which this is done now. I'm thinking specifically about the ability to quantify, isolate, and breed out the genes that result in high concentrations of phytotoxins (and the accordant pesticides that must be applied now that the natural defenses are gone) undercooked beans contain high levels of phytotoxins, for example, and lead to gastrointestinal distress and sometimes even death. if all plants/vegetables/etc in the past had comparably elevated levels of these toxins, it's not hard to imagine that people in the past were doing their best to pattern recognize and thus avoid things they had little-to-no systemic understanding of which then are extrapolated and grown into popular consciousness by word-of-mouth the obsession with 'health' as measured by the four humors is definitely silly from an empirical POV but the innate drive to not want to shit your guts out after your morning porridge seems like a very normal and valid motivator
• deepsun 1mo ago
  > Fish bad I've read an archeological analysis of a merchant ship rowers-slaves -- every skeleton had perfect teeth. Because slaves were fed only fish, not any bread, bread was a product that merchants traded, while fish was cheap and abundant. So I think "fish bad" opinion was just because fish was cheap and everyone had it.