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.
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.
> "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.
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.
> 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.
Outside of monasteries, the intersection of men who were literate and men who were directly involved in food production was tiny.
Farming men weren’t cooking their midday meal out in the fields; they took some bread and maybe some protein out with them at the start of their working day.
> Outside of monasteries, the intersection of men who were literate and men who were directly involved in food production was tiny
Higher than that. While the educated men likely did not do much farm labor (depending on the local details they may have been out there during harvest when all hands were needed), they had to ensure there were enough slaves to do that. Most of them were also well aware that they were one bad harvest from starvation and so paid attention to food production.
> Farming men weren’t cooking their midday meal out in the fields; they took some bread and maybe some protein out with them at the start of their working day.
That depends on the culture. The famous Spanish dish Paella was men cooking in the fields.
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
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, and which those that came after them chose to bother preserving.
> 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.
Womem were in the fields. And kids too. Generally men were doing physically most demanding work, but not all of it is like that.
And people working in the fields would also take the food that does not necessitate cooking with them. And kids were tasked to bring food to people working in fields when necessary.
You cant "fend for yourself" in the fields and also do the fields work.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
> "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-cli...
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.
> 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.
Outside of monasteries, the intersection of men who were literate and men who were directly involved in food production was tiny.
Farming men weren’t cooking their midday meal out in the fields; they took some bread and maybe some protein out with them at the start of their working day.
> Outside of monasteries, the intersection of men who were literate and men who were directly involved in food production was tiny
Higher than that. While the educated men likely did not do much farm labor (depending on the local details they may have been out there during harvest when all hands were needed), they had to ensure there were enough slaves to do that. Most of them were also well aware that they were one bad harvest from starvation and so paid attention to food production.
> Farming men weren’t cooking their midday meal out in the fields; they took some bread and maybe some protein out with them at the start of their working day.
That depends on the culture. The famous Spanish dish Paella was men cooking in the fields.
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
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, and which those that came after them chose to bother preserving.
True, but farming was still somewhat visible to many of the elite. The bible (old testament) has a number of farmers who were also elite.
> 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.
Womem were in the fields. And kids too. Generally men were doing physically most demanding work, but not all of it is like that.
And people working in the fields would also take the food that does not necessitate cooking with them. And kids were tasked to bring food to people working in fields when necessary.
You cant "fend for yourself" in the fields and also do the fields work.
> lettuce was dangerous because it was so cold and moist
Joke's on us, I guess.
https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investi...
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.
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?
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.
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.
Considering how quickly poultry and fish go bad, they weren't entirely wrong.
You can base an entire food brand on that article. The Tik Tok channel alone would be massive.
Paleo diets are passé. The new fad diet is medieval. And frankly the science isn't any worse.
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?
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
If you recognize something is bad but lack the knowledge to explain it, it isn't completely crazy to invent a taboo against it.
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.