When people look at a medieval ration card, they tend to choose the best choices of the era. Research suggests, however, that the diets of ordinary people and wealthier city dwellers differed significantly, says Lembi Lõugas, a senior researcher at Tallinn University’s Institute of Archaeology.
“Today our idea of medieval food is a bit idealized, that is, we have taken the best pieces of the Middle Ages and brought them together in one setting and period. In reality, festive meals were very rare, they were not an everyday thing. ” “The simplest people probably didn’t have access to the food they offered,” Lõugas explained in “Attention! This is science.”
For example, lentils and meat may have been locally sourced, but cucumbers with various spices were imported. The latter were neither accessible nor affordable for ordinary people. “Our research team wanted to know more precisely what Estonian farmers ate and what richer city dwellers ate. To see since when the local population of Estonia adopted this foreign food,” added the senior researcher.
To have a better overview, Lõugas and his colleagues put together written sources, results obtained from studying the taxonomy of bone remains and the related content of elemental variants present in bone collagen as one of the most important components.
“After all, during his life, a person eats the food that his body is made of, including bones. The isotope content of chemical elements in bone collagen is the component we analyzed,” Lõugas explained. Specifically, he and his colleagues focused on carbon, nitrogen and sulfur, which together say something about where the food consumed during a person’s life comes from. It can take four months to extract collagen from a single piece of bone and determine its isotopes.
Based on studies of lunar collagen, scientists were able to state that in the Middle Ages the diet of urban and rural populations differed much more than today. The city fathers ate more meat, such as pork, goat, beef, or local fish, than the common people. The poorer population may have had more agricultural products and could wipe their mouths with delicacies imported from distant lands. It was purely the domain of the rich.
“If we go into a little more detail, it is quite interesting to know whether local food was consumed in ancient times, how large seafood and sea fish were and whether there were only vegetarians in the population. They also existed in history This type of knowledge can also be interesting for nutritionists,” he added. In the chin.
2024-01-11 10:54:00
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