What People Actually Ate

For most people in most places, the diet was one starch, in quantity, with very little else. Bread in northern Europe, rice across much of Asia, maize in Mesoamerica, potatoes in the Andes and later in Ireland: typically seventy to eighty per cent of calories from a single crop, and sometimes considerably more. Meat was occasional, dairy regional, vegetables seasonal and often minor.

The sameness is the point, and it is what modern readers most consistently fail to register. A labourer's bread was not part of his diet; it was his diet. This is why dietary variety turns out to be one of the most reliable markers of income in the historical record, measurable from household accounts centuries before anybody collected nutritional data. An account book listing bread, beer and a little cheese, month after month, is not evidence of unusual poverty. It is evidence of a normal household, and the surprise belongs to the reader rather than to the document.

Staple dependence is reliable in quantity and fragile in nutrition, and catastrophic when the one crop fails. The Irish famine is the standard case and the standard telling is imprecise. Blight struck across Europe and killed a million people in one country. The difference was structural: a population subsisting on a single variety propagated from tubers and therefore nearly genetically identical, on holdings too small to grow anything else, while food continued to be exported under the prevailing policy. The pathogen was the trigger. The monoculture and the land system were the vulnerability.

Sugar is the other case worth following, because its history cannot be told without the political economy that produced it. It went from a spice priced like a medicine to a staple of the working diet in about two centuries, and nothing about European taste changed to produce that. The price fell, and the price fell because of plantation slavery. By the nineteenth century sugar supplied a meaningful share of calories in the British working-class diet, largely delivered in sweetened tea.

While we are correcting things: spices were not used to disguise the taste of spoiled meat. This is a persistent story with no support in the record. Spices were extraordinarily expensive and were used by people wealthy enough to buy fresh meat, for display and for medical reasons under the humoral theory of the day. It survives because it sounds like the kind of thing that would have been true, which is a good general warning.

Fernand Braudel's argument about all of this is the one to take away. Material life (what people ate, what they wore, how far a cart could go before the grain spoiled) changes so slowly that it is nearly invisible in a political narrative, and it sets the limits within which the entire political narrative happens. A state cannot campaign further than its grain can travel, and how far grain travels is a fact about roads and carts rather than about kings. A history told only at the level of events will keep being surprised by constraints it never thought to mention.