Welcome to eating the past. This is Tammy Proctor, and while we've been talking about spicy foods, I wanted to bring to your attention some recent research that I think is really interesting about how people in the past ate.
So this is research that was conducted by a number of scholars. The lead scholar's name is Alice Rose. There was an article published in "Antiquity" which is a journal that collects this kind of information, and it's from a project at the University of Cambridge in the UK called "after the plague."
The research, and I'm going to try to describe this in historian terms rather than in scientist terms. The research basically looks at bones, skeletons, and it analyzes them to try to figure out what kind of isotopes or minerals, I guess, are in the bones. And I think they look particularly at the collagen in the bones, that that's where they can get this rich information.
This is something that I've seen in museums in recent years, especially in places where they found skeletons that are preserved in peat bog or ships that they've raised that had skeletons on them. So this is something that they do where they look at dietary protein through these bones.
And so this particular project that I think is really interesting is in Cambridge in the UK. And what they did was they looked at four different kinds of burial sites.
So one cemetery that was a parrish cemetery in town. One was associated more with rural areas. One from an Augustinian friary. So here you can thank medieval wealthy.
So they expected to find a more robust diet there. And then the fourth one was a charity hospital for the poor, which probably included people who stayed there for a short time, long time that there's a cemetery associated with the hospital, but it could have also maybe had some staff or other people associated with the hospital buried there.
So they took all of these together. They did kind of a cross section then of these bones and they had a pretty good sample. It's more than 200 individual samples that they looked at. First, I think, and probably not entirely surprising is that there were big differences in terms of diet based on social position.
So the friars, they were eating more animal protein, especially meat and fish. They obviously had access to more resources food wise, than many other people in the region. The townspeople, for instance, had less of that.
Another finding was that there were differences between the urban and the rural populations. The townspeople had some access to animal and marine protein but the rural areas seem to have a little less. I don't know if that's because they're relying more on stuff that they grew or if it has to do with, again, poverty, social status, those issues.
Another thing that they found that was pretty interesting is that the division is social position, not sex. So men and women in the town had pretty similar dietary profiles. The difference was really in whether they were in the poor Charity Hospital or whether they were living in town where they had access to more food.
The other thing that the scientists make clear is that these are patterns that they're studying. So they don't really know exactly what people were eating what foods, but it does show that there were meaningful differences in access to food based on your social status. And ordinary people did have what seemed to be nutritionally adequate diets, much more so compared to the really poor who showed up as having more nutritional defects.
So I think it's important, because as we try to reconstruct the medieval world, many historians have often wondered, you know, what kind of access to food there was based on your position in society and where you were living.
So that's my little diversion into medieval history.
For more information about spicy foods, please join us on Sunday, right before the splendid table at noon on your UPR station.