Life Was A Paradise…
This story on the BBC about Medieval diet is one of my favorite story types, a nanny lecture that completely misses the point. The medieval diet and exercise regime was what it was because they had no choice about it at all. They lived hard, short lives because their society didn’t support enough excess capacity to give them any choice at all, you ate what you had access to which wasn’t much at all. We do eat too much crap food and we don’t exercise enough but pining for the life of middle ages peasant is pretty stupid. They died young and their bodies were broken by the time they get middle age. This isn’t an ideal I want people trying to live up to.
December 19th, 2007 at 4:32 am
“However, he did acknowledge that people today did have one advantage over their ancestors when it came to staying alive.” One? Um… one? How big of him to acknowledge the one advantage we have.
I’m with you on this one! It doesn’t take a historian to see the faults in this one.
Cue Richard Attenborough’s voiceover “…Until Man Came.”