• mlg@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    No one before the 1930s had access to such a large breed of chicken lol.

    They probably would have confused this picture with a miniature Turkey.

  • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
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    3 days ago

    Peasants? Even many nobles didn’t eat like that every day.

    People think that the typical nobleman in the Middle Ages ate like King Henry VIII. That isn’t true. Did you know that they determined that at least at a few points in Vlad the Impaler’s life he was basically living on a vegan diet? They ate a hell of a lot of vegetables and grains because meat was still expensive for everyone involved.

    • Lucky_777@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      This. You had a steady diet of vegetables and bread. Maybe eggs if you had chickens and some small bit of land. Those times were harsh as fuck

      • vga@sopuli.xyz
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        2 days ago

        Or our lives are abundant as fuck, which makes everything else look like absolute poverty.

      • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
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        2 days ago

        Also they weren’t guzzling wine and ale at all hours and when they did drink it was usually cut with water or what they called ‘small beer’ and very young wine (which didn’t have time to properly fermented and reach full potency) that had limited alcohol content. Also they did drink water. In the same way that in places in the world where they have limited water treatment facilities they still drink water even if it isn’t the best.

        Again… they weren’t stupid. They might not have had the depth and breadth of modern medical technology on how alcohol affects you, but people knew what it did and they know what addiction is (even if they made it out to be a personal weakness) and how terrible it was.

    • arc99@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Try a ploughmans meal - bread, cheese and pickle. Awesome as a lunch.

      • TimeNaan@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Btw, that “ploughman’s lunch” was created in the 1960s by british politicians. It has nothing to do with medieval times, it’s just meant to evoque that vague feeling.

        • Ginny [they/she]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          3 days ago

          The branding of ploughman’s lunch was invented in the 60s but that same Wikipedia page states it had been a common meal for rural labourers for centuries.

          • arc99@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            The pickle is probably the new aspect. Farm workers have obviously been eating cheese, bread, pasties, cold meats etc. since forever.

            • dermanus@lemmy.ca
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              2 days ago

              Fermenting veggies has been around a long time too. It might not have been a pickled cucumber, but something pickled wouldn’t be unheard of.

        • lovely_reader@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Thank you for this info. I wouldn’t have thought to look into such a thing. It reads to me like it was created by marketers, though, not politicians. It says “the Cheese Bureau, a marketing body affiliated with the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency” created it in the '50s.

    • SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org
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      2 days ago

      The roast chicken is usually not an egg creating machine though.
      They are fairly young male chickens, that have been raised just past their maximum growth rates.

      I guess that wouldn’t have been that much different in medieval times. The difference nowadays is, that we have specialized breeds for egg-laying or meat production vice versa and the respective ‘wrong’ sex of each will just be ‘discarded’ right after hatching.

    • Soulphite@reddthat.com
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      4 days ago

      Potatoes could. The leaves, sprouts, and underground stems (tubers) of potatoes contain a toxic substance called glycoalkaloid. Glycoalkaloids make a potato look green when it’s exposed to light, gets damaged, or ages. Eating potatoes with a high glycoalkaloid content can cause nausea, diarrhea, confusion, headaches, and death.

      Also, the sentient mutant vegetables on Atrack of the Killer Tomatoes will definitely want to do harm toward OP.

    • Nosavingthrow@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Oh yeah? Do you think a bit of fiber finally moving all that trapped poop is harmless? We don’t all have guts of steel like SOMEBODY.

    • YellowParenti@lemmy.wtf
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      4 days ago

      When I was on a strict diet, I actually bought 5 dollar rotisserie chicken and made a stir fry of sorts with broccoli, spinach, carrots, peas. I’d skip breakfast just to be able to have a big dinner and be satisfied going to bed. I’d try to get close to 120g of protein a day, (I’d eat half a chicken a day) and technically as much veg as I could stomach. I figure I was eating around 1500 calories a day. It worked but it was boring.

      • stray@pawb.social
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        4 days ago

        Wheat grain is strictly a vegetable, being an edible plant part. But people usually use the word to refer to a socially-constructed category which is completely feels-based. Membership tends to be determined by flavor profile, nutrition content, and whether the given part falls into another popular sub-category (such as fruit or nuts). This is why fruits like the tomato and pumpkin are usually sorted as vegetables separately from fruits with generally sweeter flavors like the banana or orange.

        Vegetables like grains, legumes, and certain tubers will often be grouped together as “carbs” due to their high carbohydrate content which distinguishes them from low-calorie, high-fiber vegetables like spinach or broccoli.

      • CannedYeet@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        Wheat is a plant. If wheat was a vegetable we wouldn’t need the distinction between plant and vegetable.

        • howrar@lemmy.ca
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          3 days ago

          There are parts of plants that aren’t edible. One definition of vegetable is the edible part of a plant.

  • manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    Even in the 1960s eating a whole chicken would have been a luxury, this isn’t peasant food, that’s the gout inducing diet of a king

      • Faildini@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        I used to work at Boston Market, and there were definitely customers that would order a whole chicken just for themselves and eat it. Not every day or anything, but it wasn’t rare enough to raise eyebrows either.

    • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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      4 days ago

      King Richard I was once captured for ransom while traveling undercover trough Austria.

      His cover was blown specifically because he tried ordering a roast chicken.

      There are a few variations of the details in this story though, a peasant could definitely have owned a chicken and eaten it when it died but it was probably way more valuable to sell it.

    • Denjin@feddit.uk
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      4 days ago

      Doubtful, most common meal for peasants would have been a sort of stew of vegetables and oats called pottage.

      A whole chicken would have been prohibitively expensive either to purchase or in lost money from sale at market, same for pork or beef.

      Fish though would be plentiful and cheap and a valuable source of protein. Oysters were considered peasant food until pretty much the 20th century.

      Wheat bread similarly would have been a rare luxury, especially made from refined white flour, rye and buckwheat, roughly ground would be far more common.

    • mech@feddit.org
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      3 days ago

      Depends on time and place, of course. Peasants in the late medieval period in England ate more meat than we do today.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      A roasted bird? Why not? Y’all are making assumptions that this is a chicken and the peasant a small farmer but why not a traveling mime trapping pigeons from the square?

  • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Soft white bread? Nobody but rich upper class people could afford soft white bread until well past the industrial revolution.

    That’s also a pretty large roasted bird that’s being eaten in complete absence of stew.

  • john_t@piefed.ee
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    4 days ago

    “What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent chicken meal?”, “Get your hand off my baguette!”

  • timestatic@feddit.org
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    4 days ago

    A medieval peasant on a celebration day. I doubt they could eat a whole as chicken every day

    • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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      4 days ago

      Depends on which era honestly. The medieval period lasted for nearly a thousand years and could very about as much as one would expect, so for example a very well off peasant during the high medieval period maybe could have eaten a whole ass chicken for a while at least. Probably wouldn’t have though, at least not without turning it into soup or a sandwich equivalent.

    • DrivebyHaiku@lemmy.ca
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      4 days ago

      Yeah communally like a couple times a year if lucky and most likely spent hens or cockrels not this monstrosity of a broiler meat bred bird.