angelicspaceprince
distressed-honking
Food history has been so sanitized by the demonization of carbs. “Our ancestors only had fruits and veggies they didn’t have all these refined carbs” our ancestors drank beer 25/8 because the water was bad. Our ancestors drizzled honey on shit ever since we knew it existed. We’ve been making bread for our entire recorded history. It’s true that bleached sugars specifically are a new thing but high glycemic carbs are not new at all, we’ve been consuming them for thousands of years
Quick correction bc I see this myth everywhere.
People drank beer & fruit wine 25/8 because it was high in calories and also tasty and pretty cheap/easy to make in bulk.
The alcohol content in beer/wine back then was too low to actually sanitize anything effectively, and beer/wine only lasts for 6 months (usually less) even while still sealed in a cask, due to oxidization. Oxidation turns fermented liquids into vinegar. Wine and beer wasn’t meant for long-term storage.
This is great, because vinegar is the great preserver! VINEGAR is what people used to store their foods long-term, along with SALT and DRYING and SMOKING.
“Pickling” can be done with pure vinegar if you don’t have any expensive salt around, and vinegar can be made by fermenting any fruit or grain with wild yeast! If you’re lucky, you can also get wine/beer treats out of it on the way.
Circling back around: beer/wine was NEVER a replacement for water. Humans have been drinking from ground springs, wells, rainwater, and clear running water since our ape ancestors got the instinct to avoid stagnant pools.
If you didn’t have immediate access to a source of clean water, you didn’t fucking build a town there!
That’s a big reason why, WORLDWIDE, settlements are ALL historically clustered around sources of water like springs, wells, and rivers. (Or utilized rainwater catchment & storage) And why “the town well is poisoned/dried up!” Is a huge and terrible thing that comes up in a ton of old stories. Losing your source of freshwater means everyone has to move somewhere else, or die.
Even in huge cities, you’d be surprised at how sophisticated freshwater delivery systems were in the middle-ages. London had the “great conduit.” - a man-made, underground channel that moved water directly from a freshwater spring to fill a water tank in the Cheapside marketplace, accessible to the public. This conduit was built in 1245.
Mesopotamians in the BRONZE AGE built clay pipes for sewage removal, and other pipes for rain water collection, and wells. In 4,000 BC.
Building Aqueducts to move spring water into towns was first attributed to the Minoans, who lived in 2,000 BC.
Sanskrit texts from 2,000 BC also detail how to purify water you’re not sure about: expose it to Sunlight, filter it through Charcoal, dip a piece of copper in it at least 7 times, and filter it again. (UV treatment kills bacteria, Charcoal catches many poisons and heavy metal, copper is also antibacterial) <- even if they didn’t know what germs were, prehistoric humans were great at recognizing patterns, and noticing when people DIDNT die.
Persians in 700 BC used ‘qanat’, or tunnels dug into hillsides to let gravity move (CLEAN!) groundwater to nearby towns + for agriculture irrigation. Qanats were still the main water supply for the entire Iranian capitol city until about 1933.
The Roman Empire (312 BC) also built aqueducts to move spring and groundwater across miles and miles.
The Incas (1450) built wondrous examples of hydraulic engineering. Their “stairway of fountains” supplied the entire city of Machu Picchu with fresh spring water from a pair of rain-fed springs atop the mountain. The fountain canals could carry about 80 gallons a minute.
Getting clean drinking water was just not an issue for normal people in MOST long-term settlements. They may not understand germ theory, but they knew clean water was important and would kick up a BIG fuss if those water sources were sabotaged.
In many cultures, there were weak beers. They had names like small beer — they were specifically beers that had low alcohol because people knew that beer got you drunk and if you watered it down or re-brewed using previously used hops or barley or whatever, then you would get a beer that wouldn’t get you drunk.
Same with wines: there was get you drunk wine, and there was wind that you could drink a lot of. They were also cordial made by concentrating fruit juice, or historical drinks like Posca.
As far back is the Babylonian Empire they were making pastries out of dates and pistachios and flour.
Previous to that they probably were as well, but we don’t have any written records of it.
Literally as soon as somebody figured out that you could smash some high fat, high carb, high sugar stuffed together and bake it into something resembling cookies, they absolutely did.
So you should go and eat a cookie, because all of your ancestors spent a lot of time arranging the situation of civilisation to make sure that cookies were available. And if you don’t eat one then they’re going to be very sad
And so will you.
Also there’s a degree of Eurocentrism in the “everyone was drinking beer constantly” thing. In premodern Europe, yeah, beer was a very common beverage. This is absolutely not the case in all premodern societies.
Most cultures had some kind of intoxicant, yes, and in many cases an alcoholic beverage would be among the more common options (as @fuckingrecipes says, high in calories, tasty, & easy to make*), but by no means was everyone on the same page with consuming it recreationally or as an everyday part of their diet. Sometimes it was only for special occasions, or for ceremonial purposes, or just not that big a part of their lives.
* Beer is actually one of the more complicated ones, which might be why people used to thinking of it as the Default Booze assume there must have been a stronger driving force than “fun to get drunk” behind alcohol production. Grain is harder to ferment, but you can also make bread with it, in some regions it’s easier to grow in large quantities than fruits & such, and there are some state-building pressures behind mass grain cultivation that would take a while to get into. Fruit wines & ciders are dead easy, mead is practically naturally occurring, and palm wine is basically the instant microwave dinner of alcohol — you can tap a tree in the morning & get drunk off it in the afternoon.
And no, it was never about the water being unsafe to drink. (It’s theoretically possible that in some specific times & places this could have come up, but it’s not Why we have alcohol.) Just logistically, there’s no way to make that work. Even if you’re producing drinks with a high enough alcohol content to actually be sterile, which you probably aren’t without having access to more advanced distillation technology** than you’d need to just purify the water in the first place, you’re not going to have enough of that to replace all the water you’d normally drink. You’d have to dilute it again, and we’re back where we started. And even if you have the resources necessary to devise a system where you produce enough high-alcohol-content beverages to drink nothing else… well, I don’t know if you know this, but liquor is not great for hydration purposes, so you’d better put water back into your diet anyway. As a concept, it just doesn’t work once you think about it.
** Everyone say thank you to medieval Arabic alchemists for figuring out how to distill alcohol. Next time you crack open a bottle of whiskey or suchlike, raise a glass in the general direction of Baghdad and/or pour one out for the House of Wisdom.
