Summary: The realities of life in preindustrial England reveal a world teeming with physical discomforts, social cruelty, and environmental hazards unimaginable to modern sensibilities. England from 1600 to 1770 was plagued by disease, primitive hygiene, adulterated food, and oppressive punishments. Far from the romanticized notions of simpler times, living in this early modern time and place often meant enduring relentless hardship and indignity.

British historian Emily Cockayne’s Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England, 1600–1770 provides a window into the lives of ordinary people in the preindustrial and early industrial era. A “social history,” the book conveys how the world sounded, smelled, felt, and tasted—a horror show beyond the comprehension of most modern people. The chapters bear titles such as “Itchy,” “Mouldy,” “Grotty,” “Dirty,” and “Gloomy.”

A preindustrial person transported to the present day would be amazed by the current prevalence of relatively smooth, clear skin enabled by better general health in addition to the widespread use of sunscreen, moisturizers, and all manner of modern beauty treatments. In the past, frequent illnesses left victims permanently marked. To be “Pock-broken” or “pock-freckled” was a common descriptor. Skin was often directly disfigured by diseases and further damaged by how fleas and then-common medical conditions caused compulsive scratching. “Fleas would have been a common feature of institutions and inns, as well as domestic settings,” proliferating in crammed households, cities, and seaports. A Dutch traveler named William Schellinks (1623–1678) found the fleas in one English inn so “aggressive” that he opted to sleep on a hard bench rather than the provided bed. But fleas were far from the sole culprit. “Many conditions would have caused itching, including eczema, impetigo, ‘psorophthalmy’ (eyebrow dandruff), scabies, chilblains, chapped and rough skin, tetters’ (spots and sores), ‘black morphew’ (leprous or scurvy skin) and ringworm. Few citizens [of Britain] enjoyed smooth unblemished skin.”

If you could visit the past, you would be shocked at the commonness not just of pockmarks but also of oozing open sores. “Venereal disease was the secret epidemic that blighted the entire period,” resulting in such outward signs as “weeping sores on the lips” and “pocky” countenances. Many other diseases also produced wounds that festered and exuded foul discharges on the faces of everyday people. “In this pre-antibiotic era, skin eruptions in the forms of bulging pustules, lesions, acne and gout-induced ulcers could all have become infected, causing chronic wounds.” Such skin problems affected all social classes. “In 1761, as an Oxford undergraduate, the parson-in-waiting James Woodforde . . . was plagued by a ‘bad Boyle on my Eye-brow’. This boil reappeared the following year, to be joined by a stye among his lower right eyelashes.”

With so many faces covered in scars, as well as boils and sores emitting blood and infected pus, it is an understatement to say the people of the past were in desperate need of skincare. Sadly, their primitive skincare and makeup regimens made matters even worse. “Caustic and toxic ingredients lurked in many ready-made and home-mixed cosmetics and toiletries. Eliza Smith’s cure for pimples included brimstone (sulphur). Johann Jacob Wecker suggested the use of arsenic and ‘Dogs-turd’ as ingredients for ointments to ‘make the nails fall’. The Duchess of Newcastle warned that the mercury in some cosmetics could cause consumption and oedema. Indeed, some preparations were so toxic that they could ‘take away both the Life and Youth of a Face, which is the greatest Beauty.’ The Countess of Coventry was said to have died from toxic properties in her cosmetics.” That countess, Maria Coventry née Gunning (1732–1760), died at age 27, likely of lead poisoning, as lead was a common ingredient in skin-whitening makeup at the time, despite lead’s propensity to make its wearers ill (or, in Maria’s case, deceased).

Even nonlethal makeup was of far poorer quality than today’s cosmetics, frequently dissolving and dripping. Women “shunned hot places for fear of melting visages.” Even royalty, with access to the best cosmetics of the era, fell victim to this tendency of makeup to drip. One observer remarked in his diary after seeing the queen of England at a banquet in 1662 that “her make-up was running down her sweaty face.”

The state of clothing for the masses contributed to skin and health problems. The truly poor bought used garments. “Poorer citizens rarely bought new items of clothing, but made do with second-, third- and fourth-hand clothes. . . . By the time they reached the poorest members of society, garments would be smutted, food-stained, sweat-ridden, pissburnt and might shine with grease. . . . Clothes in such a state would be hard, unyielding and smelly.”

“The second-hand market was a thriving one” in early modern London. “Some specialised in old shoes, or even old boots. [The Dutch-born artist] Marcellus Laroon included an image of a trader who exchanged brooms for casto-off shoes . . . in his Cryes of London (1688). . . . A high demand for second-hand clothing meant that garments constituted a considerable proportion of property that was stolen. Thomas Sevan was apprehended . . . wearing three stolen shirts in 1724. He had left his old ragged shirt behind at the scene of the crime. Elizabeth Pepys’s new farandine waistcoat was snatched from her lap as she sat in traffic in Cheapside. On Easter Monday 1732 John Elliott became the victim of highway robbers who relieved him of his hat, wig, waistcoat and shoes. . . . No item of clothing was immune from theft—even odd shoes and bundles of dirty washing were lifted.”

“Clothes could be taken to a botcher, or a botching tailor, for patching and repair. . . . Old shoes were rejuvenated or modified by cobblers, or ‘translators.’ The subsequent wearers of shoes would have worked their feet into spaces stretched to fit a foreign shape, which might have caused blisters, bunions and corns. . . . Partial unstitching and ‘turning’—the inner parts becoming the new exterior—could prolong the life of coats and other garments. Even the rich eked out the life of their favourite garments by turning, dyeing and scouring. . . . However, clothes could only be refashioned a limited number of times before they became napless, threadbare and tattered. If enough good fabric remained, this could be reused to make a smaller item of clothing, a garment for a child, or a cloth cap. . . . Tired garments were passed down to apprentices or servants.”

The condition of teeth was also disturbingly poor. “Queen Elizabeth sported black teeth. Emetics were popular cure-alls, and these would have hastened tooth decay through the acidic erosion of the enamel. Archaeological surveys suggest that the majority of early modern adults suffered tooth decay.” While they did not meet with much success, the people of the past certainly attempted to keep their teeth from rotting. “There was an array of dentifrice powders and cures on the market. Although most would have had little or no effect on cavities or diseased gums, some of these powders and recipes would have carried away some dirt and plaque from teeth. Powders were concocted from cuttlefish, cream of tartar and sal amoniack (ammonium chloride). These abrasive substances could be rubbed on” teeth, and some recommended “hard rubbing with a dry cloth or sage leaf” to cleanse teeth. The writer Thomas Tryon (1634–1703) recommended swishing river water as a mouthwash. Needless to say, such routines were insufficient. “A lack of adequate tooth cleansing and an inappropriate diet led to bad breath and also caused tooth decay.” Missing teeth were common. “A character in an eighteenth-century play bemoaned the poor dental state of London’s women” by claiming that “not one in ten has a Tooth left.” When those suffering from toothaches sought dental care, what passed for dentistry at the time could make matters even worse. Consider the unfortunate case of the English lawyer and politician Dudley Ryder (1691–1756). “After spending a month in 1715 chewing on just one side of his mouth to avoid the pain of a severely decayed tooth, Dudley Ryder finally summoned up the courage to have it drawn. In the process, a little of his jaw was broken off, but he rallied, claiming it didn’t hurt. Much. By the mid-eighteenth century wealthier citizens would have the option of trying out a transplant, using teeth from a paid donor.”

Tooth and skin problems were visible, but internal ailments that were less apparent also plagued our ancestors. One of the many negative health effects of animals crowding the cities was that parasites from the creatures often spread to humans. “The abundance of dogs and pigs on the city streets provided the perfect breeding ground for a variety of intestinal parasites, many of which wormed their way into humans. Eliza Smith asserted that ‘vast numbers’ were infested. Many bottoms would have itched with discomfort thanks to the presence of thread and tape worms in the digestive system. According to the numerous contemporary adverts, worms created a myriad of physical discomforts, including ‘pinching Pain in the Belly, when hungry, a stinking Breath’, vomiting, nightmares, pallidness, fever and teeth gnashing.” The animals caused other problems as well. “Neighbours near to houses in which beasts were kept or slaughtered would have endured stench and noise.” For example, “those living near Lewis Smart’s huge piggery on London’s Tottenham Court Road described how servants fell sick and resigned on account of the smell, which ‘Drive thro’ the walls of the houses.’ Visitors to the house opposite were forced to hold their noses, and one neighbour explained how the fumes dirtied newly laundered linen and tarnished plate.”

The people of the past often went hungry. “Recording a high rate of corn spoilage in 1693, due to a wet summer season, [the English antiquary] Anthony Wood noted that scarcity pushed prices out of the pockets of the poor, who were forced to ‘eat turnips instead of bread’. During this dearth [the writer] Thomas Tryon outlined a diet for a person on a budget of twopence per day. The recipes are uniformly bland: flour, water, milk and peas, all boiled to differing consistencies.”

Food often spoiled during transport to the market. “Eggs that came to London from Scotland or Ireland were often rotten by the time they arrived.” Food was often adulterated, and some degree of adulteration was considered unavoidable. Malt was only deemed unacceptable if it contained “half a peck of dust or more” per quarter. “Butchers would disguise stale slaughtered birds. [A contemporary account] warns of one such operator who greased the skin and dredged on a fine powder to make the bird strike ‘a fine Colour.’” Butter was frequently adulterated with “tallow and pig’s lard.” “Some fishmongers coated gills with fresh blood, as red gills indicated a recent netting,” to misrepresent stale fish to the unwary buyer. Fish were often wormy and if not cooked thoroughly remained so at the time of serving. The English statesman Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) once noted his disgust at the sight of a sturgeon dish upon which he observed “very many little worms creeping.”

Bread, the mainstay of most diets, was not immune to contamination. “Some loaves were deliberately adulterated with stones and other items to bulk them up.” In 1642, an unscrupulous Liverpool woman named Alice Gallaway “tried to sell a white loaf that contained a stone, to make up its weight. This sort of practice would have been widespread—the baker could claim that the stone had not been removed in milling, and blamed the miller. Stone, grit and other unwelcome contaminants would have posed dangers to the teeth of the unwary.” Millers also engaged in such unethical behavior as adding “beanmeal, chalk, animal bones and slaked lime” to disguise musty flour. Perhaps it should be no surprise then that London bread was described in 1771 as “a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution.”

There are even accounts of human remains being added to food for sale, resulting in unknowing cannibalism on the part of the buyer. The author of the 1757 public health treatise Poison Detected claimed, “The charnel houses of the dead are raked to add filthiness to the food of the living.” The squalid state of the marketplace further exposed food to pollution or contamination. “The market stalls, and the streets on which they stood, were frequently described as being filthy and strewn with rotting debris.” Flies and other insects swarmed each market. “Hanging meats were vulnerable to attack by hopper-fly, and if they got too warm they would rust and spoil.” The smoke of London’s chimneys was said to fill the air and “so Mummife, drye up, wast and burn [hanging meat in the marketplace], that it suddainly crumbles away, consumes and comes to nothing.”

The population was so accustomed to foul-smelling meat that “in 1736 a bundle of rags that concealed a suffocated newborn baby was mistaken for a joint of meat by its stinking smell.” Between the bugs, the smoke, and the dirt, few groceries reached customers unscathed. One 18th-century writer complained of “pallid contaminated mash, which they call strawberries; soiled and tossed by greasy paws through twenty baskets crusted with dirt.” The state of the marketplace even inspired deprecating lyrics, such as these from 1715, “As thick as Butchers Stalls with Fly-blows [where] every blue-ars’d Insect rambles.” “As the market day progressed, perishables . . . were more likely to be fly-blown or decayed.” Those undesirable leftovers unsold at the end of the market day were often later hawked by street vendors. A letter in The Spectator in 1712 complained that everything sold by such vendors was “perished or putrified.” Recipes took into account the poor quality of available ingredients. “Imparting some dubious tips for restoring rotting larder supplies, [cookbook author] Hannah Glasse’s strategy ‘to save Potted Birds, that begin to be bad’ (indeed, those which ‘smell so bad, that no body [can] . . . bear the Smell for the Rankness of the Butter’) involved dunking the birds in boiling water for thirty seconds, and then merely retopping with new butter.”

Yet those shopping at the marketplace with all its terrors were relatively fortunate compared to others. Broken victuals, the remnants and scrapings from the more affluent plates, were a perk of service for some servants, and the saviour of many paupers.” One account from 1709 tells of a woman reduced to living off “a Mouldy Cryst [crust] and a Cucumber” while breastfeeding, an activity that greatly increases caloric needs. Desperation sometimes resulted in swallowing nonfood objects, such as wax, to ease hunger pangs. “Witnesses reported that a young London servant girl was so hungry in 1766 that she ate cabbage leaves and candles.” She was far from the first person to use candle wax as a condiment. “The underfed spread butter thickly on bread (this was necessary to facilitate swallowing dark or stale bread). Cheap butter was poor grade, akin to grease . . . a ‘tallowy rancid mass’ made of candle ends and kitchen grease was the worst type” of concoction to pass under the name of butter. Another account of hunger from 1756 relates how a starving woman felt “obliged to eat the cabbage stalks off the dunghill.”

The people of the past also had good reason to wonder whether their homes would collapse around them. “A proverb warned that ‘old buildings may fall in a moment’. So familiar was the sound of collapsing masonry that in 1688 Randle Holme included ‘a crash, a noise proceeding from a breach of a house or wall’ in a list of only nine descriptive sentences to illustrate the ‘Sense of Hearing’. Portmeadow House in Oxford collapsed in the early seventeenth century. Among the casualties recorded in the Bills of Mortality for 1664 was one hapless soul killed by a falling house in St Mary’s Whitechapel . . . Dr Johnson described London of the 1730s as a place where ‘falling Houses thunder on your Head.’ . . . In the 1740s, ‘Props to Houses’ appeared among a list of common items hindering free passage along the pavement in London. A German visitor wondered if he should go into the street in 1775 during a violent storm, ‘lest the house should fall in, which is no rare occurrence in London.’” “Thomas Atwood, a Bath plumber and property developer, died in 1775 when the floor of an old house gave way.” Regulations sometimes made matters worse, preventing the tearing down of homes on the verge of collapse. One account notes that homes in disrepair became “the rendezvous of thieves; and at last . . . fall of themselves, to the great distress of whole neighborhoods, and sometimes to bury passengers in their ruins.” Windy days could knock down homes. “Gales swept [London] in 1690, leaving ‘very many houses shattered, chimneys blowne down.’”

Inside, homes were often filled with smoke from fireplaces. “With open fires providing most of the heating, filthy discharges of soot and smut clung to interiors.” Even with regular chimney sweepings, clogged chimney pots and soot deluges could and did occur. One writer railed against the “pernicious smoke . . . superinducing a sooty Crust or furr upon all that it lights, spoyling the moveables, tarnishing the Plate, Gildings and Furniture, and Corroding the very Iron-bars and hardest stone with those piercing and acrimonious Spirits which accompany its Sulphur.” Interior smoke disturbed the air of the humblest homes and the grandest palaces alike. The German consul Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach (1683–1734) complained that the Painted Chamber of London’s Westminster Hall could “scarce be seen for the smoke” that filled the interior; in the Upper Chamber he similarly noted that the tapestries were “so wretched and tarnished with smoke that neither gold nor silver, colours or figures can be recognized.”

“Householders struggled to contain infestations of vermin.” This was a problem even in well-off homes. Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary his multiyear struggle with mice, which “scampered across his desk” with abandon despite his purchase of a cat and deployment of mousetraps. “In 1756 Harrop’s Manchester Mercury ran an advert for a book detailing how to rid houses of all manner of vermin,” including adders, ants, badgers, birds, caterpillars, earwigs, flies, fish, fleas, foxes, frogs, gnats, lice, mice, moles, otters, polecats, rabbits, rats, snakes, scorpions (an invasive species of which had entered England via Italian masonry shipments), snails, spiders, toads, wasps, weasels, and worms.

As if that wasn’t enough to keep people up at night, nighttime was loud. Crying babies and the moaning of the hungry, ill, and dying echoed in the night, as well as the pained wails of women suffering through domestic violence. In London, in 1595, a law was passed to prevent men from beating their wives after 9 p.m. The legislation was not prompted by concern for the wives (after all, wife-beating was generally accepted as normal and morally unproblematic) but by consideration for neighbors trying to sleep through the noise. The law read in part: “No man shall after the houre of nine at the Night, keepe any rule whereby any such suddaine out-cry be made in the still of the Night, as making any affray, or beating hys Wife, or servant.” A similar law forbade smiths from using their hammers “after the houre of nyne in the night, nore afore the houre of four in the Morninge.”

The book gives insight into a far crueler and more violent society. Legal punishments could be grotesque and sadistic. For example, in 1611, a woman who had conducted “lewd acts . . . was punished by the Westminster burgesses by being stripped naked from the waist upwards, fastened to a cart, and whipped through the streets on a cold December day.” Women deemed “scolds” were often publicly humiliated in ritual fashion. “Ducking stools or cuckstools were equipment for punishing scolds and were items of town furniture [and] were still used as a deterrent in the eighteenth century. Ducking was a rite of humiliation intended to put the woman in her place and to teach her a lesson.” Many towns took pride in the maintenance of their ducking stools, and sometimes a device with a similar rationale called a “scold’s bridle,” an iron muzzle that enclosed the head and compressed the tongue to silence the unfortunate wearer.

“Across the country [of England] the civic authorities ensured that their cuckstools were functioning. In 1603 the Southampton authorities complained that ‘the Cuckinge stoole on the Towne ditches is all broken’ and expressed their desire for a new one, to ‘punish the manifold number of scoldinge woemen that be in this Towne’. The following year they wondered whether a stool-on-wheels might be invented. This could be carried from dore to dore as the scolde shall inhabit’. This mobile stool would, it was explained, be ‘a great ease to mr mayor . . . whoe is daylie troubled w[i]th suche brawles’. The Oxford Council erected a cuck stool at the Castle Mills in 1647. The Manchester stool was set up in 1602 ‘for the punyshement of Lewde Wemen and Scoldes . . . six scolds were immersed in 1627. A decade later the town added a scold’s bridle to their armoury of reform. A new ducking chair was erected in ‘the usual place’ in 1738. Even as late as 1770 a knot and bridle hung from the door of the stationers, near the Dark Entry in the Market Place ‘as a terror to the scolding huxter-women.’”

Outhouses doubled as dumping grounds for victims of infanticide with shocking frequency. “Much of what we know about London’s privies and houses of ease comes from unpleasant witness statements concerning gruesome discoveries of infants’ corpses found among the filth. In the trial of Mercy Hornby for killing her newborn daughter we find details of the privy into which the child was cast. Newly constructed in the 1730s, it was six foot deep, with just over three feet of soil at the time of the incident.”

And that is only a small slice of the manifold horrors detailed in Cockayne’s book, where practically every page provides fresh fodder for nightmares.

“Americans who think of petrified hot dogs, frozen burritos and salty snacks when they imagine getting food at a gas station or truck stop may be pleasantly surprised during their next road trip: U.S. convenience stores are offering them more and better — though not necessarily healthier — choices.

From 7-Eleven to regional chains like QuikTrip, the operators of c-stores, as they’re known in the trade, are looking overseas for grab-and-go inspiration, adding sit-down seating at some locations, expanding their coffee menus to rival Starbucks and experimenting with made-to-order meals for busy families.

The moves are happening as convenience stores seek ways to offset slowing sales of cigarettes, maps and soft drinks. By tempting customers’ palates with fresh deli sandwiches and build-your-own burgers, the humble food marts want to become an alternative to fast-food restaurants for busy Americans who crave easy, interesting and less expensive eating options.”

From Associated Press.

Summary: Tom Standage’s book explores how history’s major events and periods are reflected in the history of food, from the agricultural revolution to the spice trade of globalization. The book reveals the harsh realities of pre-industrial food production and the deadly consequences of misguided beliefs about food. It recounts how past societies waged wars and committed atrocities in the name of different foods, and how food has had profound historical influence over major events.

Tom Standage’s An Edible History of Humanity traces how food impacted major world events in different eras, from the agricultural revolution to the spice trade’s role in early globalization. The book covers the industrial and post-industrial eras with harrowing descriptions of the horrific famines wrought by communism’s price controls and collectivization of agriculture. Its insights into the pre-industrial age are also noteworthy.

Standage reminds the reader that food is a product of innovation and progress, saying that “a cultivated field of maize, or any other crop, is as man-made as a microchip” and that the barely edible wild ancestors of today’s foods were nothing like their modern counterparts. The book also reveals that many foods of the past looked less appetizing and tasted worse. Consider the carrot. “Carrots were originally white and purple, and the sweeter orange variety was created by Dutch horticulturalists in the sixteenth century as a tribute to William I, Prince of Orange.” And that is not the only royal anecdote in the book. In the late 17th century, pineapples were known as “the fruit of kings” in Europe because they were so rare; King Charles II of England even posed for a painting with a pineapple and held a feast in which he “cut the fruit up himself and offered pieces of it from his own plate. This might sound like a gesture of humility, but was really a demonstration of his power: only a king could offer his guests pineapple.”

An Edible History also reminds the reader that poverty was the default throughout much of history, quoting a Mesopotamian proverb from around 2,000 BC that notes, “Wealth is hard to come by, but poverty is always at hand.” In ancient Uruk, according to Standage, “80 percent of the population were farmers.” In nonindustrialized corners of the modern world, not much has changed on that front. “In poor countries such as Rwanda, the proportion of the population involved in agriculture is still more than 80 percent—as it was in Uruk 5,500 years ago.”

The vast majority of people in pre-industrial societies the world over labored on farms, and the backbreaking work took a heavy toll on their bodies. Archeology reveals that historically in agricultural societies, “female skeletons often display evidence of arthritic joints and deformities of the toes, knees, and lower back, all of which are associated with the daily use of a saddle kern to grind grain.”

The book describes how difficult life was for agricultural workers, once the greater part of humanity. Many people viewed the ceaseless agricultural labor that defined their lives as a form of divine punishment: Standage quotes a verse in the biblical Book of Genesis that reads, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.” In some cultures, the painful struggle to produce food from the earth was likened to fighting a war. “For the Incas, agriculture was closely linked to warfare: The earth was defeated, as if in battle, by the plow. So the harvest ceremony was carried out by young noblemen as part of their initiation as warriors, and they sang a haylli [a military victory chant] as they harvested the maize to celebrate their victory over the earth.”

Sometimes, local beliefs connected to food could prove lethal. The Aztecs thought the “Earth Mother was nourished by human blood . . . and the crops would only grow if she was given enough of it” in the form of innumerable human sacrifices. “Sacrificial victims were referred to as ‘tortillas for the gods.’” The Incas also practiced human sacrifice. “After subjugating a new region, the Incas sacrificed its most beautiful people.”

Other bizarre beliefs related to food are detailed in the book. “Herodotus, the Greek writer of the fifth century B.C. known as the ‘father of history,’ explained that gathering cassia, a form of cinnamon, involved donning a full-body suit made from the hides of oxen, covering everything but the eyes. Only then would the wearer be protected from the ‘winged creatures like bats [which] have to be kept from attacking the men’s eyes when they are cutting the cassia.’” Theophrastus, another ancient Greek philosopher, believed cinnamon “was guarded by deadly snakes” and that “the only safe way to collect it was . . . to leave a third of the harvest behind as a gift to the sun, which would cause the offering to burst into flames.’” The Roman writer Tacitus worried about “spendthrift table luxuries,” such as spices now considered unremarkable. The book examines how the acquisition of what are today ordinary spices that can be purchased for a few dollars at any grocery store once inspired wars, including wars of conquest and destructive battles over trading rights. “After the year 1500 there was no pepper to be had at Calicut that was not dyed red with blood,” the author quotes Voltaire as quipping in 1756.

The book describes how in the quest for spices, often “violence was used arbitrarily and unsparingly.” For example, when the Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama arrived in India, he “arbitrarily burned and bombarded towns on the coast in order to force key ports to [trade spices to Portugal rather than rival Muslim merchants] and his men also sank and looted Muslim and local vessels, on one occasion using prisoners for crossbow practice; the hands, noses, and ears of the remaining prisoners were cut off and sent ashore.” This violence was over pepper, something that is now inexpensive and thoroughly unremarkable. The quest to attain nutmeg, meanwhile, led the Dutch East India Company, or Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), to commit human rights abuses in the Banda Islands: “Villages were burned down and the inhabitants were killed, chased off, or sold into slavery. The village chiefs were tortured and then beheaded by the VOC’s samurai mercenaries, brought in from Japan.” Again, that was over nutmeg. As the book notes: “Today most people walk past the spices in the supermarket, arrayed on shelves in small glass bottles, without a second thought.” It can be hard to imagine, but people once killed and died to obtain the likes of pepper and nutmeg.

An Edible History’s discussion of the spice trade also makes vivid how poor the state of geographic knowledge was in the past. In the 1420s, Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator sought in vain to “make contact with Prestor John, the legendary Christin ruler of a kingdom thought to be somewhere in Africa or the Indies.” In the 1480s, when Christopher Columbus tried to convince the Portuguese crown to fund his voyage, he was turned down in part because his calculations relied on the writings of Marco Polo, and Polo’s “book describing his travels in the East was widely regarded at the time as a work of fiction.” In fact, it wasn’t until the 19th century that scholars began to accept Polo’s travelog as a genuine historical account. When Columbus finally did make his voyage in 1492, he spread further confusion, believing he had visited Asia rather than a continent unknown to Europeans. And that was not all. “He claimed to have found the footprints of griffins.” “In the 1540s [the] conquistador, Gonzalo Pizarro, scoured the Amazon jungle in a doomed search for the legendary city of El Dorado and the ‘país de la canela,’ or cinnamon country. It was not until the seventeenth century that the search for Old World spices in the Americas was finally abandoned.”

The book also details the strange dietary advice of the past, such as dietary guidelines meant to ward off the devastating bubonic plague: “There are accounts of people being sealed into their houses to prevent the plague from spreading, and of people abandoning their families to avoid infection. Medical men proposed all sorts of strange measures that would, they said, minimize the risk of infection, advising fat people not to sit in the sunshine, for example, and issuing a series of baffling dietary pronouncements. Doctors in Paris advised people to avoid vegetables, whether pickled or fresh; to avoid fruit, unless consumed with wine; and to refrain from eating poultry, duck, and meat from young pigs. ‘Olive oil,’ they warned, ‘is fatal.’” What, then, was a person properly worried about the plague to eat? “The French doctors recommended drinking broth seasoned with pepper, ginger, and cloves. The plague was thought to be caused by corrupted air, so people were advised to burn scented woods and sprinkle rosewater in their homes, and other aromatics when going out. . . . This helped to conceal the smell of the dead and dying, as well as supposedly purifying the air. John of Escenden, a fellow at Oxford University, was certain that a combination of powdered cinnamon, aloes, myrrh, saffron, mace, and cloves had enabled him to survive even as those around him succumbed to the plague.”

Superstitions initially prevented Europeans from eating potatoes when that vegetable arrived on their continent: “Potatoes resembled a leper’s gnarled hands, and the idea that they caused leprosy became widespread. According to the second edition of John Gerard’s Herball, published in 1633, ‘the Burgundians are forbidden to make use of these tubers, because they are assured that eating them caused leprosy.’ . . . Potatoes became associated with witchcraft and devil worship.” In fact, even in the 1770s, “potatoes were still widely believed to be poisonous and to cause disease.”

“A guilt-free chocolate bar, full of sugar, could someday land at a supermarket near you.

The chocolate would look and taste normal, and contain the same amount of sugar. But an enzyme, encased in an edible substance and added to the bar, would reduce how much sugar is absorbed into the bloodstream, and even turn it into a fiber that is good for your gut.

The product is the brainchild of scientists at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. In 2018, Kraft Heinz tapped the scientists to help develop a sugar substitute that would enable the food giant to cut the sweetener from its food without losing its benefits. The scientists had a different idea—save the sugar but devise a way to make it healthier.”

From Wall Street Journal.