Food Waste

 In the modern US, more than a third of the food produced is never eaten.  Instead it goes to waste, some of it composted, but much ending up in landfills where as it decomposes it produces methane, a gas that helps lead to global warming.

How about medieval food?  Was it wasted in the same way?

Well, food waste is always an issue, but it's different in different societies.  In the US, more than half of the food wasted is wasted before it even gets on somebody's plate.  A farmer who produces far more potatoes (for example) than he knows he can sell will just leave them to rot in the field.  A wholesaler won't even bother trying to sell misshapen fruits and vegetables to a grocery store.  A restaurant will cook up a lot of a dish it hopes will sell well, and often there is some left over, ready to be tossed.  A grocery store will fill the dumpster with overripe bananas, apples that have developed a  bad spot, or meat that didn't sell by its Sell By date.  A bakery may put "day old" bread on sale, but two-day-old bread is thrown away.

Most of this would not have been at issue in the Middle Ages.  A farmer would try to harvest and store everything grown, whether or not there was an immediate market for it—and in fact there usually was.  Misshapen fruits and vegetables bothered no one.  Who cared if the apple wasn't perfectly round and red?

There were far fewer of what we'd consider restaurants, and an inn would just reheat the next day anything that didn't move today.  Bread had to be baked frequently, since it didn't have the preservatives found in most modern bread, but dried out bread would still find a place on the menu, probably cooked into something else.

The food wasted before it got to the consumer was wasted for other reasons.  Grain was a favorite meal for mice and rats, and storage facilities were not nearly as effective in the Middle Ages as they are now at keeping out the vermin.  Cats were valued not as pets but as pest control.

All food will eventually rot, becoming unfit (or even dangerous) to eat, and it was much harder to keep without modern refrigeration.  Hence drying, salting, smoking, or sticking full of peppercorns or cloves were widely practiced, as was making milk into cheese, a more durable form.  But an onion will eventually rot even if properly dried, even heavily salted and smoked meat isn't going to last over a year without refrigeration, and spices were expensive.  And there nothing like canning to preserve "shelf life."  Fresh fruits and vegetables had to be eaten when fresh.

Even so, some part of the food was never going to be eaten.  A lot of cheese has an inedible rind.  No one was going to eat onion skins or egg shells or bones.  Technically these are also food waste, destined for the landfill today, tossed in a midden heap or buried in the Middle Ages.

How about food that now either gets taken into the house (and left to slowly go off in the refrigerator) or gets onto the plate but not into the mouth?  Such waste constitutes 40% of the food waste in the modern US.  In medieval times, there was doubtless some of that, but very little.  By our standards, most people were always on the edge of being "food insecure."  If food was there, you ate it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval food and social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

A Ninth-Century Garden

 What did medieval people grow in their gardens?  A glimpse into what was (at least) possible is provided by a document of Charlemagne, an order he issued around the year 800.  In this so-called "Capitulare de villis," he laid down guidelines for how royal manors were to be organized, including a stone manor house that had a special room for women serfs to weave cloth.  This "Capitulare" also included a list of plants he wanted every royal manor to grow.

(Here's a nineteenth-century statue of Charlemagne, located in the heart of Paris, claiming him for France rather than Germany.)

Now of course this was an aspirational list.  The fact that he ordered all his manors to grow these plants indicates that they weren't necessarily doing so already.  And one certainly cannot extrapolate from might have been ordered for a royal manor and what most people grew in their gardens.  But it is still a very interesting list.

Charlemagne wanted a lot of trees in his orchard, including apples, pears, cherries, plums, chestnuts, almonds, mulberries, persimmons, and quince.  He also specified nut trees, though not what kind of nut (other than the almonds).  Today we have a lot of different varieties of apple, and it was no different in the ninth century, except that instead of Granny Smith and Honeycrisp and Macintosh, the royal document listed, "gozmaringa, geroldinga, crevedella, spirauca, dulcis, and scriores."  If anyone wants "heritage" varieties of apple, maybe they should start figuring these out.

 

Charlemagne's garden was also supposed to grow a lot of herbs.  Spices like clove and peppercorns would have had to be brought in from southeast Asia at great expense, over thousands of miles, but herbs could be locally grown.  These included sage, fenugreek, rue, chickory, anise, caraway seeds, rosemary, parsley, coriander, mint, and rose madder (the latter used for dying).  Mixed in with the herbs were a number of plants that we would consider ornamental flowers, but which could be used in various botanical preparations.  These included lilies, roses, nasturtiums, iris, and gladiolas.

And then there were the vegetables.  These included peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, beets, radishes, fava beans, peas, lentils, cabbage, kohlrabi, turnips, parsnips, onions, leeks, and celery.   You will notice there were no potatoes or tomatoes or pumpkins, as these are all New World plants.  Nonetheless, there were plenty of vegetables to choose from, at least in the summer, and most of these will keep well in a dry place.  They tend from our point of view to look rather bland, which is why you needed to perk them up with some parsley or fenugreek or, if you could afford it, black pepper.

Some plants were listed with essentially the classical Latin name, like alium for onion, or pastenacas for parsnips.  Some had a name that can be figured out from French and German words, like the medieval Latin porros for leeks, which are poirreaux in modern French and porrhe in German (modern scientific name Allium porrum).  And then there were at least some plant names that made perfect sense in the ninth century but leave modern botanists scratching their heads.  For example, what was parduna, which appears between nasturtium and mint?  They obviously knew.

(Click here for more on the medieval diet.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on real medieval food, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.