FOOD: (2) Diet
Now we have an idea how much food a populace needs. Now to another question: what food would people eat in Middle Ages?
Why does it matter?
In the low-tech setting, the largest problem isn’t even getting enough food, it’s making it last through the year. With no refrigerators, no effective food storage techniques, and no cheap imports from faraway lands the people of the real Medieval people faced a threat of famine each year.
If your economy can’t provide crucial foods for the whole year, people would die even if the total food intake could be sufficient. Sadly, humans can live only so long without food (or do they? magic may answer this question differently).
Beware, we are talking almost exclusively about peasants: they make the most of the population and eat the most too. Kings or lords may have the most extravagant eating habits, but even with tremendous gluttony they could not out-eat the majority.
Historical baseline
Generally, the classic 13th century medieval diet consists mostly from bread (75%), dairy products (13%), ale (5%), fish (4%) and meat (2%). By the more plentiful late Middle Ages, when people became much wealthier, bread dropped to mere 40% of the calorie intake, ale and meat account for additional 25% each. Beware, this structure is probably skewed towards more nutritional products than a typical peasant ate: it describes food allowances of the harvest workers that could bring the more available types of food from home and are fed extremely well due to working extremely hard (in my native faraway village even in the middle of the 20th century the most nutritious meat was saved specifically for the harvest: underfeeding during that time could be fatal).
As you may notice, the diet is much simpler than the modern one. In a low-tech and low-magic setting the nutritional basis would be the foods that can either be obtained almost anytime during the year like milk, meat, or fish; or the foods that can be stored with little difficulty, like grain or legumes. Fruits, berries and vegetables could only occasionally augment peasant diet.
Addendum: Preservation
To be fair, I didn’t give sufficient credit to the plenty of historical preservation techniques. Yes, different food preservation methods were developed by every civilization, but do they affect the overall balance much? Both the scientific sources, my personal experience and childhood stories from a small backwater village says they weren’t as available as it may seem.
Why? Because preserving foods is always more costly than simply preferring ones not needing preservation, and often this cost comes from the aspects of life not too obvious for a modern person.
Sugaring, marinating, and salting requires pricey seasonings, salt or honey. Honey is expensive even nowadays, but it may be much less affordable in a traditional society if you had no neighbour beekeeper (and especially given that the beehive had to be killed off to get to the honey until 18th century). Salt was one of the most precious goods for a medieval peasant because of its many uses and the critical fact that it has to be bought for real money (let’s talk about it later, trade is a long topic).
There is a plethora of usable preservation techniques for meat or fish: curing, jellying, burying, salting, smoking, jarring in fat etc. However, animal products have always been an expensive yet necessary supplementary food. For most cultures, it is always plant-based things that make up for a bulk of calories, and they are fairly hard to preserve.
Pickling is literally the best option I’ve seen for vegetable preservation as it requires minimal amount of salt (or literally none for marine regions), can preserve vegetables for the whole year, and can be applied to the vegetables with long shelf life to extend it further. Sauerkraut, pickled cabbage, is both one of the most ancient foods and a staple for Medieval nutrition during the Winter.
It is important that people can’t live off simple bread even if caloric needs are fully provided: they need some variety and nutrients exclusively found in fresh vegetables and animal products throughout the year. All in all, preservation can be used for getting this supplementary nutrition: you can spice up the otherwise non-impressive Winter ration with strong-tasting preserved foods, grab the valuable vitamin C from pickled vegetables, and even up the yearly meat and fish consumption.
Thanks to the Reddit community for the fruitful discussion, especially grenadiere42 and SvengeAnOsloDentist!
Seasonal foods: fruits and vegetables
Some food was available only for brief periods.
Lack of effective food preservation techniques was the main culprit: to eat fruits in winter, you need to store them for half a year in your own castle (or to preserve them for a month or so necessary to move them from faraway lands). You would have a hard time preserving a bag of apples for a month even in a modern-day refrigerator, and keeping the whole bag edible for half-year is nigh impossible.
Thus, fresh vegetables (lettuce, cabbage or spinach) were mainly available in spring and summer. These vegetables could not be stored at all, so they were mostly used just about as soon as gathered to provide nutrition. Addendum: some of these were pickled soon after harvest or later in the year (my own family history hints that cabbage can be pickled in late Autumn, when time is not as scarce) to provide flavour and vitamins in Winter. Addendum: three-field system literally requires a farmer to plant a third of his lands with fresh vegetables, thus nobody could just skip the vegetables and plant only high-yield wheat or rye since around IX century.
Onions, beetroots and carrots (and potatoes, which were only available in Americas though) are rare vegetables that can be easily preserved for the most of the year and thus were cultivated widely through the medieval Europe. If you squint a little, these vegetables behave just like grains and could easily replace them for most practical purposes.
Fruits and berries (apples, pears, grapes, raspberries…) were gathered and eaten in summer and autumn. Unlike the vegetables, limited preservation options are available for fruits and berries: drying could make them available even in winter (even though simple sun-drying was not available in northern regions, where berries and fruits got ripe too late in the year), and making alcoholic beverages (cider or wine) was the other option.
Mushrooms interestingly fall into the same category: they are available mostly in autumn, but could be dried by heat and stored for long time. However, just like fruits and berries, they can only be a supplementary food source unless your people live very scarcely in the deep woods.
Overall, you could not rely on seasonal food sources like fruits, vegetables or mushrooms to provide sufficient nourishment for the people. However, they can improve the diet of your people when fresh, save precious long-preserved foods for the darker times, and serve as gourmet dishes throughout the year.
How this may change in magical world?
First, with widespread magic preservation becomes more easily available. Freeze spells can be used to conjure ice in the middle of hot summer; life or death manipulations, warding or blessings can stave off rotting; arcane arts like sealing or time magic can be used mundanely to keep this food always fresh. If your civilization has powerful magic, their diet will be even less season-dependant than ours.
Second, better transportation may also help: there is always a part of the world where fruits grow at this very moment. With preservation techniques more available, fruits and vegetables can be fresh even after months-long journeys. Better infrastructure may further facilitate the trade. Are your water and air mages able to quicken sea travel? Can earth mages maintain better roads? Which kind of magic can lighten the cargo? In a sufficiently “high” fantasy setting even a freight teleport may be available for cheap cargo like food.
Finally, even primitive magical civilisation can produce fruits or vegetables nearly for the whole year. Life or plant magic can be used to cultivate more productive and resistant species, massive weather magic or blessings can change the climate locally and allow for additional harvests, and several magical schools can be used to develop greenhouses: warding, fire, wind, earth… Even teleporting hot air from the southern jungles may do the trick.
Fish, meat, and animal products
While they did occasionally surface even in poor folks’ diet, fish and meat were usually rare and costly. Even in the plentiful late Middle Ages only one-fifth of the daily calories were provided by animal sources. They were either seasonal and unreliable, like game meat and fish, too costly because of their non-scalable living conditions (chickens or pigs), human-like diet (horses or dogs), or better used in ways other than simple slaughter (sheep or cattle).
Fish
Fish is highly seasonal at best and may be fully absent as it requires a large body of water to be nearby. Traditional fisheries included herring, salmon, eel, whiting, plaice, cod, trout and pike.
Currently, most of us don’t live near a river, lake or sea, but cheap and quick water transportation is actually one of the most important factors for Medieval settlements. If the area is highly populated like Medieval England, you could expect most of the villages to be created regardless of the water bodies nearby, but if you are thinking about life in a more scarcely populated country, almost all settlements would be located near a river. Water, whether it is liquid or frozen, is so important for transportation that it demands a post of its own.
Thus, fish was a much more notable food than we expect nowadays, especially in a less populated country.
If your country has moderate or cold climate, fish would be much harder to get in winter: small rivers and lakes would be nearly frozen solid, and getting fish from under the icy cap on large bodies of water that never freeze fully (really deep rivers or lakes, seas and oceans) would require ice fishing, which is highly dangerous.
Large-scale fish farming emerged far later, only after the Medieval age ended in our own history and had no importance in the classical Middle Ages.
Game meat
Game meat was hardly available in the highly populated countries, but would be a much more important food source for the lower-populated frontier like most of the monster-riddled fantasy villages.
In Medieval Western Europe most of the forests were heavily controlled by the landlords for their wood, plants, and animals. The starvation-prone peasants, who we are mostly talking about in the FOOD section, could only poach or kill wild animals outside the restricted forests.
There were just too many people to allow free hunting: flocks of peasants would kill all the wild animals in forests. In the classical Medieval Europe, population densities around 30 persons per square mile are not uncommon: France and England were close in density, and Belgium or Italy were actually even more populated, up to hundred people per square mile.
On the other hand, there were more scantily-populated lands like Scotland with only 4 people per sq. mile or even less-crowded Northern countries. Even now, a square mile in Canada holds on average around 10 persons, and most of these people live in heavily-populated cities that makes rural population density even lower. In such countries hunting for fur, skins and rare meat could be a really developed industry even in a relatively modern age.
The lands you write about may be relatively underpopulated due to the climate (Norway, Canada or Siberia), being landlocked or constrained by heavy terrain (medieval Kyiv Rus or the modern Chinese Inner Mongolia), or for some entirely magical reasons. If there is a low-population frontier land, hunting will be heavily relied upon: whole villages outside of the heavily populated lands will be at least partly hunter-fed.
Farm meat and animal products
Now we can go on to the last and most important part of this section (you’ll notice this approach a lot throughout this blog: I save the most important part for the punchline). Animal products like meat, dairy or eggs will be the largest supplementary food source your people can use.
There are plenty of the domestic animals that can be slaughtered, but two things matter the most: what this animal eats, and what other useful things can the animal do. Otherwise, they blend into a faceless meaty mass.
Animal’s eating habits are really an issue: either it eats relatively cheap things like grass or waste, or it’s likely rarely cultivated in the poorer societies. I will repeat it again for sheer importance: if an animal eats the same thing humans do, poor peasants won’t have it.
The other issue is that most animals were not mainly used for food: they helped with agricultural work, pulled the carts and carriages, provided eggs, milk, and wool, manured the fields and ate pests. Until the animal is too old or too weak to provide, it could always be spared for a time (unless threat of famine gets real or animal foodstuffs become unavailable).
Other important issue to remember is that Medieval farm animals were much smaller (i.e. ate less and provided less meat/milk/wool) and wilder (i.e. required less effort and were able to find some food for their own) than the modern ones you may have seen in your personal life.
Carnivores
If you want people to cultivate carnivorous animals for meat, you’d need a lot of additional assumptions: people are normally able to eat the meat themselves instead of inefficiently feeding it to the animal whose meat they would eat later.
Carnivores, like dogs or cats, are usually cultivated for their other benefits, but may be slaughtered if starvation is coming. Dogs are a perfect example: there are plenty of places where eating dogs is normal, but it seems that these traditions originate from either occasional feasting on dog meat in very scarce times, when “everything that crawls can be eaten”, or there is some non-nutritional motive at hand, like stamina-boosting properties. If you know about a persistent carnivore farming tradition in history that existed simply because they make good food, please add your comment here.
Horses
Horses are complex. Basically, what you have in history are two distinct traditions: Europeans valued horses as a rare luxury, but the nomadic tribes of the East cultivated them easily in truly majestic numbers.
Horses are, basically, the best drafting animal (and, specifically, the best ploughing animal too) Medieval people were able to use consistently. Horses seem better in moving heavy things than donkeys or oxen (at least by being able to haul them relatively quickly), but this advantage is costly: horses, unlike cattle, cannot be fed with pure grass.
Horse, at least the classical one, has to eat some grains that could otherwise feed humans, which made them unavailable. Figure 1 here shows that until 1500s the overwhelming majority of the draft animals were actually oxen, not horses. Even in the late Middle Ages, after heavy plough was introduced and the grass-fed oxen were not enough to pull the load, peasants in the poorer regions were reluctant to convert to horses. Curiously, some research suggests that in the most land-constrained regions where there was no free grass, peasants were using horse labour slightly more.
However, in the other end of the world, nomadic tribes cultivated throngs of small horses that were able to feed themselves with grass in the flat Eastern European and Asian steppes. Mongols are likely the most striking example, managing to conquer at one point lands from Scandinavia to Chinese coastline. With numerous horses in their possession nomads naturally rode horses, ate horse meat, drank horse milk and used horse skins extensively. It’s horse (and cattle) economy, baby.
Chickens, pigs, sheep
All these animals are more or less free-roaming and wild-eating counterparts of the modern animals with very few additional remarks. It is good for the economy because these animals need minimal effort and expense, but larger-scale farming is impossible as it requires drastically larger effort and/or transition to costly foodstuffs.
Unlike the heavily domesticated products of the modern age, chickens lived wild and free in the Medieval Europe. They were actively feeding themselves with insects or whatever they could find in grass and only occasionally were fed some grains or vegetable leftovers.
Eggs were precious. They were not only smaller than modern ones, but also trickier to get and harder to keep: you needed to find the nest of the free-roaming hens before the eggs hatched. Until a useful chicken mutation spread out in the middle to late Medieval Europe, chickens were much less friendly around humans and laid eggs only during the mating season, making eggs much, much scarcer than nowadays. Regardless, eating a hen until it reached old age and stopped producing eggs was really bad idea, so chicken meat was rare too.
Pigs are the easiest of the domestic animals, in a way. They mostly fed themselves with roots, leaves or acorns and got slaughtered in November, before the scarce time of the year began. The modern pigs, on the other hand, require feeding, but are able to get much fatter and larger. Pork is a trademark product of the agricultural societies in contrast to the nomadic ones: unlike cattle, horses or sheep, pigs find their sustenance in forests and are better suited for stable farming settlements. Foodstuff corn (or maize if you prefer), which is the staple source of food for pigs, wasn’t there in the Medieval Europe, so that the pigs were fed mostly vegetable leftovers.
The grass-fed sheep are among the most versatile farm animals: they provide fur, skins, milk, and can be occasionally slaughtered for meat. Due to their thick fur, they need very little attention even if it gets really cold (I heard anecdotes about sheep being in the open for the whole winter in the frozen mountains with only occasional shelter when it got really cold even by the mountain standards). Nomads and highlanders prefer sheep, but they are not the only ones: in England and France, they were surprisingly the most popular farm animals.
Cattle
Cattle is the indisputable mooing king of the farm animals (at least in Ireland).
Cows were conveniently grass-fed, and provided milk, meat and skins. They also inadvertently fertilised the grazing lands, boosting the agricultural productivity. But that’s not even the most important their usage.
Until relatively late in the history, oxen were the chief drafting force of the European civilisation (oxen are castrated bulls that have the same body mass and strength, but are less aggressive; generally, except for bulls specifically left for breeding, all male cows were oxen).
Before starting this post, I was sure that the trade-off between oxen versus horses was quite simple: horses are more expensive to feed, but stronger in drafting; in reality, it’s not that simple. The first answer in this topic provides a well-referenced argument that even after the better carrying gear an ox could pull twice as much as a horse does, but do it half that quickly. I really don’t understand why people stopped using oxen for carrying carts and ploughs then. If anybody has a good idea, please comment.
There is consensus that oxen were better than horses at least until horse collar got widespread. Oxen pulled heavy carts, ploughs, and all kinds of odd things too heavy to use humans. And after four years of the heavy work, oxen reaching the respectable age of seven were left to feed and fatten freely just to be killed for meat in the fall. At least they got a whole season-long vacation in Europe in the end.
Dairy cows, which are generally much skinnier and less suitable for meat production, were not slaughtered until they stopped giving milk due to their old age (this discussion suggests they could live and milk up to 20 years, but cows older than 4–5 tend to produce much less and thus were likely replaced).
A simple calculation about the cattle amount of cattle that could have been supported by the average farmer family is between 2 (the minimum number of oxen needed to plough properly the average field in England) and 5 (the cattle that could be supported by 10 acres of non-cultivated, fallow land the users of the three-field system, given that “cattle required two acres each”).
What about your own world?
In magical setting, whether high or low fantasy is on the table, wilderness is much more common.
Wild forests or plains filled with monsters make a great plot device and are a logical product of magical world: you need much less agricultural land to feed your people and thus unless the place holds some specific magical resource you can leave it free.
Moreover, magical civilisations are often both more prone to conflicts and more spectacular in creating lasting destruction. While the medieval people of non-magical earth had literally no way to indulge in a long-term scorched earth policy and even modern humanity has precious few options, mages can do much more: fill forests with dangerous creatures and plants, grow aggressive sea monsters, raise undead, create sources of magical contamination or cast long-lasting curses… Large parts of the magical world would be filled with dangerous artifacts of old conflicts.
It makes hunting and fishing both more dangerous and available than it was in our history: larger wild areas hold more animals, but are MUCH more dangerous. Land or sea hunters/travellers/adventurers would be much more prevalent and much more professional than their European counterparts: better income, better gear, and harsh natural selection. Probably, the everyday life in the far countryside would be quite dissimilar to the boring monotonous work Medieval peasants had, but much more like Jack London’s stories about gold rush in Alaska (if you never read any, try it: style and contents may give you a lot to think of) or treasure hunter job: tremendous risk, rare and high reward… and eating bear meat bloody raw.
However, even if there are professional monster-hunters, most people would not rely on game meat for eating: monster meat would be too expensive due to the risks of hunting monster. A king may indulge in dragon steaks for every other breakfast, but peasants would not willingly risk their lives hunting deadly creatures (given that monsters tend to attack regardless, peasants would still eat monster meat rather often).
Unless your forest ecosystem is driven by very peculiar and purposeful magic, wilderness is much less effective in supporting human population. Forests generate much more biomass than cultivated lands, but it usually comes in such human-unfriendly form (and I don’t mean “monsters or carnivorous animals”: quite opposite, they tend to be easily used by humans; rather, the large part of the biomass in forests simply are mundane leaves that can’t be eaten or otherwise exploited by humans) that cultivation is simply better for providing food for the people. There are only so many hunters that could find enough food to feed themselves… then, even if the treasures of the forest allow to buy food for much more, it has to come from the more civilised regions, much like it was during the gold rush.
The same problem comes with the fishing, but it is much less severe overall: while oceans are much less plentiful in food on average, they are just large enough to compensate for that. Even now, the high estimates of fish biomass outweigh the biomass of all farm animals combined; and if properly harvested, the fish can sustain far, far more people than the scarce meat of the Medieval Age. With magic-augmented technology at hand, fish farming can be used widely as well: ocean currents will be harnessed by mages (or, in case of more low-magic setting, by humans affected with water-breating spell creating mundane walls), better fish species can be devised (actually, modern civilisation, for all our successes with farm animals, just barely started to apply selective breeding to fish — before starting this article I haven’t even realized how bad it was), a powerful magical command can replace inefficient nets and fishing rods…
But even with all my newfound optimism about fishing, the farm animals would bear the brunt of magical augmentation. First, selective breeding is actually the easiest. Even a weak life or flesh mage with no real ability to shape animals herself could still understand them much better than we ordinary humans do, and develop better breeds time and time faster: one magical glance may provide the same level of accuracy the ordinary eye could give only after the animal grows. High-end magic applied to the species for decades and centuries could create truly magnificent farm animals, able to process biomass of no value (or use solar power as an energy source just like plants do) to humans and provide quality nutrition.
Second, non-classical farm animals are suddenly available in fantasy. At some point of history, humans domesticated nearly every suitable animal out there. Some, like dogs and cows, the more useful and easily-available species, were our companions for the whole history of civilisation; some, like deer or elephants, are cultivated only locally. Everything that we could domesticate, we did, especially the human-sized mammals; but what if the world has different wild animals to breed?
There are dragons in your world? They will be domesticated! If they are intelligent enough, they can be befriended or domesticated with pure training. If they are just too stupid to be trained, they still can be bound by extensive domination/mind control magic; or, if even that fails, simply bred for their valuable organs: hide, teeth, talon, blood, heart, bones… and, in the end, highly nutritious meat. Nothing too different than a flying crocodile with a majestic flamethrower.
But a dragon, creature of blood and flesh with a fairly standard carnivorous diet, is just the tip of the iceberg: more arcane species could also be domesticated or at least cultivated. Could you imagine breeding griffins that lay golden eggs? Or the flame-eating salamanders? Or cultivating spirits that would be fed with something even cheaper, like old wires or postage stamps?
Probably even true demons (not the stereotypical things of flesh, fire and sulfur, but the scarier ones from the Pact: Devils and Details — and I strongly suggest that book if your world could enjoy some really dark and scary ideas) which further destruction and misery by merely existing, could be cultivated if you manage to find something cheap enough to feed them — lust, for example, but not mage’s own — and find enough usefulness to cover the costs.
Finally, you need to think really hard how the culture and established technology/magic would affect the animals in your world, primarily the farm ones. If alternative sources of meat (like Fleshcraft I once mentioned earlier) exist, there would be less farm animals as a whole. If the culture provides for extensive fasts (as the actual Christianity was in Middle Age Europe), the allowed animals and products (like chicken, fish or beavers, which were thought to be fish) would have massive boon, but the forbidden ones would be used much less.
But the most important question actually covers two our favourite animals, cattle and horses. Magical countries tend to have much better communication and transportation than the medieval civilisation could ever offer: instant or nearly instant communication (magical mirrors, telepathy, demon messengers etc.), teleportation, space manipulation, many different methods for quicker movement ranging from running speed increase to using elemental planes. For a relatively well-established magic-using civilisation, number of different options may reach tens and hundreds. In such situations, people don’t need mundane horses or oxen for drafting or riding just as we don’t need them now in modern age: they could always employ more magical means. Some of them, like necromancy, flesh or life magic, and different blessings, still need an animal to be used as a basis. Other don’t — and people would almost stop breeding horses then, just as we do now. Same goes for the oxen: if it is not needed for drafting anymore, sheep may be a better choice for farm animal.
Similar reasoning may apply to cats, dogs or sheep: if they are not needed to do their principal job, they are not cultivated and therefore not eaten. If a ward or a spell can protect your home from burglars and wild animals better than a dog, if easy ritual destroys mice better than the cat, if textile is more efficiently produced by magic-augmented silkworms than by the sheep… they will be used only as pets, and we very rarely eat our pets.
Grains
And these all were just the prelude: we come to the most important part of the diet only now and very briefly, given the planned future posts.
The wide category of “grains” as I draft it would include not only the traditional ones like wheat, barley or oats, the non-European crops like corn/maize or rice, but also plants that couldn’t be ever named grains without greatly stretching the definition: potatoes, turnips or legumes. Grains, here, are the crops both nutritious and productive enough to form a large part of peasant diet — and suitable for long preservation.
This wide category fed most of the humans in the Medieval Ages: grains like wheat and oats were used for bread/pottage production (barley had slightly more alcoholic inclination), legumes like beans or peas were used as cheap and nutritious protein source, and rare root vegetable “grains” like turnips may be primary nutritional sources for some regional populations. Medieval Europeans never encountered rice, a Chinese crop; American potatoes and maize were imported only after the Middle Ages, but these additions would not matter much in the grander scheme of things as they are effectively similar to their European counterparts.
Food production may get more efficient or more streamlined with addition of new crops, but nothing changes in principle. Grains are sowed into the cultivated (i.e. ploughed and, probably, fertilized) soil and, with various additional efforts, harvested in the end of the season. It’s the same in nature regardless of the specific form, whether people are sowing seeds, beans or roots, putting fertile animals into the ground, or painting mystical sigils of good food.
Magic, magic, magic
What could magic do? As usual, nearly everything. It gets slightly boring after several repetitions, doesn’t it?
Better crops? Easily, we discussed this several times already. Growing crops in winter? Magic has tremendous potential for glasshouses, we discussed it too. Exotic crops? Slightly trickier, but still easily attainable with sufficient selection.
What didn’t we talk so much about? Sowing, ploughing, fertilizing, and basically any work may be done easier with magic than with limited medieval technology, that’s trivial; what’s more peculiar is that development of the magical or even non-magical technology is also easier if even the simplest magical senses are available. Mages could just watch the soil and plants the whole year and select the options they see working better — an option our ancestors never had to such extent. Thus, even a low-key magic would allow for tremendous progress in agricultural techniques.
Summary
So, the benchmark is mid-medieval standard of 75% grains, 15% dairy products, and 10% fish/meat. Then you could work all the way up to a believable combination given your current fantasy setting.
Effectively it means that your economy must produce at least a pound of flour per person per day (given the nutritional value of 1500 cal), two ounces of red meat (+200 cal), and two cups of milk (+300 cal technically, but most of it would be processed into dairy products before eating) given a moderate 10% loss during storage. Some additional nutrition will be provided by the seasonal sources like fruits or vegetables and rare delicacies like game meat or honey.
If you add all the magical influence too, your own Medieval age would be at least much less starvation-filled: it would be unlikely to make everybody happy, but at least it could get anyone get fed.
