Why were people so obsessed with spices? Yes they are tasty and nobility liked tasty food...

Why were people so obsessed with spices? Yes they are tasty and nobility liked tasty food. Is that really worth travelling half the world?

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Nigga have you tried eating meat without spices?

I dare you to eat a cooked steak as is.

A good steak literally needs nothing other than proper cooking

IS IT REALLY WORTH TRAVELLING ALL THE WAY TO FUCKING INDIA?

Found the idiot and/or poorfag

Yes.

Fuckin' bleb...

A bag of spices could be worth a lifetime of a farmer's wages.

So yes.

Yes.

How the fuck do you expect trade to work? Teleportation?

And India wasn't some unknown quarter that was dangerous to sail to. Romans in Egypt travelled there and bought spice and Indian traders vice versa.

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What kind of an idiot would pay like 1,5 million dollars for condinement? Come on. There must be some other reason. Do spices give you magic powers or what?

Why were people obsessed with purple dyes? Do you know how fucking expensive they were to make!?

It was largely a social status thing, at first, so that alone made it worth it, for those with money would pay for them, just to prove they had money. As they became more plentiful, even the poor started using them to stretch their food supplies (soup goes a lot further if it's spiced). In addition, in ye olden days, spices were the primary method of preservation of meat.

Fucking pleb. Good meat is best naked!

A bag of real saffron still is.

Well, a good sized bag, and a poorly paid farmer's.

>1.5 million dollars is a farmers lifetime wages in the 1500s

lolno

This, OP is right... but I guess that's just what makes us interesting each and every one of us is unique.

Spices were frequently used to disguise the taste of bad meat.

[spoiler] they still are [/spoiler]

I am tryin to find the modern equivalent.

Rome empire consumed lots of purple dye for their everything - including the Church itself, every single priest had purple robes, and pretty much most soldiers with armors had purple capes.

It was the Byzantines theme color.

Why the fuck would someone waste money on spice to hide the taste of bad meat, instead of quality meat?

The highest it got in pre-industrial society was about 1,000

800 dollars would be a more likely figure.

It's working life that would be hard to quantify.

>WE ARE THE 1500 1%

You seem to believe that, if you were in London and wanted spices, you had to travel to the place where spices originate or at least send someone. That's not how it works. You probably got it from a guy in London, who got it from a guy in Flanders, who got it from a guy in Spain, who got it from a guy in Italy, who got it from a guy in Egypt, who got it from a guy in Yemen who got it from a guy in India. Actually there's probably way more guys in between.

Of course, some merchants made longer travels, but that wasn't the norm.

Prestige.

Obviously you'd use the cheaper spices.

I was thinking more of Queen's Elizabeth's age when it was hard as fuck to make, because you had to import the materials from BFE, but I suspect the Byzantines made it their theme color specifically because it was a sign of wealth and power as well. Though they probably cut some corners on how they went about making it... Likely not Tyrian Purple - where ya gotta carefully dissect about 10,000 mollusks for a gram - save maybe on the Emperor's robes.

Yes, because they are light, compact, and very useful. They are the first thing that would become profitable to ship over long distances as soon as the naval technology got to that point.

Point of autism here.

If it's civilian shipping it's maritime, not naval.

Why were people obsessed with gold? I mean you could do fuck-all with it.

Oh yeah, "status".

They used it as a luxury thing, I don't know what the other user is talking about. It was basically like gold or silk.

I don't mind such autism. Thank you for the correciton. Naval was just the first word that pops into my head. I never use the word Maritime.

Maritime.
Maritime
Maritime.

I think the rotting meat thing came later on in the spice trade, once mass supplies of things like pepper became available.

But meat was much, much more expensive back in the day. It's easy to lose sight of how hard it is to produce meat in an agricultural society without mechanization.

The average Roman never even got to eat meat. They basically just had porridge. Plain porridge with nothing else, not even salt.

God I hate the concentration of wealth.

Not every piece of meat is "good steak" not only that but beef and pork weren't primary sources of protein for most of the population.

Eh... "Third-century Roman emperor Aurelian famously wouldn't allow his wife to buy a shawl made from Tyrian purple silk because it literally cost its weight in gold."

Though that's a special purple die - plus silk. Plus his wife was kind of naughty.

Also this:

Was salted pork always common or was salt too expensive?

youtube.com/watch?v=ZdmPIpQZPRg

That would depend on when and where... I suppose as meat goes, though, it's always been among the cheaper variants. Jerky of any sort... Chicken being the cheapest, I assume.

All you need to make salt is access to the sea.why the fuck was it so expensive? A fucking Hindu in a diaper made a bunch

Reminder that salt is a spice and salt is also a highly useful food preservative.

Bad meat as in bad quality? Because if you mean the victorian age bullshit of rotten meat, it's completely wrong

You would literally fucking die of nutritional deficiencies if you ate like that nigguh. Didn't Romans have fish sauce and wine with everything?

>what is scarcity

Fucking millennials. Hand everything to them on a silver platter and they start wondering why the peasants under Louis XVI didn't just content themselves smoking dank weed and playing Pokemon on their iPhones.

this

Also, people forget that refrigeration was much more difficult and often less consistent.
There's a reason we discovered aged food stuffs like aged (and I mean aged, not preserved) meat, cheese, beer, wine, spirits, vinegar, so on and so forth. Spoilage was a thing, and food was expensive enough for a lot of people to see if they could stomach that stuff. Some of it turned out to be delicious, sometimes healthier than non-aged food/drink, and even if it wasn't delicious, if you add enough spice you can cook stuff to oblivion, making it safer while dealing with possible off flavors and simple blandness of overcooked food with the spices.

>You would literally fucking die of nutritional deficiencies if you ate like that
Well, didn't they?

I was talking about the purple thing, sorry. Should've clarified.

Why would you make salt for the masses when you could be holding some rich patrician's glass of wine all day for a lot more money?

That's what concentration of wealth does. The masses are so poor that virtually every job in the economy is just to serve the rich. Like giving one forklift in a factor golden hubcaps before you even give the rest sparkplugs.

steak without salt and pepper gets boring pretty quick, especially if it's not a premium cut like filet.

The little bit of authoritative stuff I've read about it talks a lot about dates, grapes, wine, vinegar, seafood, eggs, that sort of stuff.

Nutritional deficiencies were probably common.

Well Rome typically had a higher death rate than birth rate and only survived and grew due to people from surrounding regions moving into the middle of the meat grinder. Disease was a major reason for the high death rates but I would imagine that would be exacerbated by the fact that most people living in the heart of Rome subsisted off of state provided grain and little else.

No amount of cooking makes turned meat safe to eat. What makes it noxious to your health isn't bacteria but toxic bacterial secretions.

Salt mines were a profitable enterprise, and while it was pretty much a staple everywhere, it was one of your more expensive ones in a lot of places. Getting usable salt from the sea wasn't always an easy process, mining dead sea beds was often more effective, but, in addition to all that hard labor, then you also had to transport it from there - thus shit got pricey. (Plus hording to control the price.)

Pork, similarly, was a luxury in a lot of places. Meat in general among the lower classes was fairly rare occurrence in ages past, depending on when and where you were, of course.

Among the patricians maybe. The economic disparity between classes in the Roman Empire got pretty absurd. Julius Caesar was able to get so much popular because he actually cared about feeding the starving masses.

>because he actually cared
Did he? Or did he just make them think they did?

Does it matter?

I mean, he did provide them with food. It's not like he promised it and didn't deliver. He also pushed through a lot of land reforms.

That is a safer assumption for a simple rule to live by, but the reality is there are different toxins from different bacteria, and spoilage is not always mutual with harmful bacteria. Some kinds of spoilage are due to harmful bacteria which can infect your gut, which can then produce enough toxins over time to mess you up, sometimes the toxins can be rendered inert via cooking, sometimes the cooking itself is a form of preservation (cook it long, put it in a pot, cover with long rendered/filtered fat).

>Getting usable salt from the sea wasn't always an easy process
Yest it was. It has always been piss easy people just didn't do it because they were retarded.

I have a hard time imagining people not have fairly consistent access to seafood, eggs, and dried fruit.

Some times the spoilage is a form of preservation.

Yep, which I alluded to earlier.

I suspect, from his writings, Julius had more appreciation of the suffering of the common man than most, especially of the common soldier. I suppose some of the better Emperors had an advantage that way - they'd lived among their fellow soldiers, a few even making an effort to disguise themselves and continue to do so, according to legend, at least.

Can't say that of most modern leaders - who almost invariably come from the upper crust, even among those few who have spent time as soldiers (and even then, generally officers).

Kill yourself.

Interestingly, a lot of spices are lightly toxic and have - as example - anti-cancer properties or otherwise benefits to the immune system.

The population of Rome was huge and they had no money to spend on anything.

Roman farm land had gradually been bought up by patricians and worked inefficiently by slaves. The middle class disappeared. The previous poor farm owners left with nothing moved into Rome itself and worked in sweatshops for a penance. The masses didn't even have enough money to feed themselves by even the most basic means.

That's why Julius Caesar was so popular. He gave the masses government aid and promised land reform.

*pittance

Mining is still more efficient than evaporation in most cases, to this day. Very little of the salt on your table comes from the sea.

There's only a few places where you can extract salt from the sea in a practical manner. It requires a warm climate where the evaporation rate exceeds the precipitation rate, for extended periods and where there are steady prevailing winds to boot. The metallurgy for brine boilers wasn't around back then. Even when they could do it, it meant carving out huge swaths of land to create a partition between a concentrating pond and the crystallizing pond, requiring a huge amount of man power, all of which were reduced to nothing come the first rain, and you got to start all over again.

Well, could be I was reading recipes from a different time period or something, too. I'm not terribly versed in the history of Rome or anything like that. I've just read ~50 or so translated recipes (for common peoples, on up to feast foods).

Even poor people have special days where they eat a bit better.

>"""common people"""
Maybe they didn't have quotation marks back then?

The Roman Republic wasn't even that bad in the beginning. But as Rome conquered and acquired slaves to replace the middle class everything just went to shit.

>$4750 for 1 kilo
G-sus

Without the concentration of wealth we wouldn't have gotten where we are right now where a never before seen amount of people gets to eat meat.

Also I doubt kwashiokor was a thing in Rome, they probably had other sources even at the poorest, or they just plain starved.

Because they were rich as fuck and couldn't find enough ways to make their money.

Spend*

I'm an avid meat eater, so I appreciate the result, but even I have to admit, this is getting kinda scary.

Wonder how soon before we have to convert to vat grown meat and milk, and watch half of the mammalian weight on the planet go extinct.

Even if things were split evenly between everyone, pre-industrial societies simply don't have enough economic productivity to produce the level of nutrition we take for granted.

I'm pretty sure these were truly common people recipes. Lots of porridge, but also mentioning that eggs were frequent as a cheap and available source of protein, as well as seafood when near the coast, often in combination with porridge. So it's not like they just had millet or barley stewed in water all day everyday, and nothing else. If I remember correctly, the feast food stuff was mostly focused on merchant class, which I assumed was middle to middle-upper class. I remember that I was looking specifically for "normal" food, but I don't think I saved any of the sources that I found anywhere. I remember combing through a bunch of shitty stuff from renaissance fair idiots on my way, too, so I'm sure I didn't stop until I found some stuff with decent value.

Don't forget beans.

Rice and beans make a complete protein.

It was, and is, the cheapest way to survive as a human.

I am saying that you wouldn't be able to survive on the stuff. Even if we exclude B12 deficiency, a fuckton of people would die of scurvy.

The farmers don't see a cent figurativly.

A lot of vegetables grow well under most conditions.

That's where the vitamins would typically come from.

That said, from the period from the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution, the vast majority of human beings were malnourished.

If you have good access to a diverse assortment of vegetables and fruit then you don't really need meat.

Death from malnutrition was kinda par for the course for the poor, and has remained so until very recently (even now, it puts a dent in it, even if it's more a lack of quality than quantity).

Life expectancy for everyone outside of the upper-middle class on up was kinda ass.

...

Why do you think modern humans are so much taller than humans were just a century or two ago? They were all malnourished.

Also dietary retirements are determined by finding the minimum amount of a nutrient that the average person gets before negative side effects are observed then that value is doubled. So it's not like you will drop dead if you only get 25% of modern requirements of a lot of nutrients every day. You'll just feel like crap.

I hope you die without ever making children.
Considering your views and your presence in this board that must be pretty likely.

Why so triggered tho?

Both "How not to die" and "the food hourglass" pretty much say this yea. And they aren't written by gurus but by actual doctors.

I personally think the best option is the majority vegetables (also legumes) and fruit + minority meat. Insects, which scientists advocate but aren't catching on, are for me very interesting.

Also stable foods such as rice, wheat and potatoes are considered unhealthy by at the least the doctor who wrote "the food hourglass". Legumes are the way to go, but they have side-effects (i.e. gas).

Beans, brah.

Beans.

Grains, beans, and some veggies and you're good.

Well, not good, but alive.

>rice, wheat, and potatoes are considered unhealthy by at the least the doctor who wrote "the food hourglass".
Either he is a cook or he meant to say """unhealthy""".

>Legumes are the way to go, but they have side-effects (i.e. gas).
You might explode:
youtube.com/watch?v=8bMpFWNVAVc

>all these barbarians despising one of the most important things during roman times: the salt

Salt isn't a spice you tard.

Holy shit how fucking uneducated are you

The spice must flow, little friend.

I know rite thank god for all that AI steaksauce Europe got from India. XD

What this user said ().

I only get to eat steak, like, once a week. Why the FUCK would you mask the taste of that delicious, wholesome beef with the pointless addition of salt or pepper? God forbid you decide to throw on some fucking ketchup or something.

As for OP's question, it's because beef and pork weren't up to our modern standards at the time. Peppers and spices helped to mask the taste of poor quality meat.

This is just my personal theory, but bear with me here. I think that's why places like Louisiana and Texas (major cattle crop states) have a longstanding tradition of smoked meats and barbecues; because they were the first to discover this new way of making meat much more palatable than it was back then. Hotter climates where refrigeration was impossible meant people had to innovate; giving rise to fried chicken (bought in by the Scots), smoked brisket (which, I believe, was first popularized in New England when it was first brought in by Le Joos), and finally, barbecued meat (debatably introduced to Western Europeans when Spaniards visited the Caribbean).

Notice how all of them came from hot or humid climates, necessitating the need for slow-cook preservation methods and the addition of carrion-combating spices? This is how American barbecue came to be, and this is why nobles went to war for the good shit; because once you've had a little piece of heaven, men would crawl and die just to get back inside.

You cut out the middleman and make more dosh in one trip than all your other merchant friends can make in a whole lifetime.

It's called high-risk/high-reward, son. Ain't no game.

I have this recurring fantasy where I go to the best steakhouse in town, and then order a steak well done and then ask them to bring me some ketchup.

Somebody has to pay for your boat though.

And you're going to have to make a given number of runs without being killed by your own inexperience with the stretch of ocean you're travelling along to pay back the people who financed your boat.