I set out to write a post about British Monarchs who suffered the worst food in the history of monarchy. I’m quite certain that a long time ago I read an article about a series of British Kings whose meals were usually rotten, wine filled with dregs (the servants would have filtered it through cloth, or their teeth) and bread moldy and stale. The internet failed me and I can’t find a source for that information (nor can I remember which Kings it was.)

Instead, I found a wonderfully entertaining article on Slate about how medieval themed restaurants don’t serve anything close to what people actually ate back then. The author does not specify but I think he’s only referencing the cuisine of the medieval nobility. The peasantry back then would not have consumed much meat protein.

Furthermore, It’s a myth that medieval foods were heavily spiced, sauced, and colored to disguise the fact that they were rotten. Spice was expensive and probably wouldn’t have been wasted on rotten meat (except, perhaps in the wealthiest kitchens.) Meats were often salted with gray or black sea salt so they had to have spices and vegetables heaped onto them to absorb some of the salt and its impurities.
So the Medieval Nobility ate meat that had been sitting in dirty gray salt. The peasantry ate much much worse. Is that really so different than eating a Chicken McNugget, which may or may not contain Dimethylpolysiloxane? Their culinary adulterants came from nature whereas ours mainly come from the laboratory and the factory.

On the other hand, maybe it’s a small price to pay for not having to grow our own wheat. I wonder, could we go back to the old ways if we had to? I’ll bet that a lot of the stressed out corporate workaholics out there would actually derive a bit of unfamiliar satisfaction from spending their days tending crops, if they had to.