That’s something that makes a significant difference between my own and my mother’s generation, for example. But when processed sugar first got introduced to Europe (as a luxury good), people literally started displaying their rotten teeth as a status signifier.
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Having been born and raised in Alaska pretty much all of our produce is barged to Alaska from Bellingham, or Seattle WA. The first time I was in Phoenix and had access to fresh produce I almost became a vegetarian. The revelation that a tomato could be firm and not just a mushy watery flavorless bit of red. Or picking an orange off a tree that had been baking in the Phoenix sun all day and yet that 110 degree orange was the most flavorful and refreshing orange I’ll probably ever eat.
I’m back in Alaska currently and I sure do miss the fresh produce, although we have a few homespun hydroponic gardens that sell fresh produce year round and in the summer they grow in dirt outdoors as well I’ve bought a few of their veggies, but they want you to be on a monthly program with them where each month you get a small box full of fresh veggies and they are delicious, but it’s a bit too spendy for me. The housing situation in Juneau is crazy expensive for such a small town.
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Fresh spinach in a salad; it was like freakin’ Nirvana.
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If only you had more volcanos…
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Or ceiling beams. I was going to suggest that they either all had divots in their heads or developed spinal deformation in their 20s.
My uncle owns a cottage with a medieval section, and there are beams there that have smoothed sections polished with forehead grease from the generations of people who decided “my back can’t handle this anymore, I’m just going to take this one in the skull.”. My father’s 5’ 8" or 9" and he put three or four good dents in the last time we visited. My poor uncle is 6’ 1".
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Pickling and fermenting food was in wide use in Europe centuries before the Medieval period. Controlled spoilage essentially. Cheesemaking was also a widely used food preservation method. Getting that milk to last for weeks/months.
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My baby brother is probably 6’ 5". 
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i grew up in rural central texas on the farm and pasturage of my grandparents. from them and my parents i learned about gardens, orchards, canning, drying, and other preservation methods. when my grandparents were still able to work actively at it we had two large gardens plus a large field they used to grow potatoes in the spring and field corn in the fall. there were also 30-40 peach trees. a dozen plums, a dozen pears, and 5 or 6 apples. each year until i reached my early teens we would eat all the fresh produce we wanted while canning, drying, freezing, and pickling all the excess along the way. over the fall and winter we’d have the various stored vegetables and fruits from the growing season before. my grandfather raised cattle and one young bull would be fed out and slaughtered which provided a great deal of meat for the year to come. my parents and grandparents both had large deep freezes. i do a variety of canning each year just to keep my hand in.
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I recommend he not buy a thatched cottage in southern England, no matter how romantic.
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There is a very simple reason for all those low doors and ceilings, and it has nothing to do with how tall people were.
It’s called “fireplaces are very poor house-heating mechanisms”. Low ceilings and lower doors help keep the heat trapped low enough to be useful. Even rich people tended to have places that had a lot of small rooms that could be closed off when not needed.
As we got more efficient, things got bigger and more open. Try using a fireplace (an actual fireplace, not a woodstove) to keep a modern house warm during a winter power outage, and it becomes fairly obvious.
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We’ve been binge-watching Life Below Zero, and I’m fascinated by the diets, especially the Hailstones, who often mentioning trying to approximate how native people have hunted and eaten for thousands of years. Tons of animal products, not so much veggies. Kinda blows me away that humans survived and thrived there that long with such an amazingly unbalanced diet; I’ve been curious if there are foods their ancestors would have had access to that would have provided the sorts of nutrients that now they have to trade for or grow with a greenhouse or hydroponics.
Also, I’m totally curious how seal tastes. The Hailstones love their seal fat.
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Quite a bit of medieval food in these series:
and
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This is, pardon the pun, food for thought, because of course none of us in the modern era scientifically test food we’re not sure about. Despite all our modern trappings, on a personal level we’re still generally not doing anything for food safety more advanced than what we’ve done for thousands and thousands of years. And it’s always been good enough.
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Actually, it is, and quite potent to boot. It’s a hallucinogenic stimulant (when ground from whole, fresh nutmeg) when smoked. And ingesting somewhere around 5-15 grams can make you very ill, and possibly kill you. Yes, really.
…Yeah, I tried smoking fresh nutmeg. Yeah, it worked. NOT particularly pleasant, I gotta say; totally not worth even the experiment, I promise you. I strongly advise not making the same mistake. Smoke a doob instead =x.
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I, um, yeah… I knew that stuff.
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Fresh vegetables will make you gay!
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They weren’t. The short and unhealthy stuff came with movement to towns and cities, especially after the Enclosure Acts
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That could explain the doors, but not the beams (the ceiling is actually as high or higher than it is in my 1970 ranch house). Basically that part of his house is unlivable for someone over 5’ 7".
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I can’t resist…
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I’ve had it at a restaurant. It’s not bad dipped in ponzu, but not that great, either.
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