Week 3: Eating and drinking

Hello, I’m Helen King. And I’m Professor of Classical Studies here at The Open University. And I’m talking to Mathijs Lucassen from the School of Health, Wellbeing, and Social Care. Hello, again.

Hi.

So today we’re going to talk about food. And we still say you are what you eat. So we love a bit of comparison of ancient and current ideas about food and digestion. And I think one of the problems for me is the source material is quite difficult. So a lot of it is actually descriptions of banquets eaten by extremely powerful men, usually emperors, in the Roman world. So we get quite a skewed view maybe of what rich people ate or maybe just what people thought rich people ate.

So there’s a wonderful recipe I’ve got down here, something called the Shield of Minerva, served to the emperor Vitellius. It contains livers of char fish, brains of pheasants and peacocks, the tongues of flamingos, the entrails of lampreys which had been brought in ships of war as far as from the Carpathian Sea and the Spanish straits.

So it’s weird, and it’s also exotic. And I think quite a lot of discussions of food in the ancient world are about normal food versus exotic food. Do we have exotic foods today, do you think?

I think we still have the exotic foods. Like if I think about what’s exotic, it’s things like bananas or citrus fruits. It could be all sorts of delicious things we’ve got from all over the planet. But I think it’s a lot easier to access those because of modern shipping and freighting really.

Yes. So in the ancient world you haven’t got those sorts of transport links until you get the Roman Empire where they are getting food in from all over the place. But they’ve also got the idea that actually it’s somehow wrong to eat funny, foreign food and that if you do that you’ll get ill. So new diseases, according to one Roman writer, arise from new foodstuffs that we just can’t cope with, which I think sort of brings us to indigestion.

So when you can’t manage something, what do you do? Now, later this week we’ve got a video of a colleague of mine, Dr. Laurence Totelin, actually making a Roman indigestion remedy. And today it’s more like various sort of pills and potions that you have, usually something quite chalk-based to sort of calm down your stomach acid.

But to get to that point where you’re not eating the right things or you’re eating things that make you ill, let’s go back a step and think, what should you be eating in the first place? What is a healthy diet? What’s a healthy diet today?

Well, a healthy diet is we talk about balance. We have got--

Very ancient.

--the right sorts of mix of food, so the right minerals and nutrients and vitamins in your food. So it’s going to be some protein, some carbohydrate. We talk about five a day in terms of fruit and vegetables. Fresh fruit and vegetables are seen as being very important. We also measure these things in some ways, as well, because we’ll say there’s so many grammes of fat that you should be consuming a day , around 2,000 calories for an adult a day. And so we have some quite specific ideas around what’s thought to be healthy for diet.

And very specific numbers there that you brought out. So we’ve got the fruit in the fruit bowl here. So this comes from not exactly around the corner here, so transport links. But also you mentioned vitamins which, of course, they wouldn’t have known about in the ancient world at all.

It’s much more a question of what you can afford I suppose there and also how you can preserve it over the winter because that’s when the foodstuffs really reduced. We don’t have any of those issues now. But what do we do in terms of knowing what sort of body weight we should be aiming for? What’s the ideal now, do you think?

Well, there’s are all sorts of thoughts on what’s the ideal. Again, if we go back to sort of measurements, we’ve got the body mass index which will tell us how much we should weigh relative to our height as sort of a really crude measure of what we should be weight-wise. And we relate that to what we’re eating. And obviously, food and food intake is seen as being directly related to something like BMI.

Yeah. And, of course, nothing like that at all in the ancient world. We’ve got a bit of evidence of what they would have eaten as well from things like this. This is part of a pot for drinking water or for food. But also some of the cooking pots we have. These are bits of black-burnished ware from the Roman Britain area. And some of these will have traces on them where you can actually scientifically analyse what they might have been eating, which is really useful. So you can get some access to what ordinary people would have eaten in an ordinary diet.

But most of the time, I think the problem is just that we have very skewed evidence. I think that’s a problem in a lot of things in the ancient world, but particularly maybe with diet. So we try to get some sort of balance ourselves between literary sources, Shield of Minerva, and the sorts of things we can find about real diet to see what actually happened in the ancient world.

I suppose on balance, I’m wondering were they healthier than us or not. And from what you’re saying, they obviously didn’t know the things we know about food, but maybe they weren’t quite as driven by the latest fad, the latest diet craze, that we are. So perhaps overall they had quite a healthy, balanced diet.

And certainly one of the things that they would have done a lot better than modern people do now is the low levels of sugar that they were consuming.

Right

And we have such highly-processed foods with additives and preservatives. They would have had food that would have been seen as being more basic but also less interfered with.

So really the ancient diet is not healthy in the sense that they maybe didn’t have enough meat protein. But it’s also a lot healthier than ours in terms of sugar. And some of their ideas about food and excess are really quite similar to the ideas we have today, particularly about food coming from a long way away being not necessarily good for you. Thanks very much.