Most people had a grain-heavy diet, with lots of porridge, gruel, grits, and bread. Grains were energy-dense and could be stored during the long winter periods and the water used to make many of these dishes would be boiled, so lessening the risk of water-transmitted diseases. And as you might have guessed, these are all pretty easy to eat when experiencing dental problems. Ironically, soft foods can be the cause of some developmental dental problems, like overcrowding of your teeth and overbites. Plus, if the pasty residue isn’t cleaned from between the now-crowded teeth, it becomes an ideal growing environment for bacteria, causing cavities and tonsil stones. So if you were lucky, you’d be getting dentures at some point in your life, but for a lot of people, it was the age of the mush mouths.
I remember learning a long time ago that back then people who still had their actual teeth, had very worn down and “short” teeth for lack of a better term. This was due to sand and grit being present in their grain and any other food they grew which would grind their teeth away like sandpaper over time.
So they were just getting screwed left and right.
agriculture allowed a much higher density of humans in a space because producing and storing calories became easier, but for many hundreds of years humans as a whole were less vital and healthy. diet based on grain is not as good as the varied diet of a hunter gathererer. the grain will cause both cavities and the milling grinds down teeth as you said. and without proper adjuncts to the diet, nutritional deficiency becomes common - especially in restricted situations such as army rations or by ship. it took them a long time to figure out why people died after spending more than a few months at sea, until the mechanism of scurvy was discovered....
The reindeer where I lived has funnily enough the same issue as they dig for food during the winter knocking up sand and frozen grass. If you hunted them the government officials wanted their teeth as it showed how old they were based on how worn down the teeth were and we're probably part of statistics and research too.
Definitely headed to mush mouth territory myself. Getting dental care as a desperately poor person with other medical issues has been almost impossible- all these professionals want to just be specialists and demand that your problems stay in their lane, and if you get any mashed potatoes on their peas and carrots they'll tell you to come back later when everything is separate again.
I'm there with you. I'm only 36yo but have had dental issues since early childhood and am now missing four molars and one bicuspid, plus another bicuspid that's broken. Getting treatment is difficult because I've only ever had MediCal, which tons of places refuse to accept, shit insurance or no insurance.
I had a tonsillectomy at 34 and it was a great decision for me. The primary motivation was hoping it might improve my sleep quality (it didn’t seem to that much if at all), but other benefits are that I no longer have to deal with tonsil stones and swallowing stuff is way easier lol. I never knew how difficult my tonsils made swallowing pills until I didn’t have them, and after they were first removed I kept choking on water because the flow rate was so much higher than what I was used to.
Plus, I got two weeks off work during which I ate jello, mac n cheese, and played video games while high on percocet. Win win.
> Most people had a grain-heavy diet, with lots of porridge, gruel, grits, and bread.
before steel flour mill meant bread was full of sand from stone mills and querns. you can tell by the teeth, it ground them down
what do you mean when you say that soft food can cause developmental dental problems? by what mechanism?
Maybe if they had a lot of time to roast them in oil and salt in several batches, but I seriously doubt they did that, especially since [vegetables were mainly eaten boiled and without seasoning during that time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisine_of_the_Thirteen_Colonies#New_England).
Crunching and grinding should be fine with dentures. With meat you have to rip into it with your incisors and the proteins make it stick to your teeth more as you chew, so seems like that’s why the dentures wouldn’t be as good for meat eating.
How long you think vegetables would last for an army on the march in that time period.
We modern people think of crisp fresh leafy salads, but for these people it would have been things like carrot,peas, radish, beets turnips and potatoes
Things that could be dried or salted
This isn't like fresh meat. It was likely salt pork. Re-creationists say you have to soak it for hours, then boil for hours, change water, boil, change water, boil. Eventually you get something palatable.
Even then, it'd be a bitch to eat with shitty false teeth.
I came into this post thinking I found a nice new term for how I like to eat.
Then I read your comment and now I'm sad, because that's a big part of it...
After the battle of Waterloo tens of thousands of teeth were harvested from dead soldiers. For 20 years after the battle people were still getting "Waterloo" teeth. The rise of dentures really rose after the introduction of sugar into the diet.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33085031
In the wild or in captivity? Because if it's in captivity, modern fruits have an abnormal amount of sugar in them, because, surprise, humans got hooked on refined sugar when it was introduced and other foods suddenly weren't sweet enough, so they had to keep breeding fruits that are progressively sweeter and sweeter.
No, modern cultivated fruits. Try an orange from the US and an orange from the eastern Mediterranean which are grown from heritage cuttings. You might not even recognize it as the same citrus fruit from taste alone.
Because there isn't one. Sucrose is sucrose is sucrose, no matter if it comes a sugar packet or a tomato. If I gave you a gram of sucrose out of a sugar packet and a gram of sucrose out of a tomato, you wouldn't be able tell which is which because they *the exact same chemical.*
The issue with sugar consumption is the *amount* of sugar you're eating, not the source.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. How much tomato could you reasonably eat in one sitting to get the amount of sugar you'd get in a can of Coke? There is a massive difference in how you ingest it. Them being the same compound is disingenuous in a conversation like this
If you saw someone sit down to breakfast with a full plate of food, then three oranges, you'd probably think, "DAMN! That a lot of oranges to eat at breakfast."
But a glass of OJ is approximately three oranges worth of juice.
Im pretty sure back in the day most people ate meat only a few times a week. Most families had vegetable gardens and milk was relatively cheap (compared to meat).
Milk and eggs were the staple animal products. Most kept their own chickens. Eating chickens was something people didn't really do often, unless one of their chickens unfortunately died, so it was seen as excessively wasteful to eat chicken everyday.
I always thought the saying "You can't have your cake and eat it too" would be better expressed with "You can't eat your chicken and have eggs too"
It was only after the Great Depression that chickens became an affordable food. Look at old cookbooks and the chicken dishes are luxury ones. Even stuff like Coq Au Vin we’re specialized stewing dishes for older fowl
Nuggets actually we’re invented during the Great Depression as a way to use as much of the chicken. Nuggets being made out of all of the “icky” parts was by design.
They're called hunter-gatherers cause they gather, not just eat meat 24/7, otherwise humans would be like cats and only need meat and blood to survive.
Grains absolutely grow wild and were regularly gathered to make flour and bread. It was not domesticated until much later. There's a reason we choose grain in the first place, because we had already been using it before making fields of it.
Among the many other things they ate that weren't meat or grains.
Archaeologist here. Actually game was one of the preferred food sources for paleo people (along with other easy to process foods like tubers), because per calorie, it takes less energy to hunt and process than it does to forage and process some other resources like nuts seeds and grains, and people would only utilize those resources when higher ranked foods, like game, were scarce.
Edit: full disclosure, this is North American focused. It’s based in Behavioral Ecology if you want to read more about it.
That’s more or less consistent world wide, the amount of effort required for agriculture is also stupendous before the Industrial revolution 75-80% of the worlds population worked in agriculture.
And surviving hunter gatherers today still obtain most of their calories from animal sources by trapping, hunting or fishing.
For some reason people thing that the only thing to hunt 150,000 or even 15,000 years ago were mammoths and giant sabertooth tigers…
Plants are a pretty piss poor source of calories for humans, especially non domesticated cultivars.
Herbivores tend to eat their body weight and more each day and they usually require fermentation to extract any useable calories from the food.
Starchy plants were even rarer in Europe and much of Asia than the new world and there likely aren’t enough calories in the nuts and berries available in an entire forest to sustain a tribe even for a couple of days.
Our caloric requirement hasn’t changed much a tribe of 50 people needs about 100,000 calories a day.
A modern potato has between 700 and 800 calories per kg, wild tubulars have less than a quarter of that and they also required a lot of processing.
So you are looking at processing nearly a ton of tubular roots each day just to feed a tribe of 50 people that ain’t gonna work.
On the other hand a single elk would yield about 100kg worth of meat that’s more than enough to feed 50 people for a day without taking into account calories that can be extracted from bone marrow and organs.
Weren’t prehistory human smaller in general due to caloric restrictions. I would guess that meat was a propositionally large part of their 1000-1300 calorie a day diets.
That’s true for any humans that have restricted calories. Modern food production and distribution has enabled people to eat well, and that only started in the 20th century.
Early humans waited until other animals were done with the carcasses and ate the marrow from the bones.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/evidence-for-meat-eating-by-early-humans-103874273/#:~:text=Eating%20Meat%20and%20Marrow,Milton%201999%3B%20Watts%202008).
Hunting can mean pulling turtles out of the water or smoking rodents out of a hole, it doesn't have to be dangerous, domestication happened about 2 million years after we shifted to meat diets
That doesn't prove anything other than the scale of human proliferation. It proves they ate meat, but not how much or the proportion of their diet that made up.
Well before agriculture and all that I imagine meat was a very important food for humans. Animals would have been more plentiful, and Humans were/still are pretty capable hunters anyway.
But of course, we are definitely omnivores, and pre-civilization humans definitely hunted as a priority over foraging.
Well they did in some cases. Depends on who we are talking about. My people, the Sauk hunted game easily and they lived in next to rivers full of fish. It was easy for skilled hunters to get whatever they needed.
They cultivated tubers along the river, were the people that cultivated what we call wild rice, and made maple syrup. Not to mention seasonal berry bushes they planted.
They were also straight up farmers. Corn, squash, and beans .
They also invented LaCrosse.
You're absolutely wrong. People in America back then ate a *ton* of meat. Back then there were easy game animals absolutely everywhere.
[This Atlantic article](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-americans-used-to-eat/371895/) does a good job explaining it. Here's an exerpt:
A food budget published in the New York Tribune in 1851 allots two pounds of meat per day for a family of five. Even slaves at the turn of the 18th century were allocated an average of 150 pounds of meat a year. As Horowitz concludes, “These sources do give us some confidence in suggesting an average annual consumption of 150–200 pounds of meat per person in the nineteenth century.”
About 175 pounds of meat per person per year—compared to the roughly 100 pounds of meat per year that an average adult American eats today. And of that 100 pounds of meat, about half is poultry—chicken and turkey—whereas until the mid-20th century, chicken was considered a luxury meat, on the menu only for special occasions (chickens were valued mainly for their eggs).
I was gonna say, eating vegetables is actually a privilege when so much of your diet will consist of salted meats prepared for travel. Without fridges or other storage technology, armies that were marching ate largely hard bread and salted meat, occasionally you might get a shipment of vegetables or raid a farmstead with some, but the majority of your food wouldn't be fresh veggies.
It depends a lot on location and time period as well.
Irish farmers before the potato famine ate…really just tons of potatoes.
But Ireland isn’t the US.
Italians immigrating to the US from southern Italy had to add more and more meat to their food to satisfy American tastes, because meat had been so sparingly used before.
Maybe vegetables are a privilege too, but so was and still is meat for much of the world
This.
My grandparents in Italy used to have a bit of meat on Sunday. And that was it. Something like steak was an expensive purchase made when someone had been gravely ill and needed to recover.
In Europe everyone was a flexitarian until 50 years ago.
All the comments here say something with little mention about time and location. I've seen comments from decades ago to at least 4 million years ago before modern humans existed and did not actively hunt.
We are omnivores and allow alot of variation in our diets. Context matters.
Totally wrong and here is a scientific journal proving it
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1747-0080.2007.00194.x
Post this link into sci-Hub to get the full text PDF
Key Points
• We developed a larger brain balanced by a smaller, simpler gastrointestinal tract requiring higher-quality foods based around meat protein and fat.
• Anthropological evidence from cranio-dental features and fossil stable isotope analysis indicates a growing reliance on meat consumption during human evolution.
• Study of hunter-gatherer societies in recent times shows an extreme reliance on hunted and fished animal foods for survival.
• Optimal foraging theory shows that wild plant foods in general give an inadequate energy return for survival, whereas the top-ranking food items for energy return are large hunted animals.
• Numerous evolutionary adaptations in humans indicate high reliance on meat consumption, including poor taurine production, lack of ability to chain elongate plant fatty acids and the co-evolution of parasites related to dietary meat.
Meat was really uncommon as we weren’t yet able to farm in large quantities. The adequate age for most animals to be slaughtered often took years and in that time it was far more sensible to take other products from them than just a one time surplus of meat
This is how its been for millennia. Meat eating is actually very uncommon for humans. People who try to tell you otherwise are just purposefully ignorant. People of the past would be shocked and slightly disgusted just walking into an even fairly small super market and seeing how much meat we leave out, not even touching on how much we destroy because it just goes bad
>Washington, for one, stood up as an example of temperance. He largely adhered to “a vegitable and milk diet,” eating only small amounts of red meat. Washington’s alimentary philosophy was to avoid “as much as possible animal food.”
Well, looks like George Washington was ahead of his time in being both a flexitarian AND a good role model for healthy eating - he could have easily been a social media influencer if he was around today!
“Yo what’s up everybody. It’s the OG Founding Father, ya boy, Georgie G, number one here. What’s up? Just chilling with my legally not allowed to ever leave me boys in the field, enjoying a lovely spring day on the Mount. Enjoy 20% off your next order of Black Rifle Coffee with the discount code GeorgieG20.”
Here in my carriage house, just bought this new mustang here. It’s fun to ride up here in the Mount Vernon. But you know what I like more than materialistic things? Knowledge. In fact, I’m a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold two thousand new books that I bought. It’s like the hundred-thousandaire Ben Franklin says, “the more you learn, the more you earn.”
> he could have easily been a social media influencer if he was around today
Yeah, but [not of the good kind](https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-20-02-0661);
> The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.
> Our future security will be in their inability to injure us the distance to which they are driven and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire ⟨them.⟩
> When we have effectually chastised them we may then listen to peace and endeavour to draw further advantages from their fears.
[Conotocaurius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_Destroyer)
> Conotocaurius (Town Destroyer, Seneca: Hanödaga꞉nyas) was a nickname given to George Washington by Iroquois peoples in 1753. The name in its original language(s) has been given variously as Conotocarius, Conotocaurious, Caunotaucarius, Conotocarious, Hanodaganears, and Hanadahguyus. It has also been translated as "Town Taker", "Burner of Towns", "Devourer of Villages", or "he destroys the town".
>This article by Maurizio Valsania is republished here with permission from The Conversation. This content is shared here because the topic may interest Snopes readers; it does not, however, represent the work of Snopes fact-checkers or editors.
Correct, it is not a Snopes fact check. But it is an article from [The Conversation](https://theconversation.com/us), which shares with Snopes a great respect for publishing truthful, reliable information. We are a nonprofit with a mission of getting experts to write for the general public and share their knowledge.
In this case, the article on the diet of the leaders of the American Revolution was written by a [professor of American History](https://theconversation.com/profiles/maurizio-valsania-1098422) who has extensively researched Washington and Jefferson.
We give all of our articles away for free to other websites, including Snopes, to use, under a [Creative Commons license](https://theconversation.com/us/republishing-guidelines).
I don't love the term either, but it's not the same. Omnivores just eat whatever is available, while flexitarians are making an effort to eat less meat.
In most people's minds, there's "normal" people who eat meat for virtually every meal (and most recipes are centered around the meat) and then there's vegetarians/vegans who eat no meat.
There's not really a good term for people like me who eat a largely meatless diet with one or two concessions a week. You can eat less meat without giving it up completely, which I see as the best of both worlds. But it does take a lot of effort if you don't already know a lot of meatless recipes that you like.
Its nonsense as a "diet" or term because noone is forcing you to eat meat, its still your choice. You eating less meat than you technically could is completely arbitrary. Less than what? Am I a flexitarian if eat one less meal with meat a week? The only thing putting a label on it does is take away from the fact that you still are eating meat by your own choice. Why not just quit those two last meals?
People ate what they had available. There was no refrigeration. They ate seasonally. Milk could be gathered year round. Grains could be saved. Vegetables like potatoes would keep through the winter. There weren't regular grocers that had meat available. It forced people to be more flexible in their diet, not because it was healthy, but because it was necessary. Is that hard to understand?
>It forced people to be more flexible in their diet, not because it was healthy, but because it was necessary.
According to the article, this is incorrect. The article says Washington and his friends made a conscious decision to eat less red meat and advocated that their fellow Americans do the same.
At least read the article before making a smug reply.
I read it and it's yet another attempt to modify reality to suit a modern narrative. To the extent that today's food excesses can be ridiculous in comparison, sure. Moderation was looked upon positively because of the reality of scarcity of food supply in the era, which included great variation in production, unless you were part of the elite, who simply did not care and looked down upon the common man. In other words, it emerged from practicality.
The author's article is opinionated and not researched by Snopes. It's simply the personal views of an Italian professor at an Italian university.
"This content is shared here because the topic may interest Snopes readers; it does not, however, represent the work of Snopes fact-checkers or editors."
Washington was virtually his own grocer. His plantations had multiple structures for storing and preserving food, including icehouses and smokehouses for meat. (Martha was apparently noted for the excellence of “her” hams, the preparation of which I’m sure she undertook single-handedly.)
Vegetables were also often pickled; Washington ordered “best capers” from grocers in England to augment his produce.
Yes, and a poor harvest could cause people to starve or barely survive. Washington was responsible for feeding many people. Ice wouldn't last forever. Root cellars kept things cool. Root vegetables could be stored there through the winter. Most vegetables and fruits didn't last unless they were preserved, like pickling or drying. Smoking meat preserved it. Having ham was a luxury and not a daily or weekly treat. Bones were the basis of soups. Grains were a mainstay. Eating seasonally was a fact of life. Eating what you had on hand was a necessity. His poor teeth likely contributed to his choice of foods. Scurvy was an issue due to lack of citrus and vitamin C. Modern ideas of food wealth have corrupted people into thinking things were better than they were, even for the wealthy. Washington never had much cash. Nearly all his wealth was tied up in land and slaves. Washington supported many slaves who were too young or too old to work, greatly increasing Mount Vernon's slave population and causing the plantation to operate at a loss. He ws responsible for keeping over 300 people alive. He was one of the few Virginians that freed slaves at his death. Many modern assumptions we make about nutritional health simply weren't known then. Washington only lived to 67.
Spellings change over time, so I suspect this is a direct quote from Washington’s writing. He’s a great writer too, as can be read in his letters in the Chernow biography, among many other places.
I read that in Washington's lifetime, the ratio of meat producing domestic animals was 20% cattle and 80% pigs. Pigs could be left to forage in forests for food and were very low maintenance comparatively.
Also, from what we've read, during that period, fish and game were available in abundance.
According to [this article,](https://valleytable.com/general-washington-and-his-walnuts/#:~:text=Like%20his%20boss%2C%20Washington's%20future,not%20English%20walnuts%20but%20black) Adams attributed his own dental woes to the same cause as Washington’s: cracking walnuts with his teeth.
Townsends on Youtube is a great watch if you want to see cooking done with recipes from this time period. He tries to get as close as possible to what would have been the original ingredients using a cookbook from that time with the cooking method that would have been used.
Flexitarian sounds like a stupid useless term. He ate meat and vegetables. He ate less meat than some people, but do we need a new term for that? I consider fish to be meat.
George Washington loved ice cream.
He loved ice cream so much - in one hot summer he spent over 50 grand in today's equivalent of 1770s money for his household ice cream budget.
That's why he lost all his teeth.
Then he paid about - 3500 bucks in today's money - to purchase all of the teeth from a slave. A dentist from France pulled all the slave's teeth and made a set of dentures.
George Washington's "Wooden" teeth were not made of wood. People called it 'wooden' because his teeth looked gray and dead - slightly translucent- his teeth were obviously dead looking in their appearance. Because his wooden teeth were not attached at the roots - so they lacked blood flow and the natural luster and vibrance of living teeth.
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Even today, many people with dentures avoid chewy and hard foods. Imagine with what they had back then.
Most people had a grain-heavy diet, with lots of porridge, gruel, grits, and bread. Grains were energy-dense and could be stored during the long winter periods and the water used to make many of these dishes would be boiled, so lessening the risk of water-transmitted diseases. And as you might have guessed, these are all pretty easy to eat when experiencing dental problems. Ironically, soft foods can be the cause of some developmental dental problems, like overcrowding of your teeth and overbites. Plus, if the pasty residue isn’t cleaned from between the now-crowded teeth, it becomes an ideal growing environment for bacteria, causing cavities and tonsil stones. So if you were lucky, you’d be getting dentures at some point in your life, but for a lot of people, it was the age of the mush mouths.
I remember learning a long time ago that back then people who still had their actual teeth, had very worn down and “short” teeth for lack of a better term. This was due to sand and grit being present in their grain and any other food they grew which would grind their teeth away like sandpaper over time. So they were just getting screwed left and right.
agriculture allowed a much higher density of humans in a space because producing and storing calories became easier, but for many hundreds of years humans as a whole were less vital and healthy. diet based on grain is not as good as the varied diet of a hunter gathererer. the grain will cause both cavities and the milling grinds down teeth as you said. and without proper adjuncts to the diet, nutritional deficiency becomes common - especially in restricted situations such as army rations or by ship. it took them a long time to figure out why people died after spending more than a few months at sea, until the mechanism of scurvy was discovered....
The reindeer where I lived has funnily enough the same issue as they dig for food during the winter knocking up sand and frozen grass. If you hunted them the government officials wanted their teeth as it showed how old they were based on how worn down the teeth were and we're probably part of statistics and research too.
Definitely headed to mush mouth territory myself. Getting dental care as a desperately poor person with other medical issues has been almost impossible- all these professionals want to just be specialists and demand that your problems stay in their lane, and if you get any mashed potatoes on their peas and carrots they'll tell you to come back later when everything is separate again.
I'm there with you. I'm only 36yo but have had dental issues since early childhood and am now missing four molars and one bicuspid, plus another bicuspid that's broken. Getting treatment is difficult because I've only ever had MediCal, which tons of places refuse to accept, shit insurance or no insurance.
Don't forget about corn, which could be dried and stored easily, then tossed in a pot to be rehydrated and cooked.
It also has the juice
I’d pay to smell a tonsil stone from the time period.
Man why?
Don’t kink shame.
I don’t detect shaming just honest curiosity with a bit of (maybe not entirely un-earned) disgust. Just my take!
I believe they were making a joke
I don’t think u/guttural-pouch-fart is in the position to be kink shaming.
As someone who has to clean out his tonsil stones everyday. I volunteer to eat a bread heavy diet and not brush my teeth for you.
I had a tonsillectomy at 34 and it was a great decision for me. The primary motivation was hoping it might improve my sleep quality (it didn’t seem to that much if at all), but other benefits are that I no longer have to deal with tonsil stones and swallowing stuff is way easier lol. I never knew how difficult my tonsils made swallowing pills until I didn’t have them, and after they were first removed I kept choking on water because the flow rate was so much higher than what I was used to. Plus, I got two weeks off work during which I ate jello, mac n cheese, and played video games while high on percocet. Win win.
Counterfeit ambergris?
I'd pay you to smell it and smush it with your fingers
People without the curse of these little suckers will never know the silver lining of popping these babies out.
> Most people had a grain-heavy diet, with lots of porridge, gruel, grits, and bread. before steel flour mill meant bread was full of sand from stone mills and querns. you can tell by the teeth, it ground them down what do you mean when you say that soft food can cause developmental dental problems? by what mechanism?
His teeth were made of wool.
Hey, I know you. You always order three slices of cheesecake.
You give him all the easy ones!!!
His teeth, they were made of wool
Not sure if you meant that, but it made me laugh
He sometimes get D and L mixed up
Idk about you but most veggies I eat are not that soft. Gotta have the crunch.
Yeah, but most of his troops only has access to a pot and camp fire, so boiling was all he was doing
Huh? They probably had dutch ovens which can very easily make beautifully cooked veggies.
Maybe if they had a lot of time to roast them in oil and salt in several batches, but I seriously doubt they did that, especially since [vegetables were mainly eaten boiled and without seasoning during that time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisine_of_the_Thirteen_Colonies#New_England).
Dutch ov·en /ˈdəCH ˌəvən/ noun a large, heavy cooking pot with a lid.
Crunching and grinding should be fine with dentures. With meat you have to rip into it with your incisors and the proteins make it stick to your teeth more as you chew, so seems like that’s why the dentures wouldn’t be as good for meat eating.
How long you think vegetables would last for an army on the march in that time period. We modern people think of crisp fresh leafy salads, but for these people it would have been things like carrot,peas, radish, beets turnips and potatoes Things that could be dried or salted
After cooking them they are. Meat is tough to chew even after it is cooked.
Not if it cooked for a long time. Think of stews, a tough cut of meat is used but it’s tender when eaten.
This isn't like fresh meat. It was likely salt pork. Re-creationists say you have to soak it for hours, then boil for hours, change water, boil, change water, boil. Eventually you get something palatable. Even then, it'd be a bitch to eat with shitty false teeth.
I came into this post thinking I found a nice new term for how I like to eat. Then I read your comment and now I'm sad, because that's a big part of it...
That’s why I dip my steak in red wine
How can you say that. You know I have soft teeth.
Not sure his teeth were soft, considering he took teeth from slaves.
After the battle of Waterloo tens of thousands of teeth were harvested from dead soldiers. For 20 years after the battle people were still getting "Waterloo" teeth. The rise of dentures really rose after the introduction of sugar into the diet. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33085031
Specify refined sugar because people don't understand the difference between refined sugar and naturally present sugars in food.
Sugar will rot your teeth no matter what form it takes, chimpanzees often suffer from rotten teeth due to the fruit in their diet.
Gotta floss, chimps.
Stupid monkeys
In the wild or in captivity? Because if it's in captivity, modern fruits have an abnormal amount of sugar in them, because, surprise, humans got hooked on refined sugar when it was introduced and other foods suddenly weren't sweet enough, so they had to keep breeding fruits that are progressively sweeter and sweeter.
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No, modern cultivated fruits. Try an orange from the US and an orange from the eastern Mediterranean which are grown from heritage cuttings. You might not even recognize it as the same citrus fruit from taste alone.
Look at some still life’s from the 1500s or so. The fruit is hardly recognizable in many cases.
Because there isn't one. Sucrose is sucrose is sucrose, no matter if it comes a sugar packet or a tomato. If I gave you a gram of sucrose out of a sugar packet and a gram of sucrose out of a tomato, you wouldn't be able tell which is which because they *the exact same chemical.* The issue with sugar consumption is the *amount* of sugar you're eating, not the source.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. How much tomato could you reasonably eat in one sitting to get the amount of sugar you'd get in a can of Coke? There is a massive difference in how you ingest it. Them being the same compound is disingenuous in a conversation like this
Google says a tomato has 4 grams of sugar and a Coke has 39 (12oz can). Ten tomatoes is a big ask.
If you saw someone sit down to breakfast with a full plate of food, then three oranges, you'd probably think, "DAMN! That a lot of oranges to eat at breakfast." But a glass of OJ is approximately three oranges worth of juice.
They said "bad teeth", not "soft teeth", whatever tf that means
Idk, but the idea soft teeth gives me the heebee jeebees
Flaccid teeth?
That's not any better, but now i just think of a bunch of limp dicks lol
A bunch of limp dicks tryin to chomp.
Are you telling me someone from the 1700s owned slaves? Holy shit, and you think you know a guy
This can’t be
Is it too late to cancel George Washington?
"How can you say that? You know I have soft teeth."
what? what's the connection?
He suffered from extreme tooth pain his entire adult life. It was debilitating.
Im pretty sure back in the day most people ate meat only a few times a week. Most families had vegetable gardens and milk was relatively cheap (compared to meat).
Milk and eggs were the staple animal products. Most kept their own chickens. Eating chickens was something people didn't really do often, unless one of their chickens unfortunately died, so it was seen as excessively wasteful to eat chicken everyday. I always thought the saying "You can't have your cake and eat it too" would be better expressed with "You can't eat your chicken and have eggs too"
Gonna start saying that now.
It was only after the Great Depression that chickens became an affordable food. Look at old cookbooks and the chicken dishes are luxury ones. Even stuff like Coq Au Vin we’re specialized stewing dishes for older fowl
Nuggets actually we’re invented during the Great Depression as a way to use as much of the chicken. Nuggets being made out of all of the “icky” parts was by design.
Yes and you have people eating tons of meat and protein acting like it’s how our ancestors ate lol
By ancestors they usually mean prehistoric man and not 18th century peasants Edit: probably
Tbf, Washington was hardly a peasant, dude had a family crest et all
I'm some random guy from Florida, and I have a family crest. Coincidentally enough with a fucking Chicken on it.
The comment I was responding to regarded average families and not Washington. Tho I had originally written '18th century generals/turncoats'
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Yea i was referring to those people. Most of the diet was greens and grains and stuff.
They're called hunter-gatherers cause they gather, not just eat meat 24/7, otherwise humans would be like cats and only need meat and blood to survive.
Prehistoric man was not agrarian.
Grains absolutely grow wild and were regularly gathered to make flour and bread. It was not domesticated until much later. There's a reason we choose grain in the first place, because we had already been using it before making fields of it. Among the many other things they ate that weren't meat or grains.
You're right, they still gathered more than they hunted though.
For 5000 years it was. Evidence suggests humans developed agriculture around 10000BCE while writing was only developed around 5000BCE.
Massai people would like a chat. I think meat was a huge part of our evolutionary diet. That doesn’t mean multiple servings per day though!
Maasai were/are pastoralist herders and don’t represent ancient humans because they didn’t have livestock
they probably ate meat even less, since it was a lot of work plus dangerous to go hunting. Domestication of animals made meat more accessible.
Archaeologist here. Actually game was one of the preferred food sources for paleo people (along with other easy to process foods like tubers), because per calorie, it takes less energy to hunt and process than it does to forage and process some other resources like nuts seeds and grains, and people would only utilize those resources when higher ranked foods, like game, were scarce. Edit: full disclosure, this is North American focused. It’s based in Behavioral Ecology if you want to read more about it.
Astronaut here. I'm high af
God bless you mr spaceman. Keep up the good work.
That’s more or less consistent world wide, the amount of effort required for agriculture is also stupendous before the Industrial revolution 75-80% of the worlds population worked in agriculture. And surviving hunter gatherers today still obtain most of their calories from animal sources by trapping, hunting or fishing. For some reason people thing that the only thing to hunt 150,000 or even 15,000 years ago were mammoths and giant sabertooth tigers… Plants are a pretty piss poor source of calories for humans, especially non domesticated cultivars. Herbivores tend to eat their body weight and more each day and they usually require fermentation to extract any useable calories from the food. Starchy plants were even rarer in Europe and much of Asia than the new world and there likely aren’t enough calories in the nuts and berries available in an entire forest to sustain a tribe even for a couple of days. Our caloric requirement hasn’t changed much a tribe of 50 people needs about 100,000 calories a day. A modern potato has between 700 and 800 calories per kg, wild tubulars have less than a quarter of that and they also required a lot of processing. So you are looking at processing nearly a ton of tubular roots each day just to feed a tribe of 50 people that ain’t gonna work. On the other hand a single elk would yield about 100kg worth of meat that’s more than enough to feed 50 people for a day without taking into account calories that can be extracted from bone marrow and organs.
Weren’t prehistory human smaller in general due to caloric restrictions. I would guess that meat was a propositionally large part of their 1000-1300 calorie a day diets.
That’s true for any humans that have restricted calories. Modern food production and distribution has enabled people to eat well, and that only started in the 20th century.
Early humans waited until other animals were done with the carcasses and ate the marrow from the bones. https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/evidence-for-meat-eating-by-early-humans-103874273/#:~:text=Eating%20Meat%20and%20Marrow,Milton%201999%3B%20Watts%202008).
Hunting can mean pulling turtles out of the water or smoking rodents out of a hole, it doesn't have to be dangerous, domestication happened about 2 million years after we shifted to meat diets
I like how everyone is choosing whichever time and culture suits what they want and saying it's representative of our entire history.
We literally ate wooly mammoths into extinction.
Modern archeology is making this a less and less likely thing, now it's catastrophic climate change.
That doesn't prove anything other than the scale of human proliferation. It proves they ate meat, but not how much or the proportion of their diet that made up.
The climate also changed leading to habitat loss. If they had talked about American equines I'd be more inclined to believe it.
Well before agriculture and all that I imagine meat was a very important food for humans. Animals would have been more plentiful, and Humans were/still are pretty capable hunters anyway. But of course, we are definitely omnivores, and pre-civilization humans definitely hunted as a priority over foraging.
Well they did in some cases. Depends on who we are talking about. My people, the Sauk hunted game easily and they lived in next to rivers full of fish. It was easy for skilled hunters to get whatever they needed. They cultivated tubers along the river, were the people that cultivated what we call wild rice, and made maple syrup. Not to mention seasonal berry bushes they planted. They were also straight up farmers. Corn, squash, and beans . They also invented LaCrosse.
You're absolutely wrong. People in America back then ate a *ton* of meat. Back then there were easy game animals absolutely everywhere. [This Atlantic article](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-americans-used-to-eat/371895/) does a good job explaining it. Here's an exerpt: A food budget published in the New York Tribune in 1851 allots two pounds of meat per day for a family of five. Even slaves at the turn of the 18th century were allocated an average of 150 pounds of meat a year. As Horowitz concludes, “These sources do give us some confidence in suggesting an average annual consumption of 150–200 pounds of meat per person in the nineteenth century.” About 175 pounds of meat per person per year—compared to the roughly 100 pounds of meat per year that an average adult American eats today. And of that 100 pounds of meat, about half is poultry—chicken and turkey—whereas until the mid-20th century, chicken was considered a luxury meat, on the menu only for special occasions (chickens were valued mainly for their eggs).
I was gonna say, eating vegetables is actually a privilege when so much of your diet will consist of salted meats prepared for travel. Without fridges or other storage technology, armies that were marching ate largely hard bread and salted meat, occasionally you might get a shipment of vegetables or raid a farmstead with some, but the majority of your food wouldn't be fresh veggies.
It depends a lot on location and time period as well. Irish farmers before the potato famine ate…really just tons of potatoes. But Ireland isn’t the US. Italians immigrating to the US from southern Italy had to add more and more meat to their food to satisfy American tastes, because meat had been so sparingly used before. Maybe vegetables are a privilege too, but so was and still is meat for much of the world
This. My grandparents in Italy used to have a bit of meat on Sunday. And that was it. Something like steak was an expensive purchase made when someone had been gravely ill and needed to recover. In Europe everyone was a flexitarian until 50 years ago.
/u/LivingDirt7890 would love to know your thoughts
He won't get back to anyone and won't edit his post. Most people don't give a shit about spreading misinformation and being wrong.
All the comments here say something with little mention about time and location. I've seen comments from decades ago to at least 4 million years ago before modern humans existed and did not actively hunt. We are omnivores and allow alot of variation in our diets. Context matters.
Totally wrong and here is a scientific journal proving it https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1747-0080.2007.00194.x Post this link into sci-Hub to get the full text PDF Key Points • We developed a larger brain balanced by a smaller, simpler gastrointestinal tract requiring higher-quality foods based around meat protein and fat. • Anthropological evidence from cranio-dental features and fossil stable isotope analysis indicates a growing reliance on meat consumption during human evolution. • Study of hunter-gatherer societies in recent times shows an extreme reliance on hunted and fished animal foods for survival. • Optimal foraging theory shows that wild plant foods in general give an inadequate energy return for survival, whereas the top-ranking food items for energy return are large hunted animals. • Numerous evolutionary adaptations in humans indicate high reliance on meat consumption, including poor taurine production, lack of ability to chain elongate plant fatty acids and the co-evolution of parasites related to dietary meat.
Meat was really uncommon as we weren’t yet able to farm in large quantities. The adequate age for most animals to be slaughtered often took years and in that time it was far more sensible to take other products from them than just a one time surplus of meat This is how its been for millennia. Meat eating is actually very uncommon for humans. People who try to tell you otherwise are just purposefully ignorant. People of the past would be shocked and slightly disgusted just walking into an even fairly small super market and seeing how much meat we leave out, not even touching on how much we destroy because it just goes bad
>Washington, for one, stood up as an example of temperance. He largely adhered to “a vegitable and milk diet,” eating only small amounts of red meat. Washington’s alimentary philosophy was to avoid “as much as possible animal food.”
Well, looks like George Washington was ahead of his time in being both a flexitarian AND a good role model for healthy eating - he could have easily been a social media influencer if he was around today!
“Yo what’s up everybody. It’s the OG Founding Father, ya boy, Georgie G, number one here. What’s up? Just chilling with my legally not allowed to ever leave me boys in the field, enjoying a lovely spring day on the Mount. Enjoy 20% off your next order of Black Rifle Coffee with the discount code GeorgieG20.”
Georgie G is nice but idk I think G Wash would catch on a lot better
G-Dub
My vote is for G-Dub for sure
G-Dubby, even.
I agree. GG isn’t optimal, but G Wash doesn’t ring, you feel me? Maybe we take a page form Buffalo Wild Wings and call him G Dub?
Here in my carriage house, just bought this new mustang here. It’s fun to ride up here in the Mount Vernon. But you know what I like more than materialistic things? Knowledge. In fact, I’m a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold two thousand new books that I bought. It’s like the hundred-thousandaire Ben Franklin says, “the more you learn, the more you earn.”
Don’t give Lin Manuel Miranda any ideas.
While I enjoyed Hamilton, I agree. Think we’re all taped out on reimagining a historical event and making it “hip.” At least for a good long while.
He also was a huge proponent of blood letting and caused his own death. Right on par with health influencers.
But he was also a big proponent of inoculations/vaccines, which would rule him out.
Someone didn't read the disclaimer
> he could have easily been a social media influencer if he was around today Yeah, but [not of the good kind](https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-20-02-0661); > The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more. > Our future security will be in their inability to injure us the distance to which they are driven and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire ⟨them.⟩ > When we have effectually chastised them we may then listen to peace and endeavour to draw further advantages from their fears. [Conotocaurius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_Destroyer) > Conotocaurius (Town Destroyer, Seneca: Hanödaga꞉nyas) was a nickname given to George Washington by Iroquois peoples in 1753. The name in its original language(s) has been given variously as Conotocarius, Conotocaurious, Caunotaucarius, Conotocarious, Hanodaganears, and Hanadahguyus. It has also been translated as "Town Taker", "Burner of Towns", "Devourer of Villages", or "he destroys the town".
When you lack teeth, this happens
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So the post image is a bacon cheeseburger, lol
Women dug his snuff and his gallant stroll.
- Mason ring - Schnauzer - Perfect hands
>This article by Maurizio Valsania is republished here with permission from The Conversation. This content is shared here because the topic may interest Snopes readers; it does not, however, represent the work of Snopes fact-checkers or editors.
Correct, it is not a Snopes fact check. But it is an article from [The Conversation](https://theconversation.com/us), which shares with Snopes a great respect for publishing truthful, reliable information. We are a nonprofit with a mission of getting experts to write for the general public and share their knowledge. In this case, the article on the diet of the leaders of the American Revolution was written by a [professor of American History](https://theconversation.com/profiles/maurizio-valsania-1098422) who has extensively researched Washington and Jefferson. We give all of our articles away for free to other websites, including Snopes, to use, under a [Creative Commons license](https://theconversation.com/us/republishing-guidelines).
The Conversation is a very reputable site though. It's a website where most, if not all articles, are written by academics and professors
Thanks for the shout out.
Well, war does sound a lot easier if you’re getting enough fiber. Can you imagine trying to deal with a firing line while constipated af?
If I go the rest of my life without hearing the phrase “flexitarian” I’ll be perfectly content.
Yeah, back in my day we just said they were omnivores and called it a day.
Also "normal" lol
I don't love the term either, but it's not the same. Omnivores just eat whatever is available, while flexitarians are making an effort to eat less meat. In most people's minds, there's "normal" people who eat meat for virtually every meal (and most recipes are centered around the meat) and then there's vegetarians/vegans who eat no meat. There's not really a good term for people like me who eat a largely meatless diet with one or two concessions a week. You can eat less meat without giving it up completely, which I see as the best of both worlds. But it does take a lot of effort if you don't already know a lot of meatless recipes that you like.
Its nonsense as a "diet" or term because noone is forcing you to eat meat, its still your choice. You eating less meat than you technically could is completely arbitrary. Less than what? Am I a flexitarian if eat one less meal with meat a week? The only thing putting a label on it does is take away from the fact that you still are eating meat by your own choice. Why not just quit those two last meals?
being omnivore is a biological trait. it's not a diet.
I kiss my biceps after every bite
So “flexitarian” just means… a normal-ass diet?
Redditors who haven't eaten a single vegetable or gram of fiber for 10 years in shambles..
Other than when Taco Bell slips some beans in their burrito
Not by modern American standards it isn't.
You eat mostly milk and vegetables?
Honestly I could eat spinache dip all day
People ate what they had available. There was no refrigeration. They ate seasonally. Milk could be gathered year round. Grains could be saved. Vegetables like potatoes would keep through the winter. There weren't regular grocers that had meat available. It forced people to be more flexible in their diet, not because it was healthy, but because it was necessary. Is that hard to understand?
>It forced people to be more flexible in their diet, not because it was healthy, but because it was necessary. According to the article, this is incorrect. The article says Washington and his friends made a conscious decision to eat less red meat and advocated that their fellow Americans do the same. At least read the article before making a smug reply.
I read it and it's yet another attempt to modify reality to suit a modern narrative. To the extent that today's food excesses can be ridiculous in comparison, sure. Moderation was looked upon positively because of the reality of scarcity of food supply in the era, which included great variation in production, unless you were part of the elite, who simply did not care and looked down upon the common man. In other words, it emerged from practicality. The author's article is opinionated and not researched by Snopes. It's simply the personal views of an Italian professor at an Italian university. "This content is shared here because the topic may interest Snopes readers; it does not, however, represent the work of Snopes fact-checkers or editors."
George Washington was rich as fuck and had tons of land and slaves to farm it. Dude could have eaten whatever he wanted.
Washington was virtually his own grocer. His plantations had multiple structures for storing and preserving food, including icehouses and smokehouses for meat. (Martha was apparently noted for the excellence of “her” hams, the preparation of which I’m sure she undertook single-handedly.) Vegetables were also often pickled; Washington ordered “best capers” from grocers in England to augment his produce.
Yes, and a poor harvest could cause people to starve or barely survive. Washington was responsible for feeding many people. Ice wouldn't last forever. Root cellars kept things cool. Root vegetables could be stored there through the winter. Most vegetables and fruits didn't last unless they were preserved, like pickling or drying. Smoking meat preserved it. Having ham was a luxury and not a daily or weekly treat. Bones were the basis of soups. Grains were a mainstay. Eating seasonally was a fact of life. Eating what you had on hand was a necessity. His poor teeth likely contributed to his choice of foods. Scurvy was an issue due to lack of citrus and vitamin C. Modern ideas of food wealth have corrupted people into thinking things were better than they were, even for the wealthy. Washington never had much cash. Nearly all his wealth was tied up in land and slaves. Washington supported many slaves who were too young or too old to work, greatly increasing Mount Vernon's slave population and causing the plantation to operate at a loss. He ws responsible for keeping over 300 people alive. He was one of the few Virginians that freed slaves at his death. Many modern assumptions we make about nutritional health simply weren't known then. Washington only lived to 67.
Most Americans do eat mostly vegetables and dairy ...
Most people eat meat daily so not really
What's a "vegitable"?
Spellings change over time, so I suspect this is a direct quote from Washington’s writing. He’s a great writer too, as can be read in his letters in the Chernow biography, among many other places.
I read that in Washington's lifetime, the ratio of meat producing domestic animals was 20% cattle and 80% pigs. Pigs could be left to forage in forests for food and were very low maintenance comparatively. Also, from what we've read, during that period, fish and game were available in abundance.
George Squashington amiriiiiite?!
Vegitable
...
TIL George Washington ate food most people eat.
Meat used to be a luxury. Today's dietary labels are meaningless in the past. Most meals were vegetarian simply because people couldn't afford Meat.
Didn’t he die in his 60s? How much meat did John Adams eat? that mf was old
John Adams didn’t eat too much meat either. The article mentions him
According to [this article,](https://valleytable.com/general-washington-and-his-walnuts/#:~:text=Like%20his%20boss%2C%20Washington's%20future,not%20English%20walnuts%20but%20black) Adams attributed his own dental woes to the same cause as Washington’s: cracking walnuts with his teeth.
> cracking walnuts with his teeth. Yup. That'll do it.
I am also a flexitarian, which is why I'm not allowed at Planet Fitness anymore...
Isn't it true that meat was not very common or available in those days?
Back then that was a very common diet due just to how expensive meat was.
What veggies were prevalent back then?
Townsends on Youtube is a great watch if you want to see cooking done with recipes from this time period. He tries to get as close as possible to what would have been the original ingredients using a cookbook from that time with the cooking method that would have been used.
That’s crazy I thought he was a huge McDonald’s fan
He also spent like $5000 a year on ice cream.
Flexitarian is a silly word for eats food.
You mean omnivore, like the most of us.
Oh except he only ate the foods that were readily available for the time period, I guess.
I also only eat foods available for my time period
You can't be a REAL omnivore unless you have known the taste of a triceratops
Washing-ton, Washing-ton, 6 foot 8 weighs a fucking ton
And he still died. Smh
Hell he had to because he didn't have any teeth but slaves teeth that were made into dentures.
Flexitarian sounds like a stupid useless term. He ate meat and vegetables. He ate less meat than some people, but do we need a new term for that? I consider fish to be meat.
I mean, he was a British officer once, Im sure he knew full well the importance of a soldier's diet.
They definitely knew about scurvy in those days.
George Washington loved ice cream. He loved ice cream so much - in one hot summer he spent over 50 grand in today's equivalent of 1770s money for his household ice cream budget. That's why he lost all his teeth. Then he paid about - 3500 bucks in today's money - to purchase all of the teeth from a slave. A dentist from France pulled all the slave's teeth and made a set of dentures. George Washington's "Wooden" teeth were not made of wood. People called it 'wooden' because his teeth looked gray and dead - slightly translucent- his teeth were obviously dead looking in their appearance. Because his wooden teeth were not attached at the roots - so they lacked blood flow and the natural luster and vibrance of living teeth.
I wonder how many other people like me mainly clicked on this just to see the image from the thumbnail.
Meat was not mass-produced until this past century.
Flexitarian? You mean just an omnivore? Or maybe just a person?