/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>11428407
They didn't consume much meat but that doesn't mean they didn't eat a lot of animal products, in fact that's tge very reason they slaughtered a lot of domesticated animals sparingly. Eggs were such an important part of the diets of even middling serfs that hens were often used as a form of currency. Dairy products were ubiquitous throughout European diets, in places like Ireland they would've formed the majority of calorific intake. Cattle, sheep and chickens were far too valuable alive for the average farmer to be slaughtered willy-nilly, hence why pork was the dominant form of meat because you could feed them literal shit and they bred like crazy. Even if you had to slaughter them sparingly, a few meat-based or infused dishes a month weren't out of the question. Another thing to consider is that this applied mostly to livestock, if you lived near water you'd make full use of fish and waterfowl. If you were alliwed to hunt, you would. And whilst the majority of the diet would've been grain-based, those grains would overwhelmingly be oats and rye, a lot more nutritious than the white bread we would think of today.

The malnutrition that would've manifested itself in most people was mostly due to famines (especially devastating if you're a growing child or youth, which demographically, odds are you likely were) and a general lack of variety (mostly vegetable vitamins) rather than a lifelong lack of protein, calcium or whatever.