The late Medieval shift away from carbs and toward meat The past
may have always been worse than the present, but some periods
were better than others. And as Thomas Malthus showed, what made
for an enjoyable era was plenty of disease, war, and other
disasters beforehand -- to clear out a good chunk of the
population, leaving much more stuff to go around per person
among the survivors. The 14th C. was overall a very calamitous
century, so that during and just after the myriad disasters that
plagued it, signs of the good life abounded. How would this
affect the diet? Nutritionists from roughly 1950 onward would
predict that very little animal fat -- or perhaps animal
products at all -- would have been consumed, and that they would
have enjoyed a diet based mostly on grains and cereals, and then
on fruits and vegetables. (Recall the FDA's food pyramid and its
large base of bread, pasta, and cereal.) These nutritionists are
completely ignorant of human evolution, physical anthropology,
as well as recorded histor