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DIET AND NUTRITION
. An understanding about the nature of food in late-medieval France derived ultimately,
along with all medical knowledge, from Greek doctrine as amplified by Arab physicians
and philosophers. Central to the learning of medical practitioners was a set of notions
about the nature of human beings and how this nature could be affected by everything in
their environment. In a large sense, the relationship of a person to the environment was
what was understood by the term “diet.” The compendia of medical doctrine and its
distillation in the more popular health handbooks, the tacuina sanitatis, and the
ubiquitous regimines sanitatis, invariably contained a series of chapters that set forth
highly practical advice on diet—what we might today term “lifestyle”: how the individual
could maintain a healthy personal balance of humors by avoiding certain dangers (e.g., by
refraining from sexual intercourse during the dry period of summer). That most of the
advice offered in the handbooks under the rubric “diet” is negative reflects a fundamental
attitude: health is the natural state, diet offers the means to maintain health and avoid
sickness. “Diet” in a more modern acceptation, as a temporary regimen followed
specifically in order to correct an aberration, is applied to food only in the sense that it
could also be used with regard to any other factor affecting health.
Among the wealthier classes, whether “diet” had to do with a “way of living” or a
“way of feeding,” medical doctrine ultimately defined it. For the wealthy, a diet of
specific foods could be of several sorts. It could designate those foods that were
consumed habitually and in the belief that they would not normally harm a person’s
health. Choice of foods was extensive and of relatively great variety: extant recipe
collections show that the wealthy could choose from among breads, wines, leafy and root
vegetables, peas, beans, rice, many fruits and nuts, some berries, meats of all
domesticated and game animals, a broad range of freshwater and sea fish, and domestic
and imported herbs and spices, including sugar, to provide appetizing colors and flavors.
The wealthy in the late Middle Ages enjoyed a nutritious and varied diet of habitual
foods. Therapeutic diet was dealt with in most medical treatises. Prescribed by a
physician or surgeon for a patient, this diet was designed, as it is today, to counter the
effects of a disease, particularly by restoring an ideal balance of humors. Finally, diet
could also be defined as a set of recommended foods for any individual, those that should
preserve health. Given the natural temperament of patrons, physicians specified which
foods they could safely ingest, because of their properties, and which they should avoid,
considering them to constitute a potential danger to patients.
Among the relatively poor, only the first two sorts of diet were current. Concerning
the first, it is generally surmised that people habitually ate what they could afford to eat
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