preservation

[marycatelli]

Food preservation.  Perhaps that's another clue, placed by authors unwitting of the fact, to the level of magic in fantasy world.


It is not easy to keep food in edible condition.  One of the charms of grain was that you could store it.  Pickling, drying, etc -- but there were major problems with food with all the techniques they had.

Refrigeration.  Very limited.  If you had a cave or a spring, you might keep stuff cool there.  Or an ice box -- but the ice house took a fair amount of technological work itself.

Some of it's overstated.  Spices were not used in the Middle Ages to hide rotten meat -- if only because the spices were much more valuable than the meat!  Besides, selling rotten meat was a crime.  There were punishments recorded, so it had to happen sometimes, but by the same token could not be routine.

Still, fresh fruit and veggies were unreliably sourced.  And could carry disease.  And were limited in season.

Not to mention that anything bought meant you had to worry about purity.

Personally, I find the high tech level of magic the easiest way to finesse it all.  These kinds of details can get very ugly indeed.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Uniformly high food quality and food preservation techniques are two of the least-appreciated and most-important technological advances of the 19th-20th centuries. They are unappreciated because we all take for granted that we can go to a big food store ("supermarket"), buy essentially-unlimited quantities of cheap, wholesome foods transported from all over the world as needs be, guaranteed as such by huge corporations with lots of resources to assure such quality, take them home and either keep them for days in refrigerators or months in cans or other drygoods packages with little or no diminuation in their nutritional value or wholesomeness.

We don't bother to think about this because we've grown up being able to do this our whole lives, and we don't consider just how limiting it would be if things were otherwise. Think about, in particular, what would otherwise happen in winter. Or what it would mean to suffer frequent bouts of food poisoning as just a normal part of life.

[marycatelli]

Of all the things Napoleon brought humanity, I like canning best.

Though it was decades later when someone invented the can opener. Must have been interesting in between.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced by 'There were punishments recorded, so it had to happen sometimes, but by the same token could not be routine.'

Doesn't that suggest a rather modern attitude to policing? Who would check this and how would they know what was going on? OK, if you had a whole green stinking joint on display that might be detectable at that stage, but chop it up and boil it...

I can see that someone who routinely sells food that makes people really ill is liable to go out of business in an environment where most people know each other and word of mouth gets round - if they can tell that's what's causing the problem, which might not be apparent: think of all the people that went on drinking from cholera-infected water sources for example.

[marycatelli]

Informants aka customers.

Given that it's all in the market, easy enough to complain.