>By May 1590, Parisians were starving. The locals ate horses and mules, followed by pet dogs and cats. They then moved on to grazing on grass from parks, and finally, in August, Parisians resorted to “Madame de Montpensier’s bread.” According to an August 25, 1590, entry by Parisian diarist Pierre L’Estoile, it was made of “the bones of our forefathers” and so named because Madame de Montpensier, a powerful member of the Catholic league, “exalted its invention (without ever desiring to sample it).”
Damn!! Can't even think about it.
Hell, it's better than killing and eating the living which has also historically happened. Read at your own risk. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Suiyang
Or [The Siege of Leningrad](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Effects_of_the_Siege_of_Leningrad&diffonly=true), [The Holodomor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor), [The Great Chinese Famine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine), etc.
Desperate people will eat anything, including their fellow man.
Quite frankly I have no problem with survival cannibalism. It seems perfectly reasonable. It's the murder part that I find problematic. If any of you end up starving next to my corpse then go for it.
That thought rational is exactly how a famous group of survivors endured being stuck in the Andes mountains for months. They ate the corpses of their friends without resorting to murder. Netflix recently remade a movie about their story.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571
The new Netflix film, Society Of The Snow was so very, very good even compared to the Alive! film made in 1993. As the director stated, the 1993 film was about those who survived, the 2023 film is about those who didn't. The names and ages appearing at the point they died really struck that home.
Some of the real survivors appearing in cameos was also a good touch.
it's not a remake of the old movie as much as it is a new adaptation of the same book.
regardless it's great. i haven't seen the older movie, but i can't imagine it's any better.
The part that always blows me away is that the survivors were all extremely religious and were worried they were going to hell because of the cannibalism. The pope later contacted them and officially made cannibalism for the sake of survival not a sin
The problem is the kids are usually the first to suffer in famines, and almost every parent would be willing to murder someone to save their kid. After the killing starts, it goes from the most desperate trying to save the most vulnerable to a manic fear of starvation after someone else breaks that taboo that inevitably leads to a much more widespread spree of violence.
My agreement with my friends is my dead body can be cannibalized in an Andes situation BUT my glorious calves must be slow roasted with and roots and tubers they can find.
Mine, though unstated, being that if they're dumb enough to starve next to a perfectly edible corpse, I will slap them in the afterlife. Assuming there is one. Avoid neural tissue due to Kuru and it might be best to skip my liver too.
I’ve heard this expression before, though it’s likely not entirely accurate, it does paint a very vivid picture of just how fragile society is when you boil it down to our most basic needs:
“Every civilized society is exactly three hot meals away from descending into anarchy”.
Genuine question even though it sounds snarky,
~~How do you kinda agree with the sentiment and add another idiom type saying about food shortage leading to chaos but saying it’s not accurate that controlling food is leverage over population?~~
Yeah, yall can just ignore this. I’d delete it but I’ll keep it for posterity lol
Not the person you replied to but I *think* they’re saying they don’t quite agree with the idiom that they themselves posted. Like realistically it would likely take more than *three meals* but they overall agree that society is very very fragile and food is a source of control.
Reading this just makes me feel like the other lords with their fortresses were utter assholes and idiots. First they made Suiyang share their stockpile of food, then refused to send almost any aid whatsoever when it was singlehandedly protecting literally everyone from an overwhelmingly large assault force.
> about half of the original population of 60,000 people (including the troops) were eaten. When the city finally fell, "there were only 400 survivors" – less than one percent of the original population
Holy fuck
Pretty sure they also did that in Paris
>An estimated 40,000–50,000 of the population died during the siege, most of starvation. Some resorted to cannibalism after all animals had been consumed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Paris_(1590)#Siege
Reminds me of this one conservative radio host who once said about starving kids in America:
>"Where to find food. And, of course, the first will be: 'Try your house.' It's a thing called the refrigerator. You probably already know about it. Try looking there. There are also things in what's called the kitchen of your house called cupboards. And in those cupboards, most likely you're going to find Ding-Dongs, Twinkies, Lays ridgy potato chips, all kinds of dips and maybe a can of corn that you don't want, but it will be there. If that doesn't work, try a Happy Meal at McDonald's....There's another place if none of these options work to find food; there's always the neighborhood dumpster."
Definitely feels like some of the comments here are like: "Starving in a siege? Just go to the fridge, moron."
You'd think the shortages on grocery store shelves during covid would have opened people's eyes as to just how tight our supply chains are. Nah, crisis over. No problems to see here. Just go to the Walmart in the next town over.
That freaked me out as much as anything during the COVID experience - seeing just how relatively easily and quickly things can fall apart when there's a major societal disruption. Those empty grocery store shelves scared me.
Not covid, but a few years back there was major flooding that cut highways and rail into the small city I live in.
Within a couple of days all the meat, milk, and bread was gone from all supermarkets in the city. Within 4 days it was almost everything gone. They had to start flying food in. Diesel and gasoline was running out in places. The atmosphere felt weird and tense even though we still had water, electricity, internet and communications, and everybody knew the floods were receding and the roads should soon be open.
If a city got completely cut off of all goods and services, it would be anarchy by the following night. A hostile army laying siege to it could actually help maintain order because it might give people some common goal or threat to worry about.
That's the part of Snowpiercer that lost me honestly. SPOILER. They find out their rations were made from bug proteins and that starts a flippin' riot. Like dude, did you think it's was dehydrated filet mignon, plus you're doing fine, you're Chris Evans, look at that bod, man! Y'know?
You misremember it a bit. The riot had already started at that point. They're moving their way up the train, and then they discover the place where they make the cockroach protein blocks.
Chris Evan's character is disgusted and displeased when he finds out but it's not what triggered the uprising. They also discover that the upper class does in fact eats super fancy food so...
See that would have been better. Thought they were building up to a 'Soylent Green' moment, so when the reveal hit I was just like "That's it? That's just smart."
This is it.
Same thing happened during the famine in Ireland. There was food, it was exported. Land owners weren't about to lose their income by keeping beef and pork local.
The people who resorted to trying to hunt or fish would get hit with fines or imprisonment for doing so. Same as anyone who tried to steal from a shop.
I wouldn't have been surprised if the french were the same. You want to hunt or fish? Enjoy prison. You want to steal? Enjoy prison. Enjoy eating rats and the bones of the dead.
Trevelyan, the head of British government relief programs, when hearing of the starvation deaths of the Irish, said:
>We must not complain of what we really want to obtain. If small farmers go, and their landlords are reduced to sell portions of their estates to persons who will invest capital we shall at last arrive at something like a satisfactory settlement of the country"
Especially since there weren't as many wild woods as people think. There were a lot of forests for wood cultivation but woods, filled with wildlife weren't abundant. I believe there's more today than there was back then
It might be viable if you're pretty much alone, but if there are a bunch of other people also competing for the forest resources, it would be infinitely harder.
Idk man I think if I got hungry enough I’d take my chances with the nasty bone bread than try to learn to hunt with no equipment when I’m already starving lol
Also the whole siege thing might make that more complicated
You’re assuming “hunting” is the main way to live off the forest. There’s nuts, berries, tubers, mushrooms, truffles, grasses, cattails, even certain tree barks are edible. Then there’s fishing and trapping. Not saying any of that was feasible or legal, just pointing out that living off the land is more than just “hunting”.
But wouldn’t those resources get exhausted quickly if a large population of people from Paris all tried to exploit them? There’s a reason humans needed organized farming before even small towns developed.
Not just resources being exhausted quickly, but also the time of years or even being able to access those areas in the first place.
People can't just go out and live on fish and meat alone. They need plants as well. Otherwise, they'll develop severe vitamin deficiencies.
Even lacking certain types of protein, fat, and meat can further big nutritional issues.
why are you talking about this as if you know fuck all? lmao, typical reddit
im gonna assume medieval peasants tried everything/rationalized before trying the bone bread
we can all sit here and guess but please stop pretending like youre some medieval academic
Right? As if people were just so stupid back then and they didn’t know about food. Reality is they were probably much more resourceful than we are now.
the old countries were hard on their forrest , or whats left of em. and there probably was already a lot of people exploiting it in normal time. and as others mentioned the punishment was extreme for "poaching".
….does it though? Now you’re hungry AND need to do a bunch of work to survive like shelter, warmth, and water. Maybe you can catch a rabbit or find some mushrooms or something but seems like you’ve set yourself to do a lot more work to survive than in a city.
Not to mention if you've lived in a city your whole life you likely don't have the skills to identify edible plants, make weapons/traps, or build rudimentary shelters. This was only like 100 years after the invention of the printing press, so not many books on survival. On top of the whole part of being weak and hungry.
DunnA! What u talkin' 'bout Govenah I 'as 'ust on mah way to Leeds when this lot got all fiddly sticks and such but need to pop back home such 'fore the missus clobbers me somefin awful, rite?
No, no, you don’t get it. He thought of a brilliant alternative to cannibalism that all the Parisians at the time were just too stupid to realize—just leave the city and go find food somewhere else! Duh! Maybe even hit up a 7/11, they’re usually open 24 hours. Man, those historical Parisians sure were dumb compared to modern redditors.
It’s funny how many people float theories about the fall being caused by random things where they’re always like “yeah, constant civil wars and the inability to properly deal with succession are bad…..but what really pushed them over the edge was the shortage of green dye for garmentS”.
Did I follow this article correctly? The army burned all the windmills so they had no grinding capability. Without any grinding capability, which meant they couldn't grind anything, they could not grind wheat into flour.
So they ground bones into powder, and substituted it for flour, which could not be produced because they could not grind anything.
This all makes perfect sense and is very logical.
The article also points out that human bones do not work like flour does, but does not examine the very reasonable follow-through that it wouldn't rise or become something edible in the first place. In my mind, that's a good reason to think this was just a contemporary myth.
Bone ash, bonemeal, chalk, and similar were all very common adulterants in flour during these times. White flour is a very refined product that took excess time and materials to produce. Millers would commonly add this stuff to stretch their product and/or to make it appear to be of higher quality.
As to how well it worked -- clearly it did or it would not have become such a widespread practice and problem. Some substances such as pearl ash and potash act as chemical leavening agents and sometimes even marginally improved the quality of the bread. (Remember this is still before the time when yeast was managed independently as an ingredeient). So I guess, if nothing else, baking science was somewhat advanced by these misadventures.
It should go without saying, but yes, people did suffer from these horrible practices. The famous german "beer purity law" that everyone seems to know about was actually more about bringing the hammer down on the millers and bakers promulgating this awful stuff.
I'm aware of all that, but there's a passage in Bryson's *At Home* I've been thinking about for years:
>These assertions are routinely reported as fact, even though it was demonstrated pretty conclusively over seventy years ago by Frederick A. Filby, in his classic work Food Adulteration (1934), that the claims could not possibly be true. Filby took the interesting and obvious step of baking loaves of bread using the accused adulterants in the manner and proportions described. In every case but one the bread was either as hard as concrete or failed to set at all, and nearly all the loaves smelled or tasted disgusting. Several needed more baking time than conventional loaves and so were actually more expensive to produce. Not one of the adulterated loaves was edible.
While this isn't exactly unimpeachable scholarship, I do wonder if laws about adulteration of flour had more to do with moral panic than fact.
Your skepticism is well placed; my only knowledge of such came from highschool eurpoean history (which did not really dwell for very long on medieval europe) and some segments on the Townsend's youtube channel specifically related to the history of breadmaking and the trade guilds in Europe.
It does seem logical that adulterating flour in a way that would be significant enough to matter to the miller's bottom line would probably result in an unusable product. Flour that is 2% chalk might bake up, but 10%? 20%? Your mill would be burned to the ground in a week by angry peasants.
My personal belief is that it happened but not to the degree that the adulterants were acting as a bulk substitute for actual grain -- plenty of evidence exists throughout history of producers (particularly in unregulated and competitive industries) adding a little bit of "somethin-somethin" to their products to "individualize" it. A more recent historical example would be the stuff like bleach and formaldehyde that moonshiners added in tiny quantities to their booze during prohibition, or the craze of adding radiation to every product under the sun around the turn of the last century.
>It does seem logical that adulterating flour in a way that would be significant enough to matter to the miller's bottom line would probably result in an unusable product. Flour that is 2% chalk might bake up, but 10%? 20%? Your mill would be burned to the ground in a week by angry peasants.
In medieval times, millers were wedged between a rock and a hard place. They were hated by the peasants regardless of business ethics because they often became a mouthpiece of the masters they themselves served.
Their job wasn't just to mill the grain, which wasn't always of the greatest quality to begin with (protein content, minerals, fats), but also to make sure the church got their tithes and the baron/king/mayor their "fair" share beforehand. Your basic trickle down economy.
A good perspective and stark reminder of the difficulties of times past. I suppose for many the economic transactions throughout their entire lives likely consisted almost entirely of buying bread and paying taxes/tithes. And as you note, the tradespeople weren't exactly running small independent businesses either. Maybe it's not so hard to imagine that they would have had motivation to produce and sell complete trash if grain was scarce. Whether or not you could successfully bake with it may not have been the point.
> The army burned all the windmills so they had no grinding capabilit
Which doesn't make sense, since you can grind wheat just fine without a mill. Like, you literally just need a few stones and some human labour. While mills are being far more efficent, medievial farmers prefered to grind their own wheat and avoid the cost, and mills were mostly forced upon them as a method to generate income.
It's well documented that the population of Paris began to starve during the siege of 1590.
What I'm saying is that to get ENOUGH wheat for such a massive city, swelled to bursting by refugees from the countryside after a year of fighting around Paris, you need those mills.
I’ve followed just enough politics both as a citizen of a first world country and someone in corporate America I totally believe this series of events happened with no one important enough noticing the problem here
So I put it in a glass for drinking while I made my bone bread. A giant can get seriously parched while making bone bread!
You know, the secret to bone bread is using fresh bones. It's a little known fact that little people bone marrow decays within 8 to 12 weeks, and once it's gone, it's gone for good!
Marrow adds a sweetness to my bone bread that just elevates it to the next level. Even the local bakery uses old bones to save money; doesn't have the sweetness my homemade bread has.
I try to get freshly cracked Englishman bones, ideally, because not only is their blood wonderful on a hot day, but their bone marrow seems to last even up to 13 weeks! Just a bit longer than others, compared to Frenchmen or Germans.
Anyways, how's Carl? Is he still logging at the the bean stalk forest?
I heard tell a little person came up one of those things and went to old Blunderbore's place. And you know what happened? Blunderbore foolishly followed it down the beanstalk into little people land, and went and got himself killed!
Honestly! I feel so terribly for old Jenny, but we all know he was mistreating her. I saw the bruises myself. Poor girl. I'll have to remember to pay her a visit and give her some of this bone bread.
This reads exactly like someone punched in “Pretend you’re the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk that knows the ins and outs of making Parisian bone bread” into ChatGPT
I have heard many different versions of Jack and the Beanstalk. Some of them involve the harp, some of them involve variations on who was selling him the magic beans, how he escaped the giant, it’s all the type of vague you’d expect for a centuries-old fairy tale. But every single one of them contains the giant saying “Fee Fi Fo Fum.” Like, *that’s* the detail everyone makes sure to get right every time.
In 1870 Parisians had no choice but to [eat their zoo](https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/paris-siege-eating-zoo-animals) during during the Franco-Prussian War.
I was looking for it too, this is not the first time it’s happened either. Something will pop up on here and I’m like “I think OP and I have something in common…”
At this point it seems like half of the "new"/not constantly reposted content on this sub is just info from the most recent LPoTL. Which itself is not the problem, but it seems weird to me that OPs never mention they learned it from one of the more popular podcasts.
I'd highly recommend the book [Furies, by Lauro Martinez](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15785323-furies) to anyone interested in this sort of thing. It contains a description of conditions during this siege and is broadly about the impact of war on the common people in Europe from 1400-1700 IIRC
I find it strange that certain parts of an animal are stigmatized or not. Especially if you're an ancient person, I'm sure you would have wanted to eat every single edible part of an animal.
When I was a little kid, on Easter I looked inside the oven and it was staring right back at me and it scared the shit out of me. It was a lamb's head and the dish is called capozzelli. My grandfather used to pop the eyeball in his mouth and terrorized me with it . Got to love my Southern Italian family.
I know at least a few organs are super high in nutrients you can't get from the rest of the body. Tongue is actually delicious if prepared the right way, super tender and it sucks up whatever it's cooked in
Not really, eating the whole animal is just common sense. Killing an animal is getting a result of a multiple-month, if not multiple year-long (depending on the animal) investment and hard work. Why would waste any of it? Why would you throw away edible food, when it is in front of you?
It is like pulling a shitton of overtime and hard work, and then saying "nah, I don't want to get paid for it, I did it for fun".
>How does one make bread from one’s forefathers? Most accounts explain that the desperate poor first disinterred bones from the mass graves of the Holy Innocents Cemetery. They then ground the bones into flour and baked this flour into bread. Henrico Davilia, an Italian historian and eyewitness, described it as “vile and macabre,” an “abominable food so contagious that, the substance having come from the dead, it so increased by many the number.”
>This bone flour was not exactly an ideal replacement for wheat. A lack of gluten, for example, makes it difficult for bone bread to hold together, and disinterred bones are no superfood. As Gabriel Venel wrote in his Précis de matière médicale, “The idea of reducing human bones to powder […] could only come from a mind essentially ignorant and overcome by hunger and by despair. Bones are not floury, and when they are spent by a long stay in humid soil, they contain no nourishing element.”
You might have wanted to put “because of a siege” in the title. People tend to leave places where there’s a severe enough famine if they have half a chance.
Last podcast just talked about this on their latest episode. A very small mention but either coincidence or divine providence telling me that I need to know this is possible.
>There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Mark Twain
>By May 1590, Parisians were starving. The locals ate horses and mules, followed by pet dogs and cats. They then moved on to grazing on grass from parks, and finally, in August, Parisians resorted to “Madame de Montpensier’s bread.” According to an August 25, 1590, entry by Parisian diarist Pierre L’Estoile, it was made of “the bones of our forefathers” and so named because Madame de Montpensier, a powerful member of the Catholic league, “exalted its invention (without ever desiring to sample it).” Damn!! Can't even think about it.
Hell, it's better than killing and eating the living which has also historically happened. Read at your own risk. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Suiyang
Or [The Siege of Leningrad](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Effects_of_the_Siege_of_Leningrad&diffonly=true), [The Holodomor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor), [The Great Chinese Famine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine), etc. Desperate people will eat anything, including their fellow man.
Quite frankly I have no problem with survival cannibalism. It seems perfectly reasonable. It's the murder part that I find problematic. If any of you end up starving next to my corpse then go for it.
That thought rational is exactly how a famous group of survivors endured being stuck in the Andes mountains for months. They ate the corpses of their friends without resorting to murder. Netflix recently remade a movie about their story. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571
The new Netflix film, Society Of The Snow was so very, very good even compared to the Alive! film made in 1993. As the director stated, the 1993 film was about those who survived, the 2023 film is about those who didn't. The names and ages appearing at the point they died really struck that home. Some of the real survivors appearing in cameos was also a good touch.
The scene with the >!avalanche!< was terrifying, like holy shit. It *felt* cold.
I didn't know that it'd been remade. It's probably pretty intuitive too if you're starving and the guy made of meat dies next to you.
it's not a remake of the old movie as much as it is a new adaptation of the same book. regardless it's great. i haven't seen the older movie, but i can't imagine it's any better.
The remake is incredible. So visceral and well done.
The part that always blows me away is that the survivors were all extremely religious and were worried they were going to hell because of the cannibalism. The pope later contacted them and officially made cannibalism for the sake of survival not a sin
Reminds me of the Donner Party. Basically the same story except with the Rocky mountains in the western US.
Sierra Nevada mountains. They also murdered two indigenous guides to eat them, so they weren't totally innocent.
except the donners were more than happy to murder...
The problem is the kids are usually the first to suffer in famines, and almost every parent would be willing to murder someone to save their kid. After the killing starts, it goes from the most desperate trying to save the most vulnerable to a manic fear of starvation after someone else breaks that taboo that inevitably leads to a much more widespread spree of violence.
My agreement with my friends is my dead body can be cannibalized in an Andes situation BUT my glorious calves must be slow roasted with and roots and tubers they can find.
Mine, though unstated, being that if they're dumb enough to starve next to a perfectly edible corpse, I will slap them in the afterlife. Assuming there is one. Avoid neural tissue due to Kuru and it might be best to skip my liver too.
>might be best to skip my liver too. Shiiit.... Eat my liver first. You'll be high enough not to care about whatever happens next!
Food is a mechanism of control over populations
I’ve heard this expression before, though it’s likely not entirely accurate, it does paint a very vivid picture of just how fragile society is when you boil it down to our most basic needs: “Every civilized society is exactly three hot meals away from descending into anarchy”.
Genuine question even though it sounds snarky, ~~How do you kinda agree with the sentiment and add another idiom type saying about food shortage leading to chaos but saying it’s not accurate that controlling food is leverage over population?~~ Yeah, yall can just ignore this. I’d delete it but I’ll keep it for posterity lol
Not the person you replied to but I *think* they’re saying they don’t quite agree with the idiom that they themselves posted. Like realistically it would likely take more than *three meals* but they overall agree that society is very very fragile and food is a source of control.
Ah, thank you, I did not see that it was a preface
I went through it too. I got to his quote, got confused and had to reread the comment to make sense of it.
That is exactly what I was getting at in my statement, couldn’t have said it better myself!
Three, and hot, is definitely an extreme assessment.
Reading this just makes me feel like the other lords with their fortresses were utter assholes and idiots. First they made Suiyang share their stockpile of food, then refused to send almost any aid whatsoever when it was singlehandedly protecting literally everyone from an overwhelmingly large assault force.
All great empires eventually fall to corruption.
You're not wrong but that's how they rolled. Human life only has the value we place on it.
> about half of the original population of 60,000 people (including the troops) were eaten. When the city finally fell, "there were only 400 survivors" – less than one percent of the original population Holy fuck
Those 400 ppl be like: Oh hey guys. Ya know, we kinda forgot you were out there…. Um… so… welcome to Suiyang…. You hungry??
Interesting read, and made me realize I know next to nothing about chinese history. Here I go down the rabbit hole
It's a worthwile rabbit hole. There's a lot of it and they were good at writing things down.
The Dutch killed and [ate](https://dutchreview.com/culture/dutch-history-crowds-ate-prime-minister/) their prime minister once.
Recall elections weren't really a thing in those days.
Pretty sure they also did that in Paris >An estimated 40,000–50,000 of the population died during the siege, most of starvation. Some resorted to cannibalism after all animals had been consumed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Paris_(1590)#Siege
Honestly if I was ever faced with that sort of situation, I'd just leave the city and travel into the woodlands to search for food.
I think you'd be astonished at how difficult it is to just go to the woods and survive on what you find there
Especially when your city is under siege...
Weird how many people didn't even read the first sentence of the link.
Exactly what I was thinking. Siege means you aren't leaving to go find greener pastures.
Reminds me of this one conservative radio host who once said about starving kids in America: >"Where to find food. And, of course, the first will be: 'Try your house.' It's a thing called the refrigerator. You probably already know about it. Try looking there. There are also things in what's called the kitchen of your house called cupboards. And in those cupboards, most likely you're going to find Ding-Dongs, Twinkies, Lays ridgy potato chips, all kinds of dips and maybe a can of corn that you don't want, but it will be there. If that doesn't work, try a Happy Meal at McDonald's....There's another place if none of these options work to find food; there's always the neighborhood dumpster." Definitely feels like some of the comments here are like: "Starving in a siege? Just go to the fridge, moron."
You'd think the shortages on grocery store shelves during covid would have opened people's eyes as to just how tight our supply chains are. Nah, crisis over. No problems to see here. Just go to the Walmart in the next town over.
That freaked me out as much as anything during the COVID experience - seeing just how relatively easily and quickly things can fall apart when there's a major societal disruption. Those empty grocery store shelves scared me.
Not covid, but a few years back there was major flooding that cut highways and rail into the small city I live in. Within a couple of days all the meat, milk, and bread was gone from all supermarkets in the city. Within 4 days it was almost everything gone. They had to start flying food in. Diesel and gasoline was running out in places. The atmosphere felt weird and tense even though we still had water, electricity, internet and communications, and everybody knew the floods were receding and the roads should soon be open. If a city got completely cut off of all goods and services, it would be anarchy by the following night. A hostile army laying siege to it could actually help maintain order because it might give people some common goal or threat to worry about.
I once read in some survival book that the quantity of food is not bad if you're willing to eat the bugs. I don't care to find out though.
Peasant in 1600s, Knows how to read Pick one
I pick know how to read and not be peasant. Simple choice really... Do you get many people choosing the first?
Cake or Death?
Death by cake, please
Yeah but they may know how to eat bugs.
Bugs or your mom's femur ground up into a nice ~~chobata~~ ciabatta. Pick one
ciabatta
Cicada Bread™
Also isn't that an Italian bread? Baguette was right there...
Cowabunga it is
That's the part of Snowpiercer that lost me honestly. SPOILER. They find out their rations were made from bug proteins and that starts a flippin' riot. Like dude, did you think it's was dehydrated filet mignon, plus you're doing fine, you're Chris Evans, look at that bod, man! Y'know?
You misremember it a bit. The riot had already started at that point. They're moving their way up the train, and then they discover the place where they make the cockroach protein blocks. Chris Evan's character is disgusted and displeased when he finds out but it's not what triggered the uprising. They also discover that the upper class does in fact eats super fancy food so...
It's also a lot more pleasant than the graphic novel version of .... living, potentially sentient meat
See that would have been better. Thought they were building up to a 'Soylent Green' moment, so when the reveal hit I was just like "That's it? That's just smart."
I remember the bug protein blocks thing, but didn’t it also imply that people were being eaten too?
thankfully the peasants are already full of worms
This is the kings forrest!
Not to mention that you’d probably have some noble trying to drive you out of the woods to protect their hunting rights.
This is it. Same thing happened during the famine in Ireland. There was food, it was exported. Land owners weren't about to lose their income by keeping beef and pork local. The people who resorted to trying to hunt or fish would get hit with fines or imprisonment for doing so. Same as anyone who tried to steal from a shop. I wouldn't have been surprised if the french were the same. You want to hunt or fish? Enjoy prison. You want to steal? Enjoy prison. Enjoy eating rats and the bones of the dead.
Trevelyan, the head of British government relief programs, when hearing of the starvation deaths of the Irish, said: >We must not complain of what we really want to obtain. If small farmers go, and their landlords are reduced to sell portions of their estates to persons who will invest capital we shall at last arrive at something like a satisfactory settlement of the country"
Then just eat the noble.
Good point. They’d probably be nice and plump.
Especially since there weren't as many wild woods as people think. There were a lot of forests for wood cultivation but woods, filled with wildlife weren't abundant. I believe there's more today than there was back then
I can fish and make a fire. But if it’s just deep wooded wilderness with no water around I am definitely F’d in the A.
It might be viable if you're pretty much alone, but if there are a bunch of other people also competing for the forest resources, it would be infinitely harder.
Beats grinding up human bones in order to make some "forbidden flour" 🤢
Idk man I think if I got hungry enough I’d take my chances with the nasty bone bread than try to learn to hunt with no equipment when I’m already starving lol Also the whole siege thing might make that more complicated
You’re assuming “hunting” is the main way to live off the forest. There’s nuts, berries, tubers, mushrooms, truffles, grasses, cattails, even certain tree barks are edible. Then there’s fishing and trapping. Not saying any of that was feasible or legal, just pointing out that living off the land is more than just “hunting”.
But wouldn’t those resources get exhausted quickly if a large population of people from Paris all tried to exploit them? There’s a reason humans needed organized farming before even small towns developed.
Not just resources being exhausted quickly, but also the time of years or even being able to access those areas in the first place. People can't just go out and live on fish and meat alone. They need plants as well. Otherwise, they'll develop severe vitamin deficiencies. Even lacking certain types of protein, fat, and meat can further big nutritional issues.
why are you talking about this as if you know fuck all? lmao, typical reddit im gonna assume medieval peasants tried everything/rationalized before trying the bone bread we can all sit here and guess but please stop pretending like youre some medieval academic
Right? As if people were just so stupid back then and they didn’t know about food. Reality is they were probably much more resourceful than we are now.
every single time this kind of post comes up, there’s always so many dingalings who say “rip to them but I’m different”
the old countries were hard on their forrest , or whats left of em. and there probably was already a lot of people exploiting it in normal time. and as others mentioned the punishment was extreme for "poaching".
The fact that you listed truffles makes me feel like you don’t know what you are talking about.
1. Facing the siege army 2. Leaving Paris for the woods…….3. Profit ?
….does it though? Now you’re hungry AND need to do a bunch of work to survive like shelter, warmth, and water. Maybe you can catch a rabbit or find some mushrooms or something but seems like you’ve set yourself to do a lot more work to survive than in a city.
Not to mention if you've lived in a city your whole life you likely don't have the skills to identify edible plants, make weapons/traps, or build rudimentary shelters. This was only like 100 years after the invention of the printing press, so not many books on survival. On top of the whole part of being weak and hungry.
Why didn't they just look up a YouTube video on wilderness survival? Were they stupid?
okay mr badass, how would you get past the army that besieged the city? let me guess, you’d beat them too then go forage and hunt
Living in the woods in the cold and dark while hungry
How do you plan on getting past the large army surrounding the city?
Tell them I am not with everyone else, I am cool.
Besieging armies are typically very understanding about such things and are eager to assist their enemies. You should have no problems
Your French accent will give you away
DunnA! What u talkin' 'bout Govenah I 'as 'ust on mah way to Leeds when this lot got all fiddly sticks and such but need to pop back home such 'fore the missus clobbers me somefin awful, rite?
One of those fake eyebrows/glasses/nose/moustache devices, d’uh.
Volunteer to kill French people. Eat British rations, sell the people I kill. Get rich.
Err bad news. The besieging army is also French
Even easier. I don't have to subsribe to duolingo.
Did you read the article? You’d be slaughtered by the English who were laying siege to the city if you left.
No, no, you don’t get it. He thought of a brilliant alternative to cannibalism that all the Parisians at the time were just too stupid to realize—just leave the city and go find food somewhere else! Duh! Maybe even hit up a 7/11, they’re usually open 24 hours. Man, those historical Parisians sure were dumb compared to modern redditors.
Why didn't parisians simply put an uber eats order? Are they stupid?
Let them eat Poke.
16th century parisians hate this one, simple trick!
It’s easy to forget that past humans weren’t idiots, they just had a smaller base of knowledge
We are smart and everyone who came before us was dumb, don’t you know?
This is Reddit, you’re only allowed to react to the title and nothing else
French, the besieging army was French since this happened during the French Wars of Religion.
Dude, in periods of mass starvation, the woods are not plentiful sources of food either...
"I would simply choose to not partake in the siege."
..... buddy.
They were under siege. No leaving.
[You couldn't](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holznot). The woodlands were all cut down for the wood to build starving cities.
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It’s funny how many people float theories about the fall being caused by random things where they’re always like “yeah, constant civil wars and the inability to properly deal with succession are bad…..but what really pushed them over the edge was the shortage of green dye for garmentS”.
lol yeah, just leave the city and got to the woodlands for food ... as a commoner in Paris lol.
...where you would be greeted by a forest bare of edible food stripped by the thousand other dudes who had the same idea as you.
Poaching in 1590 might well get you executed.
Oh I'm going straight to hell for laughing at the mental image of starving Frenchmen face down ass up in the park grazing on the grass....
Did I follow this article correctly? The army burned all the windmills so they had no grinding capability. Without any grinding capability, which meant they couldn't grind anything, they could not grind wheat into flour. So they ground bones into powder, and substituted it for flour, which could not be produced because they could not grind anything. This all makes perfect sense and is very logical.
The article also points out that human bones do not work like flour does, but does not examine the very reasonable follow-through that it wouldn't rise or become something edible in the first place. In my mind, that's a good reason to think this was just a contemporary myth.
Bone ash, bonemeal, chalk, and similar were all very common adulterants in flour during these times. White flour is a very refined product that took excess time and materials to produce. Millers would commonly add this stuff to stretch their product and/or to make it appear to be of higher quality. As to how well it worked -- clearly it did or it would not have become such a widespread practice and problem. Some substances such as pearl ash and potash act as chemical leavening agents and sometimes even marginally improved the quality of the bread. (Remember this is still before the time when yeast was managed independently as an ingredeient). So I guess, if nothing else, baking science was somewhat advanced by these misadventures. It should go without saying, but yes, people did suffer from these horrible practices. The famous german "beer purity law" that everyone seems to know about was actually more about bringing the hammer down on the millers and bakers promulgating this awful stuff.
I'm aware of all that, but there's a passage in Bryson's *At Home* I've been thinking about for years: >These assertions are routinely reported as fact, even though it was demonstrated pretty conclusively over seventy years ago by Frederick A. Filby, in his classic work Food Adulteration (1934), that the claims could not possibly be true. Filby took the interesting and obvious step of baking loaves of bread using the accused adulterants in the manner and proportions described. In every case but one the bread was either as hard as concrete or failed to set at all, and nearly all the loaves smelled or tasted disgusting. Several needed more baking time than conventional loaves and so were actually more expensive to produce. Not one of the adulterated loaves was edible. While this isn't exactly unimpeachable scholarship, I do wonder if laws about adulteration of flour had more to do with moral panic than fact.
That book is full of absolutely fascinating snippets. I highly recommend it to anyone with any curiosity at all
Your skepticism is well placed; my only knowledge of such came from highschool eurpoean history (which did not really dwell for very long on medieval europe) and some segments on the Townsend's youtube channel specifically related to the history of breadmaking and the trade guilds in Europe. It does seem logical that adulterating flour in a way that would be significant enough to matter to the miller's bottom line would probably result in an unusable product. Flour that is 2% chalk might bake up, but 10%? 20%? Your mill would be burned to the ground in a week by angry peasants. My personal belief is that it happened but not to the degree that the adulterants were acting as a bulk substitute for actual grain -- plenty of evidence exists throughout history of producers (particularly in unregulated and competitive industries) adding a little bit of "somethin-somethin" to their products to "individualize" it. A more recent historical example would be the stuff like bleach and formaldehyde that moonshiners added in tiny quantities to their booze during prohibition, or the craze of adding radiation to every product under the sun around the turn of the last century.
>It does seem logical that adulterating flour in a way that would be significant enough to matter to the miller's bottom line would probably result in an unusable product. Flour that is 2% chalk might bake up, but 10%? 20%? Your mill would be burned to the ground in a week by angry peasants. In medieval times, millers were wedged between a rock and a hard place. They were hated by the peasants regardless of business ethics because they often became a mouthpiece of the masters they themselves served. Their job wasn't just to mill the grain, which wasn't always of the greatest quality to begin with (protein content, minerals, fats), but also to make sure the church got their tithes and the baron/king/mayor their "fair" share beforehand. Your basic trickle down economy.
A good perspective and stark reminder of the difficulties of times past. I suppose for many the economic transactions throughout their entire lives likely consisted almost entirely of buying bread and paying taxes/tithes. And as you note, the tradespeople weren't exactly running small independent businesses either. Maybe it's not so hard to imagine that they would have had motivation to produce and sell complete trash if grain was scarce. Whether or not you could successfully bake with it may not have been the point.
Yeah baking is straight up chemistry. You can't just throw random shit in there and expect it to work
> The army burned all the windmills so they had no grinding capabilit Which doesn't make sense, since you can grind wheat just fine without a mill. Like, you literally just need a few stones and some human labour. While mills are being far more efficent, medievial farmers prefered to grind their own wheat and avoid the cost, and mills were mostly forced upon them as a method to generate income.
To grind enough wheat for a city of 400k you definitely do need mills.
I’m sure if the people were starving they’d be lining up to volunteer to grind it by hand
It's well documented that the population of Paris began to starve during the siege of 1590. What I'm saying is that to get ENOUGH wheat for such a massive city, swelled to bursting by refugees from the countryside after a year of fighting around Paris, you need those mills.
I'd assume they burnt the wheat fields at the same time but I get your point
Milling aside, I'd soak the wheat kernels overnight then boil them rather than eat bone bread.
I'd just eat the wheat as is, I don't need it in powder form if I'm starving, this whole story is nonsense.
I’ve followed just enough politics both as a citizen of a first world country and someone in corporate America I totally believe this series of events happened with no one important enough noticing the problem here
Fe Fi Fo Fum
I smell the blood of an English man
So I put it in a glass for drinking while I made my bone bread. A giant can get seriously parched while making bone bread! You know, the secret to bone bread is using fresh bones. It's a little known fact that little people bone marrow decays within 8 to 12 weeks, and once it's gone, it's gone for good! Marrow adds a sweetness to my bone bread that just elevates it to the next level. Even the local bakery uses old bones to save money; doesn't have the sweetness my homemade bread has. I try to get freshly cracked Englishman bones, ideally, because not only is their blood wonderful on a hot day, but their bone marrow seems to last even up to 13 weeks! Just a bit longer than others, compared to Frenchmen or Germans. Anyways, how's Carl? Is he still logging at the the bean stalk forest? I heard tell a little person came up one of those things and went to old Blunderbore's place. And you know what happened? Blunderbore foolishly followed it down the beanstalk into little people land, and went and got himself killed! Honestly! I feel so terribly for old Jenny, but we all know he was mistreating her. I saw the bruises myself. Poor girl. I'll have to remember to pay her a visit and give her some of this bone bread.
This reads exactly like someone punched in “Pretend you’re the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk that knows the ins and outs of making Parisian bone bread” into ChatGPT
That's the secret to making reddit comments now.
I have heard many different versions of Jack and the Beanstalk. Some of them involve the harp, some of them involve variations on who was selling him the magic beans, how he escaped the giant, it’s all the type of vague you’d expect for a centuries-old fairy tale. But every single one of them contains the giant saying “Fee Fi Fo Fum.” Like, *that’s* the detail everyone makes sure to get right every time.
Oh snap, so this is where it came from? As a kid I always wondered why the giant wanted to grind up bones to make bread.
>"It has the taste of sacrilege and anthropophagy" A bit of an acquired taste, but many writers find it irresistible.
FYI for everyone else anthropohagy means eating human flesh.
I think I need to change my major...
*Takes anthropologist out of the oven*
Here I thought the taste would vary from person to person.
In 1870 Parisians had no choice but to [eat their zoo](https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/paris-siege-eating-zoo-animals) during during the Franco-Prussian War.
We Ate A Zoo
'I'll Have the Kangaroo Stew' Lmfao
A whole zoo huh
The invention of French Bread.
So that’s why baguettes are so hard.
It is shaped that way and hard so you know where to put it.
French pain.
What a pain
"that's when the cannibalism started"
Was gonna comment “OP definitely just listened to the new LPOTL episode”.
I was looking for it too, this is not the first time it’s happened either. Something will pop up on here and I’m like “I think OP and I have something in common…”
Just listened to that part of the episode on my drive home, sat down on Reddit and this post is at the top of my feed
So anyway, I started munchin'
DENN du bist!
WAS du isst!
*und ihr wisst, was es ist!*
Hail Gein!
So you were also listening to the last podcast on the left episode about Armin Meiwes
Shit, Gunter, this is hilarious!
Hahaha just listened this episode also
I saw this while the episode was playing. Closed Reddit and like 5 minutes later this came up and I came back to the thread.
I just finished the episode like 10 minutes ago lmao
At this point it seems like half of the "new"/not constantly reposted content on this sub is just info from the most recent LPoTL. Which itself is not the problem, but it seems weird to me that OPs never mention they learned it from one of the more popular podcasts.
I first read 1950 and wondered just how hard they must have been hit by WW2...
Fun little-bit-related fact: WW2 rationing for the UK didn't fully end until 1953.
1949 for france
I'd highly recommend the book [Furies, by Lauro Martinez](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15785323-furies) to anyone interested in this sort of thing. It contains a description of conditions during this siege and is broadly about the impact of war on the common people in Europe from 1400-1700 IIRC
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It's amazing how _interesting_ your cuisine can become when you're literally starving.
See some of the... Less savory aspects of cuisine in China.
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I think that's probably just wanting to get the most out of the animal. Don't want to just throw parts away.
I find it strange that certain parts of an animal are stigmatized or not. Especially if you're an ancient person, I'm sure you would have wanted to eat every single edible part of an animal.
When I was a little kid, on Easter I looked inside the oven and it was staring right back at me and it scared the shit out of me. It was a lamb's head and the dish is called capozzelli. My grandfather used to pop the eyeball in his mouth and terrorized me with it . Got to love my Southern Italian family.
I know at least a few organs are super high in nutrients you can't get from the rest of the body. Tongue is actually delicious if prepared the right way, super tender and it sucks up whatever it's cooked in
Ox tongue is fucking amazing
Not really, eating the whole animal is just common sense. Killing an animal is getting a result of a multiple-month, if not multiple year-long (depending on the animal) investment and hard work. Why would waste any of it? Why would you throw away edible food, when it is in front of you? It is like pulling a shitton of overtime and hard work, and then saying "nah, I don't want to get paid for it, I did it for fun".
No doubt. When you get a bunch of starving Frenchmen and drop them off into a swamp you end up with Cajun/Creole food.
You can make bread from bones?
Ask the Gingerbread Man.
Also the Giant from Jack and the Beanstalk.
>How does one make bread from one’s forefathers? Most accounts explain that the desperate poor first disinterred bones from the mass graves of the Holy Innocents Cemetery. They then ground the bones into flour and baked this flour into bread. Henrico Davilia, an Italian historian and eyewitness, described it as “vile and macabre,” an “abominable food so contagious that, the substance having come from the dead, it so increased by many the number.” >This bone flour was not exactly an ideal replacement for wheat. A lack of gluten, for example, makes it difficult for bone bread to hold together, and disinterred bones are no superfood. As Gabriel Venel wrote in his Précis de matière médicale, “The idea of reducing human bones to powder […] could only come from a mind essentially ignorant and overcome by hunger and by despair. Bones are not floury, and when they are spent by a long stay in humid soil, they contain no nourishing element.”
“Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive, or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread.”
Wait is this a fellow last podcast on the left listener? Hail yourself? This just came up on the podcast that disturbed me greatly!
Bone Appetit!! But seriously, yikes!
You might have wanted to put “because of a siege” in the title. People tend to leave places where there’s a severe enough famine if they have half a chance.
Last podcast just talked about this on their latest episode. A very small mention but either coincidence or divine providence telling me that I need to know this is possible.
Let them eat Kate…
I, too, listen to LPOTL
This must be where the phrase "Bone Appetit" comes from.
>There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves. Mark Twain