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 history. Not surprisingly, they've got it completely backwards -- their recommended diet will keep your insulin levels high chronically, causing you to store fat rather than burn it for fuel, not to mention all the other side-effects of a carbohydrate-rich, fat-deficient diet. (For a good review, read Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories or watch a video if you're lazy.) It's no wonder, then, that the dietary sign of higher standards of living in the late Middle Ages was the exact opposite of the nutritionists' prescriptions -- cutting way back on bread and loading up on dead animals.

In this post I mentioned that Gregory Clark's book A Farewell to Alms has a table showing that English farm workers in the late Middle Ages got a fair portion of meat to supplement their wages. In fact, not only did they eat a lot more meat from 1350 to 1450 compared to 1250 to 1350 -- one pound a day! -- they were also eating a lot less bread. So, unlike present-day bodybuilders who hamstring their ability to pack on muscle and burn lots of energy (by carb-loading), late Medieval farm workers were not eating foods that would keep their insulin levels chronically high.

Rather than yammer on at greater length about this change, I'd rather point you to a free copy of the academic article that Clark's table mostly draws from: go to this list of articles and Ctrl F "Dyer." The article is "Changes in diet in the late middle ages: the case of harvest workers." He cautions that autumn farm workers were better off than other laborers, that even they only enjoyed this diet during their autumn work schedule, etc., but the overall change from roughly 1250 to 1450 is pretty clear.

He also provides data showing that elite people, such as the prioress of a nunnery, ate much less bread and much more meat than the lower orders. Dyer has more data on how diet varied throughout the social ladder, and the pattern holds up there too. See his book chapter "English diet in the later middle ages" in this volume, as well as the discussion of diet in his book Standards of living in the later Middle Ages. Barbara Harvey's book Living and dying in England, 1100 - 1540 is about the monks of Westminster Abbey, an elite group. In the chapter on diet, she provides data showing that during the 15th C., they ate a fair amount of meat and not as much bread as Dyer's farm workers from 1250 -- probably above the farm workers of 1450 but below the higher elites.

As I mentioned before, this is a pretty general pattern -- animal products, especially good muscle and organ meat, are more expensive to produce than grain products. So, the elite have always been less reliant on empty carbs, and enjoyed more animal protein and fat, than the commoners. This is why the notion that elites used to be fat or even obese, while the commoners used to be thin, is nonsense. As a rule, they never have been. By consuming so much of their food in the form of non-fibrous carbohydrates, the commoners of the Middle Ages would not have looked very different from today's Wal-Mart shoppers.

Kitchen detail from the Luttrell Psalter

A curious thing in Dyer's article is that he seems to think that when people ate more meat, they must have had a vitamin A deficiency, since their new diet also saw a decrease in the amount of dairy they ate. While you can get a decent amount of vitamin A from dairy (usually 5 - 10% of the RDA per serving of butter, milk, cream, or cheese), the key source has always been animal livers. To see this, here is a tool to list foods by how much of some substance they have. Click the "highest in" bar, and scroll down until you see retinol (under vitamin A), and search. Aside from dry cereals (which are irrelevant since once you add everything else to them, their weight will shoot up, and the concentration of vitamin A will plummet), the high-scorers are all from animal organs, especially liver.

True vitamin A is only found in animal products -- the stuff in spinach, carrots, etc. is just a precursor to vitamin A, and is not converted with 100% efficiency into vitamin A. (See the Wikipedia entry for vitamin A.) Vitamin A is fat soluble, so that the excess can be stored away in our fat, although the bulk of the not-currently-in-use vitamin A is stored in the liver.

So, the simple way to get plenty of this vitamin is to steal it. Find an animal that has spent all day processing the plants that are rich in the precursors -- this animal will have created true vitamin A from all this junk, and it will have stored most of the unused portion in its liver. Kill this animal and eat its liver -- and boom, you've hit the vitamin A jackpot. And all without letting a single leaf of spinach enter your mouth.

Returning to Dyer's article, he mentions that the farm workers also ate the offal of animals, not just the muscle meat. And the elites surely did too. If this included liver -- and that's probably true, since it's been prized forever (including among present-day hunter-gatherers) -- then they would've had plenty of vitamin A.

At any rate, the important thing to take home is that elites have always eaten better than commoners, in particular eating fewer easily digestible carbs and more animal protein and fat, so they were never fatter than the commoners. I don't know where this image of the "well fed, rotund aristocracy" came from, but look at who is well fed today -- middle class French people don't look obese at all, while American proles may soon be required to purchase two airline tickets for their one body.

Since the 14th C was a time of improving standards of living -- starting decades before the Black Death, but particularly so after the plague cleared away a bunch of the survivors' would-be labor competition -- these data also show that a lower standard of living, as during the 13th C., is characterized by eating lots of empty carbs and hardly any animal fat and protein, while in better times, such as the 14th and 15th Cs, people can finally junk all of that tasteless bread and dig in to beef, lamb, mutton, liver, and the rest.

Just how insane are sociologists?

One of the new topics in the General Social Survey for 2008 (under "2008 variables") was sexual harassment from clergy members toward the flock they tend. Unlike other, rarer experiences like going to museums, having a priest ask if you're up for some quick butt sex is so common that the survey designers figured they'd explore the topic in great detail. After all, if only one person in your whole survey said it had happened, you wouldn't learn much about who is at risk in general, what such experiences are like in general, etc.

How much fine-grained detail were they expecting? Here's a list of all the questions on this topic:

- Since the age of 18, have you ever been the object of sexual advances / propositions from religious leaders?

- Did this happen with a leader in a congregation you were yourself attending?

- With how many different leaders has this happened to you?

- Did you and the leader ever become an open couple?
- As above, for religious leader molester #2
- As above, for religious leader molester #3

- Was the leader also your counselor?
- As above, for religious leader molester #2
- As above, for religious leader molester #3

- Was the leader married at the time?
- As above, for religious leader molester #2
- As above, for religious leader molester #3

- Did you end up having sex with the leader?
- As above, for religious leader molester #2
- As above, for religious leader molester #3

- What was the leader's sex?
- As above, for religious leader molester #2
- As above, for religious leader molester #3

- Did you get into an ongoing relationship with the leader?
- As above, for religious leader molester #2
- As above, for religious leader molester #3

- Did the leader try to keep you from blabbing about the relationship to others?
- As above, for religious leader molester #2
- As above, for religious leader molester #3

- Have you ever told anyone about the experience with the leader?
- As above, for religious leader molester #2
- As above, for religious leader molester #3

- Have you ever told any authority in the congregation about the experience?
- As above, for religious leader molester #2
- As above, for religious leader molester #3

- Do you know of other people who were propositioned by clergy members?

- When they were propositioned, were they a close friend of yours?

Whew! So, how many victims of clergy sexual harassment were there to get data on these questions from? Out of 1,766 respondents, 42 -- or 2.4%. By contrast, 23.4% said they had been harassed by supervisors at work. Trying to get fine-grained information from such a small population requires oversampling them -- going to a support group or something, not surveying the population at random. Of course you won't find many people to give you details because hardly anyone gets sexually harassed, let alone by a priest.

For comparison, the prison population in the U.S. is about the same percent of the whole population as the people who said they'd been the target of sexual advances / propositions from clergy members. Would you try to find out what prison experiences are like, in gory detail, by asking a long list of questions to a random sample of the country? Not unless you were a fucking idiot.

But ever since the overhyped scare about child molesting priests back in 2002, everyone has had their rational judgment clouded -- I mean, c'mon, everyone knows someone who was in that situation, even if you and most of your friends were lucky enough to escape the epidemic. So, how many people actually do know such a someone? According to the GSS, 9.3% of the population. This is what we'd expect if each respondent who said they'd been harassed told 4 people about it. Sounds reasonable. So much for "everyone knows someone."

I wonder whether we've made any progress beyond the witch hysterias of the Early Modern period -- "Have you been sexually harassed by a witch? If so, by how many, and how often? Did you have sex with the witch? Did you form on ongoing relationship? Did the witch try to get you to hush up about your witch-fucking sex life?"

Surely when people 400 years from now read the 2008 GSS, they'll wonder what drugs everyone was on, that they probed a random sample at such length about something that obviously happened to hardly anyone.

Applying behavioral economics to girls

Pickup artists talk a lot about evolutionary psychology, and sometimes about older social psychology. But while it's interesting to talk about, it offers very little in the way of concrete, practical advice. Instead, the focus should be on behavioral economics, which studies how real human beings make decisions under uncertainty -- say, a girl you meet in a club who you ask out. Of course, a lot of what pickup artists do is run their own behavioral economics experiments in the field. Still, there are lots of results from "the literature" that can be applied straightforwardly and powerfully to interacting with girls.

I read the new edition of Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational, and it's chock full of cool findings. Here's just one example:

Offer bar-goers two types of beer, one that is plain beer and another that is the same beer but laced with balsamic vinager. If you don't tell them about the vinager, people tend to rate the mixed drink higher. However, tell them before they choose that one is beer and the other is beer plus vinager, and they not only don't prefer the mixed drink as much, they pucker their mouths when they drink it. What if you let them choose blindly, and only after they've had a drink do you tell them about the vinager? They behave the same way as those who never knew it had vinager -- "Hey, whatever. Can I have another glass?"

The take-home message is that our pleasure is affected by our expectations. When we hear that the mixed drink has vinager, we expect something that will make our mouths pucker and turn us off. Extra knowledge can influence our pleasure, but only if it's beforehand -- once we've already had our taste buds tickled, it's too late to turn us off by revealing that we just drank beer plus vinager.

This settles the age-old arguments that people have about whether you should tell a girl up front about what she may think are "con" qualities, vs. tell her / let her find out after you've already hit it off and established a tight emotional and physical bond. Clearly, you should forget the so-called honest thing to do. If you get to know each other and end up enjoying each other's company, only then do you tell her -- at which point she probably won't care anyway. Don't sabotage the fun for both of you by blabbing about these things at the outset.

Here are two examples that are chosen to be extreme in order to prove the point:

1) As I said when remembering how an attractive alpha-female student of mine came on to me, she only asked how old I was long after she'd been smitten. So, based on the vinager-beer experiment, we'd expect her to not really care about how much older I was -- but still, she was 15 ("and a half!") and I was 25. That's a bit more of a revelation than a few drops of vinager in some beer. So how did she respond? "oh," she said bashfully, "well... i think age is just a number..."

She probably would not have let herself fall so easily had she known from the start that I was about 10 years older. But since she found out much later, it didn't matter.

2) What if the age gap were larger, and what if my absolute age were older too? Both of these changes would seem to stretch the limits of the effect. At the local teen dance club last year, there was a cute Brown girl who was about 5 feet tall, nice fat distribution, and really perky and energetic -- fairly close to my type:


She threw herself at me several times per evening, and over the course of several weekends. (Those Brown girls and their libidos.) One night, her busybody friend -- who must have won the cockblocking gold medal in the junior Olympics -- asked me how old I was in an old maid tone-of-voice. Normally I play it off, ask them to guess, say "hey, pretty close," and then that's it. But I'd had a drink that night and slipped up -- 27, I said matter-of-factly. "And you come to [this dance club]?" It was clear from her voice that she would take every free moment she had to try to poison her friend against me, and it shouldn't have been that hard -- they were both about 16, maybe even 15, and here I was a 27 year-old.

But nope. Each time I saw them, her petite, soft, dark friend ran up to me and pressed her body to mine, including the very night when I let my age slip. Once a girl starts fantasizing about this like totally cute boy she saw in the club, that's it. I could have said that I was wanted in four countries for serial murder, and she would've written it off -- "oh puh-lease. i mean, like, who doesn't have a few flaws, y'know??? gosh..."

Everyone has some qualities that someone of the opposite sex might initially raise an eyebrow at. For god's sake, don't blab it out before the interaction has really gone anywhere. Get close first, and then let them find out -- if it's necessary (and if not, just keep it to yourself). I know that to some people this may seem completely obvious, that "you don't need a study to show that." But there are plenty of people who deeply believe that honesty up-front is the best policy -- that you just need to put it all out there at the beginning, so that you start out with no lies and no secrets. These people are wrong.

They're welcome to behave that way, of course -- but they shouldn't expect it to work. And they shouldn't expect to enjoy life very much, since they set the other person up to form negative expectations right away. Some ingredients of the beer need to be kept secret in order to prevent us from spoiling our own fun.

Alizee

I'll let that post below on logos digest for awhile. In the meantime, something soothing for the eyes and ears.

Why logos, and why are teenagers more brand-obsessed than adults?

I haven't yet read Spent, the new book by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, but John Tierney at the NYT summarizes some of it here. According to the review, Miller argues that our obsession with driving a particular type of car, drinking a certain type of coffee, etc., doesn't do for us what we thought it would:

But once you've spent the money, once you've got the personality-appropriate appliance or watch or handbag, how much good are these signals actually doing you? Not much, Dr. Miller says. The fundamental consumerist delusion, as he calls it, is that purchases affect the way we're treated.

The grand edifice of brand-name consumerism rests on the narcissistic fantasy that everyone else cares about what we buy. (It's no accident that narcissistic teenagers are the most brand-obsessed consumers.) But who else even notices? Can you remember what your partner or your best friend was wearing the day before yesterday? Or what kind of watch your boss has?

Sidebar: people may not remember the exact items that their partner, friend, or whoever, was wearing the day before yesterday, but they sure do remember if the person was dressed like an emo, a yuppie, a redneck, and so on. Ditto for brand of watch or car -- "What was he driving? I dunno, a Jetta, I think -- or maybe it was a Prius. Well, one of those girly yuppie-mobiles, anyway." We ignored what the consumer item said about the individual's personality and used it to shoehorn him into membership in this or that social group.

It's not clear that the sole or primary function of branding is to signal to others what traits you have (Miller argues that they are signals of intelligence levels and personality traits). In fact, if we assume that everyone isn't a complete moron -- I know, but just go with me for a moment here -- maybe there's a better reason for branding, and that what's wrong-headed is our guess about the function of branding.

The simple explanation is that branding serves to mark members of ethnic groups (broadly construed). In this way, the logos on their clothing, the decals on their car windows, etc., are just pieces of a composite of markers that include non-consumerist choices such as what accent or which slang words to use. They allow people to quickly and faithfully tell who belongs to which group. Why humans care so much about Us vs. Them is an orthogonal question -- the point is that we are hyper-vigilant about in-group / out-group status. So, obviously something that lets us figure that out fast and with little error will benefit all involved.

These markers may have some understandable basis when they start out -- as when the more menacing groups wear clothes that look more like suits of armor, while the sanguine groups wear softer and lighter clothing. Then again, it could have started out with no basis other than the group members' wishful thinking -- "this is what badass people wear!", even if they were actually quite wimpy.

But social psychologists have shown that you can divide a group into two sub-groups arbitrarily, and you'll still end up with strong inter-group hostility. The most famous example of this is the Eagles and the Rattlers, two groups of pubescent boys who attended an outdoor camp that turned into Lord of the Flies in short order. (Still, there were some tasks that muted the hostilities, such as having to work together to neutralize a common threat.) It doesn't matter that they were boys -- if they had been girls, replace "Lord of the Flies" with "Heathers" or "Mean Girls." Again, in these movies, the preoccupation with brands is to keep one's own group members in line and to keep out everyone else.

You can even show them that the split is arbitrary by flipping a coin, and that doesn't matter. Most adults forget their childhood and adolescence, but you must remember when the teacher split up the class by counting students: "1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, .... , OK, all the 1's over here, 2's over there..." Even though you had to sit through a solid minute or two of proof that the grouping was arbitrary, that didn't change the fact that you all had 1's tattooed on your chests, and that you were going to mop the floor with anyone with a 2, 3, or 4 on their chest.

Hell, your best friend could have been a 2 -- but that was just tough luck for him, since after all you were a 1 now. And that cute girl who you'd like to impress close-up -- well, if she happened to get a 2, she might as well have rejected you outright, the whore. All the more reason to show no mercy to those fucking 2's!

So, a narcissistic obsession with broadcasting their intelligence and personality is not the reason that teenagers, or anyone else, are so crazy about brands. (Which they are, btw: Abercrombie & Fitch created the spin-off Hollister store to cater to teenagers in order to keep them out of the more college-oriented Abercrombie & Fitch stores. Someone with the company told the WSJ that their research had shown that teenagers craved logos more than college students.)

Instead, teenagers are so neurotic about brands because they are in the most tumultuous stage of their social lives -- groups of friends form and disband within a few years, especially during middle school, unlike the longer lasting relationships that adults have with each other. When social life often seems like a game of musical chairs, of course you want a simple way to keep track of who belongs to which group at the moment. Parents -- that is, adults who are still somewhat in touch with young people -- are reminded of this extreme social volatility when they eventually give up on keeping track of who their kids' friends are:

"So, are you going to the mall with Hayley today?"

"i mean, omigod mom, are you freakin' kidding me? i stopped being friends with hayley like two weeks ago."

"But you just started hanging out with her only three months ago..."

"yeah well it's not my fault she's a stupid bitch who thinks she's hot when she's like totally not."

Now that poor Hayley has been banished from the clique, she'll probably have to throw out most of her wardrobe and buy a bunch of new junk in order to fit in with the next clique that lets her join. Didn't you too dress like a hip-hop thug in sixth grade, shift shapes into a grunge rocker in eighth grade, only to end up in preppier clothes in high school? You're not signaling your changing personality (not that it couldn't be changing, of course) -- you're signaling your changing group membership.

Adults do this too, obviously, although the volatility is not so high, and thus the obsession is not so great. But when a conservative stay-at-home mom moves into a liberal yuppie area, assuming she can't find anyone else like herself, she may start dressing, talking, and shopping like her neighbors. Again, this isn't a reflection of some huge change in her personality, but of her new membership in the greater tribe of liberal yuppies.

Well, you get the idea. There's plenty more detail to consider here, but the point remains: if our hypothesis about why people behave the way they do makes it look like they're from outer space, we should consider alternative hypotheses that humanize them. In this case, obsession with brands is not mostly about signaling how an individual differs from other individuals (in intelligence, personality, etc.), but rather what ethnic group that individual belongs to. It's only one part of the larger composite of ethnic markers, many of which have nothing to do with hyper-tailored consumer options -- for example, accent and type of slang. Teenagers do not obsess more than adults about brands due to greater narcissism, but because there is a greater need to quickly and faithfully keep track of group membership at their age.

In short, when deciding on which slang words to use, which brand of clothes to wear, what fast food places to eat at, etc., most people are not thinking, "What will this say about my personality and lifestyle?" but instead, "Are they gonna think I'm a goth / yuppie / etc.?"

Whole Foods recovering from the anti-fat witch hunt?

I'll try to keep it short since I'm about to go out for the night, but I just checked the health and nutrition part of Whole Foods' website and was very surprised to see how much they've become deprogrammed of the elite's anti-fat hysteria. Examples:

Section on fats has no demonizing of saturated or animal fats -- jesus, they even give props to lard! They also remind us that most animal fats are monounsaturated anyway.

Section on carb consciousness is pretty even-handed, but more importantly: there is no counterpart section on how to follow a low-fat diet.

Section on heart health does not vilify saturated fat or cholesterol, emphasizing instead omega-3 fats and antioxidants.

Section on pregnant and nursing mothers tells them, in not so many words, to completely ignore the FDA's moronic food pyramid and eat lamb, fatty fish, eggs, yoghurt, nuts, legumes, fat-loaded avocados, dark green leafy vegetables, sweet potatoes, and berries (which are mostly sugar-free). No mention of bread, rice, pasta, cereal, etc. -- it's as though they don't want pregnant mothers to give their kid hyperinsulemia and Type II diabetes before it's even born.

Section on men's health mentions in passing that fats increase the absorption of antioxidants from tomatoes -- a point that is true for any vitamin, or whatever, that is fat-soluble.

And that's just the good -- as I say, there are no sections on how to cut the fat out of your diet, how to put more soy in it, etc. Since a large corporation like Whole Foods doesn't stick its neck out for no reason, it must be that they've picked up on a change in sensibilities among their consumers -- if the tide hadn't begun to turn at least somewhat among them, the company wouldn't dare talk about how great lard can be or how little carbs pregnant mothers should be eating. If their consumers haven't changed, then I'm very impressed at how iconoclastic Whole Foods is behaving, at least in cyberspace.

I just got back from one, and their entire stock of Turtle Mountain's So Delicious coconut milk beverage was all gone, except for one quart, which I took just to stockpile. Ditto for Organic Valley's summertime-only butter from pasture-fed cows -- I took the last two they had. Just within the past half-year, they've started to carry four or five brands of coconut oil, rather than the one I saw when I first started eating low-carb food. Meanwhile, no one seemed interested in the untouched rows of soy milk.

Protein Power author Michael Eades noticed something similar at a recent food expo -- lots of coconut products, much less soy, and little in the way of fat hysteria generally. Let's hope these trends aren't passing. Maybe Gary Taubes' book Good Calories, Bad Calories has had a larger impact than he believes (as a neurotic Jewish Manhattanite, he's afraid that most readers will respond to it with a polite smile while inching slowly away). The low-carb trend peaked in 2004 and has been pretty dead since then -- perhaps we're seeing a rebirth.

Finding exceptions to your type

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Germans were producing revolting porn even 40,000 years ago

Germany and Japan produce and consume the sickest kind of pornography you can think of -- I shouldn't have to make a list of it. It turns out that Germans were putting this stuff out as far back as 40,000 years ago. These so-called Venus figurines usually depict females so morbidly obese that they would only satisfy German fetishes.

Every time these figurines come up in discussion, we're told that they have something to do with fertility symbols -- rather than the obvious conclusion that guys have always wanted something to help them masturbate better. I wouldn't be surprised if one day we discover a 30,000 year-old horse femur that had been hollowed out, covered with lard on the inside, and had traces of human semen at one end. At least a few prehistoric men must have been in the market for a Paleolithic Fleshlight.

Now, those women in the Altamira cave paintings may have been a little on the Kate Moss side of the BMI scale, but at least you wouldn't lose yourself in their tubby folds. Just as during the Baroque period, when Velazquez painted a slender Venus -- in contrast to the seacows that the northern Rubens forced on his viewers -- so even among the cave races did the Spaniards err more on the side of femininity rather than fattitude.

Belated

I didn't post anything today, so I'm probably in danger of losing my devoted legion of internet followers, resigned to the fact that their god has abandoned them.

Hmmm, a picture always makes for an easy post.

So apropos of the entry below on young people not getting to enjoy outdoor fun anymore, I did manage to find an exception.

Like most hyperactive young girls, she dreaded the thought of having her picture taken. But ultimately her resolve melted under the heat of my charm.

Now stop reading this damned blog and go outside!