Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Food, Sin & Shame

Episode Date: February 10, 2023

Why might a medieval nun drink the pus of an ill patient? Where does ‘fishy Friday’ come from? And what does all of this have to do with religion?Today, Kate is joined between some Reformation sheets by Eleanor Barnett, from instagram's @historyeats. They talk about how religion, and in particular the switch from Catholicism to Protestantism in England, influenced eating habits.We will also find out how eating habits from this period can be compared with those of today.Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Stuart Beckwith. Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.If you have an idea or comment for the show, we welcome you to get in touch at [e-mail] up to History Hit with the code HISTORYEATS to get half price for the first three months. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. It's Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning. Actually, quite serious fair do's warning. We're talking about food and we're talking about disordered eating and eating disorders. And that just might not be something that you want to listen to today. In which case, fair do's, you have been warned.

I'll just catch you next time. Then rolling through the supermarket, checking the back of a packet of sweets. Hmm, does it contain gluten? Is it vegan for that friend that's coming over? But what about your spiritual nourishment? How much of that do these sweeties contain? It seems a bit of a strange idea, right? But in the early modern period, food was a key part of your religious well-being.

And today, betwixt the sheets, we are going to find out how and why. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing it. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, for a beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, dear.

Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, with me, Kate Lister. You might have your cheat meal, or in my case, a cheat week. Or your guilty pleasure snacks. But food has been intrinsically linked to shame and, in fact, religious sin for centuries. From the body and blood of Christ in bread and wine to Friday fish feasts and battles to see who can fast the best and be the most pious.

I am joined by Eleanor Barnett from Instagram's At History Eats to find out how people's eating habits have been impacted by their religious beliefs. Enjoy. Hello, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Eleanor Barnett. How are you? I'm good, thank you. How are you? I am really excited to be talking to you because I love a food historian. because I'm a sex historian and I think that we've got quite a lot in common actually

the nature of the subject, the fact that it is weirdly relatable to everyone all throughout history. And I think that a lot of the narratives surrounding food and sex are the same. That might just be my sex life. No, definitely. I think thinking today about sin and shame, I was just thinking about chocolate desserts and how they're kind of almost sexy, no? They're sinful. They are weirdly sexy. Yeah.

Why would it be a chocolate dessert and not a courgette or tapioca pudding? Like, it's weird how certain foods have taken on this kind of like, oh, it's quite sexy. Whereas, like, if somebody tried to cover you in a tub of daryl, that would be bad. That would be time to leave. Yorguts, I think, is one that... Now that I've got a newborn, I don't remember that when I watch TV, but adverts, normally, from what I remember of yoghats, were very sexual, no? Like, I wasn't there one with Nicole show singer, who's sort of, like, licking creamy yogurt and...

Like the bit on a nose with that kind of like, oh God, look at me, I've got your spilt yogurt on my face. Why was that sexy? Yeah. You are right. I hadn't thought about that. Yogurt is marketed as sexy. How did it get there? That's quite a glow-up for yogurt, isn't it? Really. I'm getting ahead of myself. How did you come to be a food historian? What was your path? And what's the appeal of this subject for you? I wanted to get to the everyday lives of all. people, rather than thinking just about kind of these grand histories of kings and queens, eating we have to do most days. And especially in the eras before artificial refrigeration and

before these full stacked supermarket shelves, food, so growing it, preparing it, preserving it, cooking it, eating it. These were things that would have taken a huge amount of time out of people's ordinary day-to-day life. So it's a way of connecting to ordinary people, but it's more than that. It's something that connects to our deepest identities, you know. It's how we distinguish ourselves from others. So if you think about working class food or upper class food, I think that's something that's still prevalent today. But it's also something that brings us together.

If we think about national identities, cups of tea, the tea I'm drinking now, it's how we think of British identity. And it's something that brings together groups of families, friends. It's more than just kind of what recipes you have. It's what those recipes mean to people. Listening to you saying now, I'm just thinking that, like, food operates in so many ways. I mean, obviously, it's fuel for the body.

And I hate those people that I see on Instagram saying things like that. Like, oh, my God, food is just fuel. Just fuck off. No one's inviting you to their party, you awful person. But anyway, there are those people. But it's not just fuel for your body, is it? It's actually, like, quite a caring, loving thing. Like, when people feed you.

You know, like, whenever I go, oh, my mum insists on feeding me and, like, cooks loads of food, it operates in that way as well, doesn't it? It's a real bonding experience, I think. I suppose. Definitely, definitely. Especially traditionally for women as well. So it's a way of connecting to the female voice throughout history, which is sometimes often harder to access, I think, in the historical records. One of the questions that I get asked a lot as a sex historian, and I've never had a concrete answer that I've actually been really happy with. But the question that I get asked

a lot is, why do we have so many hangups around sex? Like, as a species, what is it about us that has latched onto sex guilt and shame and like, oh, definitely shouldn't have put that in there. That was bad and food does the same thing. So I'm going to ask the question to you and see if you can come up with a better answer than I have. Why do we attach so much shame to food? So I think it's a complicated question with different answers depending on the historical period. So the research that I do looks at the reformation period and from that perspective I think when we're thinking about shame it's much more heavily tied to religion. So what you eat or what you ate could influence how your soul interacted with your body.

There's lots of complicated physiological theories of the era that are very different from how we think of our body working today. You know, it's connected to gluttony, the sin, that kind of thing. Whereas I think today it's more often related to body image, what that food does. does makes you fatter, basically, and how that's been understood negatively in more modern history. And when you said that you researched the Reformation period, just for anyone that's listening, that's not absolutely sure, we're talking about like the Puritans, really, the rise of Protestantism. Well, think of Henry the Eighth. He loved a sandwich, that one.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Or a peacock pie, perhaps, something a bit more elaborate. He would. He would go big or go home. And he did, absolutely. But so in that era, basically, England and other countries in the context, and transforming from Catholic to Protestant. Much of my research has looked into what that meant for what people ate, but also how they understood eating. So what did they think was happening when they were eating that peacock pie? How did it relate to their connection to God and to sin and that kind of thing?

Okay, that's fascinating. And did you sort of notice that there was a noticeable shift from, I'm being very blunt here, but like in dividing up of time periods, but Catholicism and then Protestantism comes in, Was there a distinct shift in what people were eating? And what was that? So in terms of what people were eating, the major thing that you can think about is fasting. So in the Catholic world, the Catholic Church instituted certain days in the week.

So Friday, Saturday, every week. Fish on Fridays. Still a bit of a hangover from that area that we might have fish on a Friday. And then obviously you've got the long lintom fast, sometimes advent. So the idea was you fasted from meat, sometimes also from. meat products, but you can eat fish. And so there's this huge discourse in Protestant England that kind of rejects Catholic fasting laws. So Protestants say that salvation is no longer kind of granted through acts. So what you eat, what you don't eat has no implication on whether you're

saved or not. By the 1570s, most people believe in England that you're predestined to be saved or not. So that means that fasting can't impact on your salvation. They also are against the fact that you would fast from meat and continue to eat fish because they say that's kind of a remnant of Judaism. So when Christianity separates from Judaism, one of the main things that changes is that there are no longer any specific taboos in what you can eat. So Jews have a list of foods that it's sinful to eat. Whereas in Christianity, St. Paul says, for every creature of God is good and nothing ought to be refused if it be received with Thanksgiving. They also say, oh, Catholics are actually still being gluttonous because, okay, they fast from meat, but they have these big fish feasts.

So there's many examples of clergymen in the Elizabethanera saying things like in fast their beastly bodies, they say, with a huge variety of fish. And they hold their stomach and say, what pains we suffer for Christ. to take actually what the Protestants want is fasting from all types of food for a set period of time rather than just from meat. But it does get a bit more complicated that in terms of your question about what changes in terms of what people are eating. In England, the Crown still continues to enforce fish fasts. So people are still actually legally required to eat fish on Fridays and Saturday. Legally, that was the law. You have to. Yes. I did not know that. Yeah. And there's fines that are laid out for people that break the law, actually sometimes quite hefty finds as

well. For not eating fish? But the Crown tries, well, does say that this is not a religious farce like it was for the Catholics. Actually, we're just continuing this for the secular reason of supporting the fish trade and therefore supporting the Navy, which would be reliant on the vessels that the fishermen were using. Is that like the Reformation equivalent of like Vaganuary? Yeah, I think this is really interesting and quite complicated topic in history because of the variation of what people are saying and then the practice. So how many people who transitioned top down from Catholicism to Protestantism, how many of them really understood that nuanced difference

that actually you're only eating fish because the Crown says and it's secular? I thought that when you were saying that, I was quite surprised to hear that it was the Catholics who were all about fasting and that it was the Protestants who said, no, we should be able to eat. Because generally the Protestants have the reputation as being a bit more apologies for everyone, but quite dull in comparison. They're the ones that kind of walking around going, oh, that's a bit much. Don't do that.

Especially at this point in history, there's a real reaction against the supposed excess of the Catholic Church. So I thought that would have been the other way around. But I imagine you're going to tell me that it's not that Protestants were having amazing feasts and parties. I think it's more the Puritan side of Protestantism that gets that kind of bad reputation. And actually, Puritans, ironically, do end up fasting much like the more extreme Catholic fast that have. happened in monasteries. So Puritans have full day fasts as a kind of group and they're very inward thinking, very pious. The idea is to completely get rid of the material world for a day in order to focus on the spiritual, but they would be against fast that are specifically

just avoiding meat and they actually want to be more pious by not having those kind of fish feasts, which is what arguably the Catholic fars end up being. I'll be back with Eleanor after this short break. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on not just the Tudors from HistoryHid, I'm dusting down my magnifying glass to investigate some of history's most notorious murders and brutal crimes. Was it a quarrel,

or was the brilliant playwright Christopher Marlowe actually murdered in that Deptford Inn? Was Amy Dudley, wife of Elizabeth I first favourite Robert pushed down a flight of stairs to her death. Were the Gies, that great French family, actually bloodthirsty murderers, who secured their power through ruthlessness and violence? And what's the truth about the Hungarian noblewoman

who allegedly killed hundreds of young women? Join me, but not on an empty stomach, for not just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. What do people think that food was doing to their bodies? Because I think that we still do this, today. We still have this concept of clean eating and that you can detox and cleanse your body if you eat enough kale and enough radishes and that that will suddenly make you a better person.

So I think that that idea that food does something more than just fuel you is very much with us. Was that in play in the time that you're looking at? Did they understand food in that kind of context? I think what's so fascinating about looking this far back in history is that you have to detach yourself from our understanding even of how the body works, right? So they have a completely you different idea about what's happening. Essentially in the 16th century, the ideas of the ancient Greek physicians like Galen come back. And they believe that the body is made up of four, they're called humours or sort of fluids, blood, collar, melancholy, phlegm. And each one of those humours has a different variation of characteristics, so either warm, cold, wet or dry. And the idea is to be healthy,

you want to balance those humours. Each type of food is also a variation of those humours. So you know how today some people might say you're as cool as a cucumber. That's the kind of remnant from that humeral theory because cucumber was wet and cold. Cucumbers actually have quite a nasty reputation in this era. Samuel Peep's describes someone actually died from eating cowcumbers as they were known because they can make you imbalanced because they're too cold and they're too wet. So they thought cucumbers were fatal?

They could be. That's all the science that I need. So that's happening in terms of keeping your body healthy, you want to be in balance. Say if you just ate too many cucumbers, you've become too cold and wet, and then you've become phlegmatic as a characteristic. Same with how we might say someone's melancholy today. That comes from humeral theory. It means that you're too cold and you're too dry. Is this the same for spicy foods?

Because that's got a reputation as, you know, spicy food will rev you up. Yeah, exactly. That's why we say spicy food is hot. Again, it's like humoral language. hot food is more inclined towards lust, and so it could lead you into further sin. So that's kind of what's happening in the kind of, quote-unquote, science of healthy eating. But a lot of my research looks at how that's really intricately tied to religious belief. For a start, you don't want to become melancholic or kind of imbalance

because you might act in imbalanced ways, right, which could lead you to be more sinful. But the stomach in this era is kind of thought of as like a pot on a stove with a kind of heat source below. So if you eat too much food, they think that that pot is going to overflow. And the food at the top is going to kind of decay on ferment. And it's going to produce these filthy humours and it's going to belch these nasty vapours up towards your mind. And they're going to cloud your intellectual thought. So therefore, you're more inclined to sin. And it's the same with just generally things that they think are unhealthy,

that they can cloud your ability to think straight, basically. And they also believe that you have these spirits, that connect your soul and your body, how they can kind of... This is getting very complicated now. All right. So we've got humours, we've got food, we've got temperatures, and now we've got spirits. Yeah, exactly.

So what's so interesting is you really break down all of your perceptions, right, when you study this era. Because if they believe that the body works in such a different way, you can imagine that their experience of eating, therefore, is very different. What it means to put food in their mouth, it's so different to what we would think today. When they said spirit,

What do they mean? Like little like stomach elves. They're like, what was that? What would you imagine? Something between physical and non-physical that connects your immaterial soul and your body. So those spirits are moving through vessels and through blood, through veins. And because food is converted into blood,

what you eat can also disrupt that communication between your soul and your body. So eating is this really quite spiritually dangerous or at least kind of heavy thing to be. be doing in terms of religion. And then of course, more simply in Christianity, gluttony is a sin, one of the seven deadly sins. And if you think back to that first Bible story that most people know, Adam and Eve, original sin, Eve bites the apple. So food is that gateway to all human sin. Is that why gluttony is a sin? Because of this idea that if you ate too much, it could damage your soul. That's probably not a fair question. I've just wondered when he said that if that's why.

it was regarded as sinful. I think it's because, I mean, who knows really? It's very complicated. But I think on the most basic level, it's because eating is the most physical thing you can do in the sense that when you eat, you're actually taking in some of the earthly world into you, right? And you become in some quite literal way,

especially in their thought, you become that food, you become that part of the physical world. So it's so non-spiritual, if you see what I mean. Did they have concepts of good and bad food? Was there sort of like concept of like what's a good food to eat? Did they have that or was it sort of like more just moderating things? When you say good, do you mean healthy and unhealthy? I don't know really, yeah, I think so.

I think I mean like healthy and unhealthy. You know, like, you know, there are super foods and you should definitely eat more of this and definitely eat less of that and try and eat clean and paleo. But like back in the Reformation period, did they have a concept of good and bad food? I think it's more often framed as creating that balance. So you could have a bit of cucumber if you were hot to cool yourself down if you see what I mean in your humeral makeup. And it's also very individualised. So everybody has a different kind of natural humeral balance.

So someone might be more inclined to eat a certain type of food to keep themselves healthy. And that is divided by if you were a different kind of social class. So they argue that if you were a kind of upper class person in that era, that your body actually needs to eat more things like chicken or capon. And of course, it's the upper classes who are writing these treatises. I was going to say, it's quite a privileged position, isn't it? Yeah. And they make out that their bodies need more what they think of as kind of base foods like

onions and garlic. They actually think that those are healthier for them. That's kind of a way of creating or enforcing the continued division, right, between different groups of people by saying you can't actually eat our expensive nice food because your body is different and it needs different food. Right, that's convenient. I think I read somewhere that Henry VIII that ate almost exclusively meat because there is this idea that vegetables were for peasants and potentially bad for him.

Yeah, it's a bit of a myth that wealthier people, kings and queens didn't eat vegetables. They would have eaten vegetables. Okay. What happens is that vegetables aren't necessarily recorded in their account books because grown in the grounds. But it is true that in theory, especially certain vegetables, like I say, onions, root vegetables, were more appropriate, they thought, for the bodies of the peasantry, whereas meat and things are more appropriate for the wealthier people.

How did alcohol fit into all of this? Because obviously this is a group of people who like a drink. And does that play into this idea as well? I seem to recall that there's some sins around being drunk, like, that's bad. But like, what was their theories and the ideas around alcohol? Well, wine, actually, you can kind of think. of it as quite similar to red meat in that it's actually very healthy because it's the thing that's most similar to your body. So they think of wine as very easily converted into blood, which

makes sense if you were looking at wine, right? It kind of looks like blood. I can see what they're doing there. Okay. So actually, wine's very, very healthy in that sense. But therefore, it becomes something that you should fast from like meat because you're supposed to be, you know, a voice. the things that are most corporal. Yeah. And so how does this tie into, obviously, wine and bread, talking about the Eucharist, and that's quite a central issue in Protestantism and Catholicism,

this idea that you drink the wine and then you eat the bread, and then there's a whole debate about what that actually symbolises. But what's your sort of research around that idea of eating and consuming? Yeah, so in Catholicism, they believe in transubstantiation, which means that the bread and wine of the Eucharist literally become the body and blood of Christ. and that's kind of the macrocosm, I suppose, of lots of other ways in which they understood food to be able to be kind of holy.

So they don't just have the bread and wine, but they have other types of blessings. So at Easter, people could bring in their Easter eggs, they could bring in their Easter lamb, and it could be blessed. And the idea was that in some way, it therefore can transmit some kind of grace or holy power onto the consumer,

the same way that they might bless the field to try and get protection for that food and so on and so on. So there's this kind of miraculous physical way in which food can express its holy power. In the Reformation, one of the major divisions is over that interpretation of the Eucharist. So Catholics think that it's literally the body and blood of Christ, and reformers argue that actually, no, the bread is just bread, the wine is just wine. and there's kind of debates as to how far Christ is present in that event, that consecration. My research kind of goes further and argues that Protestants kind of desacralise, if that's a word, food in general. So again, things like blessing the Easter lamb is no longer allowed because it's implying that there's power being bestowed into the spiritual.

Whereas again, in Protestantism, salvation's granted by faith alone. It's not granted through these acts. That's interesting. I suppose going back to something about how I open the question about how sex and food are connected throughout history and there's a lot of sort of similar overlap. Is there a sort of a gendered reading of the history of food? Oh yeah, definitely, definitely. So perhaps we can think about Catholic nuns for a minute. Oh, please. They more often than monks tended to fast as a way of expressing their piety. How come? I think it's because women were more and perhaps still are more associated with, being the producers of food, but also kind of more symbolically that it's women who breastfeed, so they're associated with food. And it becomes a way of these kind of medieval holy women to, yeah, express their closeness to Christ. And there's one convent chronicle, Bartolomea, Rikoboni, I think, who wrote this chronicle, and she describes how one of the other nuns there

is so wonderful because she far so much, her body is kind of weak and thin like a crucifix by a avoiding food, you come closer to Christ's suffering. Wow. And there's examples of some female saints. St. Catherine of Siena is the main one that people talk about in this context, who fast so much she basically eventually dies. And some historians have argued that these nuns have a form of anorexia, although it's anachronistic to really call it that.

It's definitely a kind of trend in especially medieval Catholicism and one that Protestants don't like. I read a book once about the history of eating disorders. It covered the medieval fasting nuns. And I thought that this idea of denying yourself, not just food and sustenance, but pleasure as well. Maybe that's just me as a sex historian looking at it. But I see that link very strongly between food and sexes, that it takes a lot of willpower. It's easier to sit down and eat a bag of biscuits and have a great time.

And that's lovely. And I love doing that. But this idea of self-denial and being strong enough to be able to do it. Do you think that that was like a part of it? Yeah, definitely. I mean, often fasting is paired with sexual. abstinence in these monastic contexts could be paired with sleeping on the bed of straw, hard surfaces.

There's even medieval holy women who drink pus. So it's definitely this denial of bodily pleasure. Pusses in like infected fluids. Oh, just for a second that I was hoping that was like some kind of medieval wine that we don't have anymore. Why were they doing that? Why were they doing that? For them, it's this way of relating to Christ's suffering.

and it's a way of rejecting, at the most extreme end, the physical, in favour of the spiritual. Wow. And where's the pus coming from? Sorry, I'm hooked on this now. I'm fascinated. People who were ill? Oh, God. Do you know why that makes it worse? That it's not your own. True. Would you rather drink your own purse or someone else's purse? My own, I think. I at least know where I've been. I do recall there being a few, I think I called them nuns on Twitter when I post about it. And a lot of people went, they weren't nuns, they were mystics, who had a vision that they had Christ's foreskin in their mouth. Oh, I've not heard that one. Yeah, I think that she was like an Austrian mystic in the medieval period. There's a very strong reading of some of these early nuns

devotion to Christ as being erotic and sexual. And there was a whole big debate around Christ to foreskin in the middle ages of like where it went. As a Jewish man who was circumcised, there's this idea of like, well, someone must have his foreskin. And there was a mystic who had this image that she'd eaten Christ's foreskin. Well, there you go. I don't know what to do with that, I just popped in my head as I was saying that, but this idea of like eating weird stuff for medieval nuns, stuff from other people's bodies as well. But the foreskin thing maybe makes sense in that they would have thought of themselves as the bride of Christ. So it's trying to get in some corporal way spiritually closer to Christ and to Christ suffering, I suppose.

And I suppose that I'd do it, wouldn't it? There's lots of theories around eating disorders. And I don't want to pretend that I have any answers here, but a big one is about control. and maybe historically women who have had far less control than agency than men, that is one aspect that they can have mastery over it. Do you think that that plays into this at all? So the argument against calling it anorexia that it maybe makes it sound like it's less voluntary,

as in it depends how you think of it, but you could say that the nuns, it was actually kind of a positive experience for them, right? We say it's a way that they can exert control in their own piety. rather than anorexia. Today is more of a kind of medical or involuntary condition. I see that.

That's an important distinction. And of course, you've still got fasting in many religions around the world today. It still plays a fairly central part in many faiths, doesn't it? Yeah, definitely. Right back in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism as well. Most religions have some form of bodily self-denial, I think, built in. And oftentimes it's avoidance of meat specifically. I always want to say, okay, they've got that bad reputation of completely denying pleasure, right?

But actually, if you read their writings about food in particular, there is this sense that food can also be a positive thing in that ultimately food is God-given, right? It's the thing that keeps us alive. And more than that, it can actually connect you through things like the Eucharist to God in a spirit. or holy, powerful way. So actually Protestants have this idea that when you eat the bread and wine of the Eucharist, okay, it's not literally Christ's body and blood. But if you think about what that symbolises, you can really have a positive spiritual experience.

And, okay, we might think that they completely avoid pleasure, that there's examples of them thinking about everyday food as well in similar ways. So if you ate something that was sweet, you might contemplate how the sweetness of Christ's salvation or something like that. Or as another example, someone who writes about when he has milk, he contemplates the principles of religion because milk is analogous to baby food or the first food you have. So I wouldn't say that Puritans think of food entirely negatively. That's interesting. I would have thought that there'd have been a whole load of thou shalt not.

But I want to finish by asking you, because just would, you were saying there about most of the fasting traditions in faith around the world focus on not eating meat. Is that tied into sort of modern concept of vegetarianism? Again, I know that that's very nuanced and people are vegetarians for many, many reasons, but is there a kind of like a link somewhere there about, you know, you're abstaining from this and that makes you a better person, basically? Yeah, so it's certainly not in this Reformation era, vegetarianism, as we would know it. The term isn't coined actually until the 19th century and the first vegetarian. society is founded in England in the mid-19th century.

So actually what they're doing is avoiding meat for religious reasons. So as I said, because it's kind of the most nutritious, it inclines you to lust because it's that human really hot. It makes sense to avoid it. But also because fish is traditionally seen as more quote unquote holy because it's protected from God's curse. Sometimes they argue that fish is created through spontaneous creation rather than through the result of intercourse.

So it's kind of less. lustful to eat it. Is this what pescatarianism comes from? Is that rooted in this sort of theory? Well, I suppose you could call it a form of Catholic pescatarianism, perhaps, only on fast days, of course. Of course. And actually the Catholic Church sees people who avoid meat all the time as heretical.

Oh, do they? Yeah, because Christians want to say that no food is taboo. So if you're completely a vegetarian, you're doing something different than what they want you to do. So there are people called the Manichians in the third century, for example, who are persecuted because they completely avoid meat. They think that it's got like kind of divine light particles within it and so you shouldn't eat it. People like the Cathars as well in the 11th century who are almost vegan, again, because they have a different concept of where souls are and where that holy power is. And so they get persecuted as well. Vegans have always had it rough then, haven't they?

That's it, yeah. You do get some. arguments that we might find more familiar for quote-unquote vegetarianism in the 17th century. So you did get a few people there who start saying that it's maybe unethical or they have compassion for animals. Although ironically, so people like Thomas Bacon, who also has an ironic name, but he's also ironically not actually a meat avoider, but he does talk about having that compassion for animal welfare. Bacon as well talks about how it's healthier to be meat. free, which also sounds quite modern really, but within that kind of religious framework, because they argue that in the Bible, actually, before Noah's Flood, when people were not

consuming meats, in theory, apparently they could live up to 900 years old, that kind of thing. So it's kind of like a healthy reason, but obviously seeped in that religious theory. But it's not until really the 20th century that we get that proper environmentalism and that proper concern for animal welfare based around intensive farming practices and stuff like that, that we get the vegetarianism that we recognise today. Yeah. Do you think that our attitude today around food, although, as you said, they're influenced by other things by like animal welfare and intensive farming, but do you think that we still

view food in terms of spirituality, maybe not consciously religious, but the idea of something that's good for your soul or bad for your soul, is that like a leftover legacy? Perhaps. Yeah, maybe it's not kind of spiritual, but we certainly still think of food in very emotive language. And certainly we still think of what you eat as reflective of your inner character, right? Which is Taylor's Olders Time, really. You are what you eat, I suppose. You are what you eat, absolutely. Ellen, you've been amazing to talk to. And if people want to find you, where can they find you? I know you have a fabulous Instagram account. Yeah, come and follow me over on History Eats. I'm sharing food history facts, artwork, obviously. from around the world. I try and post something fun to do with food history every day. What's been your favourite thing that you've posted? Just because I'm still in Christmas mode, I think I love the fact that before there was a Terry's

chocolate orange, there was a Terry's chocolate apple. I did not know that. And I believe that you have a code for us as well. Yes, so there's a code for half price for the first three months of History Hit TV using the code History Eats. Go and do it. I'm please going to have a look at Eleanor's Instagram. It is honestly fascinating. Food history is just endlessly amazing. I love it. And thank you so much for joining me to talk to me about this today. You have just been wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. So nice to chat. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Eleanor for joining me. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if there's something that you want us to look into, if there's some feedback

or some comment, you're just desperate to get to us. You can now email us apps. Betwixt at HistoryHit.com. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.