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Ancient food are absurdly complicated.
(lemmy.world)
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
People needed beer because the water was not always safe to drink. The alcohol in beer kills parasites and bacteria that might make you sick. Even kids drank light beer in medieval times for this reason.
I believe that the the claim that medieval people needed to drink beer because water wasn't safe to drink is a bit of a myth. They built aquaducts, dug wells, etc.
As far as I understand it, it was more to do with preference (beer is great!) and calories. Beer was a good way to turn grains into easily quaffed liquid meals.
To be fair, wells and aquaducts are fairly clean ways to get water (read: animals haven't shit or died in it yet). Rivers and other surface water were as bad as today, if not worse because it was a de facto village sewage system. Water quality issues were also mitigated by a diet very heavy in stews and soups, so less extra hydration was needed.
Why do you think that shit was put into the waters. There were no artificial fertilizers. Dung (animal and human) was an important resource you wouldn't want to waste. Till quite recently it was normal to collect your waste in the cesspool and than fertilize your fields with it or sell it to an farmer