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is the romantic period due, in any part, to the high alcohol content of their food ?
(moist.catsweat.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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Which foods contain high quantities of alcohol?
istr something about mead/beers/ales being some kind of standard
product of u.s. public schools. ymmv
There is a school of thought that says that 1000+ years ago, clean water may have been hard to come by in some areas, and it was actually safer to drink beer than the local water.
It turns out, though, that much of the benefit comes from boiling the water as part of the beer making process - if those people had simply boiled their water before drinking it, it would have been just as effective.
The beer they drank back then was also much weaker than beer today. So nobody was getting drunk on it regularly, and it was not quite as dehydrating as modern alcoholic drinks.
The Royal Navy famously gave beer and rum as part of their rations while at sea, because the alcohol served to kill microbes. They could dilute it with water before handing out the rations for the day, and the alcohol would kill any microbes in the water, essentially helping them to stretch out the life og their water rations as well.
I think more importantly beer and mead back then were sources of calories (beer was bread in a mug), and the alcohol content was very low - this also explains the Temperance movements when alcohol levels jumped significantly and suddenly. People were used to drinking 3 or 4 (what we'd today call "little") beers at perhaps 2%, and it suddenly doubled and people were getting hammered because they didn't realize it had doubled.
I’m sure there’s something to be said about inoculating water with known not bad microbes over boiling and then possibly reintroducing disease causing microbes