imagine living in some city state on some greek island

IDK..Gyros only go back to the 1920's and they are pretty fukin tasty

Nah. Not many seasonings id imagine.

Get bland pretty fast.

you don't think they were spice-maxxing back then?

also...imagine those OG lemons that were not that many generations removed from the garden of eden...no fuking steroids... squeezed all over some grilled, giant shrimps or scallops that were caught either by you or the people you own because you captured them in a battle.

Not but it probably felt more delicious since their tongues weren't desensitized and high calorie food actually meant something.

Imagine how that fire-roasted buffalo tastes after you and 20 of your friends brought it down in a 2 hour hunt after not eating for 3 days.

only savages were eating like that 3,000 years ago. their food prob didn't taste good at all and they prob ended up eating a lot of spoiled and rancid chit bc they were godless, uncultured swine.

egyptians, hittites,israelites etc were drinking wine infused with honey and chit like this. that chit must've been epic.

"Garum was made by fermenting fish guts, typically cleaned from whitebait, anchovies, mackerel, tuna, and others, with salt and aromatic herbs. The mixture was left in the sun for several months until it reached the desired pungency. The resulting thick, amber liquid was the prized garum sauce, while the paste left behind was called allec."

This is a 2000 year old roman sauce. If they were basically making what im assuming is worschesthirirereehire sauce then they likely were cooking at a pretty decent level.

I bet the food was good as long as you werent poor. I think a poor meal would be some type of porridge, maybe a charbroiled sparrow or fish and some bread. Would get tiring. We basically have the same today, they just call it ramen noodles.

Absolutely not, I dont think so.

-Spices were rarer or in some cases non-existent. You can be certain they are inconceivably more diverse and available now.
-Recipes have evolved over time and have incorporated the ever increasing abundance of ingredients.
-The world is smaller information wise, we have access to just about every cuisine ever recorded and literal instructions on how to make it in the palm of our hand.

The average person at least in the west lives (potentially) far better than any historical king when you consider access to food ingredients & healthcare. Only thing a king had that we don't is servants, armies and endless pussy.
This is an interesting take.

Yes. The carnivore diet proved that to me.

Today we are dealing with taste de-sensitivity. Jackychin nailed it. We have food scientists whose sole job is to chemically create flavor compounds to get us addicted to.

I use to like the taste of steak, but was always seasoning it a ton, using chimichurri, or putting compound butters on it with flavor. Now I crave steak so much that after 8 months even salt is becoming too much and am considering just eating meat without it. The moment I bite into a lightly salted steak my body is in flavor heaven.

The biggest difference imo is they probably had much better quality foods, ate mostly whole foods, and didn't have any ultra processed foods to destroy their taste buds.

So maybe the flavoring wasn't as strong, but Jackychin has it correct. Imagine coming home to fresh lamb, fresh wine and a bit of fresh handmade bread with butter and olive oil on it when you haven't eaten all day. Probably tasted like gold looks.

Fruits and vegetables almost certainly tasted better. I don’t know enough about how well meat was seasoned to know how good or bad that was and not sure how often butter was used in cooking either. That is a big reason food tastes so good now.

I doubt it. They probably ate the same things everyday their entire lives. Likely healthier food but not better tasting.

They also delt with a lot of parasites so meat most certainly needed to be cooked well done. Same thing in 3rd world counties now days.

This. Every week I make a new recipe that's fire. Not because I know how to cook, but cause I understand instructions. I'd say the 1800s is when food started getting good when they were churning butter and chit. Think there's a youtube page of some woman making recipes from that era. Now THAT looks better than the processed chit we eat today.

Fuk no. Before the 1500s food had no spice and was terrible.

Standard black pepper was more expensive than gold in the 1400s. That's how starved for spice the people were.

Have you ever been to the Philippines? Where they can't get any good spices and everything tastes like crap? That's how things were back then.

Also look up what the mongols ate. It's insane and no wonder they conquered so much.

When the didn't have water to drink they would do blood letting on their horse and drink some of its blood without killing it.

Tons of butter and cheese, organs, boiled/roasted meat, dried and salted meat, fermented milk, fresh lamb or horse meat, eating wild wolves, etc.

I'm jealous.

probably
no big corps trying to kill us with GMOs

I doubt it. There was an excavation in Israel where they found an ancient bathroom/toilet and hardened stool samples. They found remains of worms in the stool samples. Most likely a lot of people had bad stomach aches/pains due to contaminated food, poor hygiene etc.

yeah but they didn't have oreos either