Memory Monday: Food and Clothing Part 1

My Great-great Aunt and Uncle

FOOD AND CLOTHING PART 1

I chose the picture above because the couple looks to in their seventies or so, but they would have been in their thirties in 1865, in their prime, working hard as farmers. This ties in with a most interesting article I found in a book from that time titled Facts for Farmers, also the Family Circle. Today, everyone seems to be concerned about what they eat—carbs, fats, proteins and how to balance them all. In the article below, it doesn’t seem that the people in the mid-19^th Century worried so much about all that. Just look at what an average man who lives to the age of 70 years old would eat in a lifetime. Makes one stop and think about how much we eat today (but then we might not work as hard as they did back then). By the way, I’m not sure what some of these things are.

THE FOOD AND CLOTHING A MAN MAY CONSUME IN A LIFETIME.

Alex Soyer's "Modern Housewife" gives the following calculation as the probable amount of food that an epicure of seventy years might have consumed. "Supposing his gastronomic performances to commence at ten years, he will make 65,700 breakfasts, dinners, and suppers, to say nothing of luncheons and extra feastings.

To supply the epicure's table for sixty years, Soyer calculates he will require 80 oxen, 200 sheep, 100 calves, 200 lambs, 50 pigs; in poultry, 1,200 fowls, 300 turkeys, 150 geese, 400 ducklings, 263 pigeons; 1,400 partridges, pheasants, and grouse; 600 woodcocks and snipes; 600 wild ducks, widgeon, and teal; 450 plovers, ruffs, and reeves; 800 quails, ortolans, and dotterels, and a few guillemots and other foreign birds; also 500 hares and rabbits, 40 deer, 120 Guinea-fowl, 10 peacocks, and 360 wild-fowls.

In the way of fish, 120 turbot, 140 salmon, 120 cod, 260 trout, 400 mackerel, 300 whitings, 800 soles and slips, 400 flounders, 400 red mullet, 209 eels, 150 haddocks, 400 herrings, 5,000 smelts, and some hundred thou sand of those delicious, silvery whitebait, besides a few hundred species of fresh-water fishes.

In shell-fish, 20 turtle, 30,000 oysters, 1,500 lobsters or crabs, 300,000 prawns, shrimps, sardines, and anchovies.

In the way of fruit, about 500 lbs. of grapes, 360 lbs. of pineapples, 600 peaches, 1,400 apricots, 240 melons, and some hundred thousand plums, green-gages, ap ples, pears, and some millions of cherries, strawberries, raspberries, currants, mulberries, and an abundance of other small fruit, viz., walnuts, chestnuts ,dry figs, and plums.

In vegetables of all kinds, 5,475 lbs. weight, and about 2,434 lbs. of butter, 684 lbs. of cheese, 21,000 eggs, 800 tongues.

Of bread, 41 tons, half a ton of salt and pepper, near 21 tons of sugar.

His drink during the same period may be set down as follows: 49 hogsheads of wine; 18,683 gallons of beer, 584 gallons of spirits, 342 gallons of liqueur, 2,3941 gallons of coffee, cocoa, tea, etc., and 304 gallons of milk, 2,736 gallons of water.

This mass of food in sixty years amounts to no less than 831 tons weight of meat, farinaceous food and vegetables, etc., out of which I have named in detail the probable delicacies that would be selected by an epicure through life.

But observe that I did not count the first ten years of his life, at the beginning of which he lived upon pap, bread and milk, etc., also a little meat, the expense of which I add to the age from then to twenty, as no one can really be called an epicure before that age; it will thus make the expenses more equal as regards the calculation.

The following is the list of what I consider his daily meals:

"BREAKFAST.—Three-quarters of a pint of coffee, four ounces of bread, one ounce of butter, two eggs, or four ounces of meat, or four ounces of fish.

"LUNCH.—Two ounces of bread, two ounces of meat, or poultry, or game, two ounces of vegetables, and a half pint of beer, or a glass of wine.

"DINNER.—Half a pint of soup, a quarter of a pound of fish, half a pound of meat, a quarter of a pound of poultry, a quarter of a pound of savory dishes or game, two ounces of vegetables, two ounces of bread, two ounces of pastry or roasts, half an ounce of cheese, a quarter of a pound of fruit, one pint of wine, one glass of liqueur, one cup of coffee or tea; at night one glass of spirits and water."

But then again, if we totaled up how much we each eat in a lifetime, we might not be so different from our ancestors. Or we might be eating more. Although, eating 800 tongues in any lifetime (at least for me) would just not happen.

Next week, I will have Part 2 where I show how much clothing it took for a lifetime.