In 1336 the English Parliament passed an act regulating what foods the various social classes were permitted to consume on different days of the week.
Read that sentence again, because it is doing a lot of work.
The act was one of a long series of sumptuary laws issued across medieval and early modern Europe. It specified that no man whose income fell below a certain threshold was permitted to be served more than two courses at a meal. It specified what kinds of meat could be eaten by whom on which days. It specified that fish was the appropriate food for the lower orders during Lent, and on Fridays, and on a long list of other holy days that totalled something like a hundred and fifty days a year.
The official justification was moral. The actual justification was that meat was scarce, valuable, and the people in charge wanted to control who got it.
Sumptuary laws of this kind appear across European history with remarkable consistency. Edward III. Edward IV. Henry VIII. Elizabeth I. The French monarchy did the same. The German principalities did. The Italian city-states did.
In every case the structure was identical: the upper classes ate freely, the middle classes ate within limits, and the peasants were given a list of days on which animal flesh was prohibited that occupied roughly half the calendar year.
The Catholic Church provided the moral framework. Fasting on Fridays. Fasting through Lent. Fasting on the vigils of feast days. Fasting on the Ember Days. The cumulative effect was that an obedient peasant in the fifteenth century was prohibited from eating meat for somewhere between a third and a half of the year, every year, for his entire life.
The nobility, conveniently, were granted dispensations.
The wealthy paid for indulgences. The monasteries that enforced the fasting rules in theory were, in practice, often the largest meat consumers in their districts, on the basis that the monks needed it for their work.
Now look at what happens when you remove dietary protein from a labouring population for half the year, every year, for centuries.
You get the medieval European peasant. Five foot three on average. Bone deformities consistent with chronic malnutrition. Life expectancy of about thirty if you survived infancy, which most children did not. A population that was, by every skeletal measure, smaller and weaker than the hunter-gatherers who had occupied the same land six thousand years earlier.
The thing the church was calling spiritual discipline was a permanent state of nutritional restriction enforced on the people who did the actual work of feeding everyone else. The people enforcing the restriction were not subject to it. The arrangement was held in place by an institution that owned about a third of the cultivable land in Europe and was, not coincidentally, the largest single beneficiary of the system.
When you read the modern recommendation that meat consumption should be limited to a few times a week, that beans and grains should make up the bulk of the diet, that animal protein should be replaced where possible with plant alternatives, ask yourself who is making the recommendation, what they themselves eat, and whether the structure of the recommendation looks at all familiar.
The peasants had Lent.
We have Meatless Mondays.
The institutions issuing the rules are different.
The arrangement is the same.
@donwinslow And just what had occurred just before this action...nobody's asking that question... intent is what's critical to know especially in fast moving situations
@Mikeggibbs Give your head a smack eh!!
Non-permanent?... this will ease the housing market/health care and everything associated with it...immigration legal and non-legal is out of hand
ATTENTION: We no longer have politicians who represent our children. That ends now.
Release the ENTIRE public sex offender registry for ALL of Canada. Ontario had ZERO vigilantism cases last year in a province of 16M+ people.
STOP shielding predators. START protecting kids.