how have people started reacting to the sort of food we usually eat today?
Answers
Answer:
A person from medieval Europe would be shocked at the quality and variety of food available to even a relatively poor person in modern Western society. Specifically, they would be amazed at the variety of spices. Certain herbs that grow easily in Europe, such as parsley, rosemary, and mint, would have been very familiar ingredients to them. But cinnamon, mace, or black pepper would have been items they had perhaps heard of but, even for a nobleman, would have been very rare to actually consume. Ounce for ounce, these spices were often more valuable than gold. Cumin would also have been a rare luxury, and ginger or any form of hot pepper unknown altogether. So their food would have been quite bland to our tastes, and ours extravagantly and strangely seasoned to theirs.
Equally startling would have been the wide range of fruits and vegetables we consume, and especially the fact that we eat these items year-round. They ate their fruits and vegetables only during brief harvest seasons, and methods of preservation like canning were generally unfamiliar to them. Tropical fruits like pineapple, mango, and banana would of course have been entirely unknown to them, but common items like potatoes and tomatoes also were not a normal item of their diet.
For meat, they would have eaten a great variety of game, birds, and fish, particularly the wealthy. The would find it very strange that cows, pigs, chicken, and turkeys constitute about 95% or so of all the meat we consume. They also consumed many types of fish that have now been overfished either to extinction or to populations too small to support commercial fishing.
Their meals were always accompanied by wine and beer, generally very strong and lots of it. They would have assumed that anyone drinking water with their meals was likely doing so as a religious penance. They would not have understood modern reluctance to give alcoholic beverages to children or pregnant women. In some medieval countries, beer was the first liquid children drank after outgrowing breast milk.
As for whether they would have liked all these strange experiences, I think most would have. Europeans who could still bought pepper and cinnamon, in spite of their extravagant price. Bananas and pineapples, when introduced, became rare and sought after luxuries. In general, I suspect that most medieval citizens, if exposed to modern food, wouldn’t willingly go back.