[MeetingsBrowser]

Recipes go back millennia, and seasonings were also common, but varied by region. It’s easy to grow your own herbs a, or even forage for some things.

I don’t think it’s true that most food sucked at any point, except for people in exceptional circumstances.

[mjhay]

Recipes were the province of the wealthy. The average person would have had a very repetitive, bland, and potentially malnourishing diet. They might have had some herbs or even foraged like you say, that still is very bland and boring compared to what we’re used to.

[retrac]

From what I have read the diet of people in classical antiquity was only terrible for the very poor. Most people in ancient Rome got to, at least rarely, eat honey cakes and fresh fruit and dried fish and maybe once a year at festivals even a small chunk of meat. They grew chives, dill, garlic, asparagus, radish, parsley, thyme, mustard, cumin and many other spices. And they made vinegar and olive oil and garum (fermented fish sauce) on an industrial scale. Mostly these would be used as sparing garnish to the grain-centric diet. But usually present.

[grebc]

The very poor far outnumber the wealthy.

[bobthepanda]

one thing to note is that while they may have consumed it they probably weren't making it. Particularly for urban dwellers, kitchens were very rudimentary if you even had one.

[red-iron-pine]

up until maybe 200 years ago famines were a genuine and consistent threat even to places like Europe.

food wouldn't just have sucked, in many cases all you could eat would be some dried grain boiled to porridge, or the handful of semi-mouldy veggies that made it through winter months -- and many would often be lucky to even have that