Food and Politics

In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the majority of the population living in the countryside ate only the food that they themselves produced. In cities, however, food took on other economic and political dimensions because food came from the outside, which, particularly during periods of famine, could cause enormous food shortages and social unrest. If the so-called great hunger shook the very foundations of power in its legitimacy and fed popular emotions (e.g., mobility crisis or riots), everyday malnutrition, and the lasting consequences of nutritional deficiencies were of no concern to the elites. Yet, the divergence in diets was obvious both physically, in the varying statures of people, and politically, in the opposition between the popolo grasso (fat people) and popolo minuto (thin people), the higher and lower part of the citizenship, as they were called in Italy at the time.