The 10th century nun diet

A lot of intelligent people know more about diet and nutrition than I do, so I will merely comment on the following information from Jonathan Jarrett's blog.  It seems there is a forged charter that gives the total amount of food supposedly consumed by nuns in  a monastery with a certain number of nuns in it.  Divide one dicey number by another dicey number and you get what supposedly was the daily intake of the ninth or 10th century nun:

• 1,440 g of bread
• 1.38 l of wine
• 70 g of cheese
• 133 g of dry vegetables
• 16 g of salt
• 0.6 g of honey (which I guess was used in accumulated dollops)

Verdon (or perhaps Rouche) [scholars Jarrett has consulted]  calculates that this is 4,727 calories and says that the required daily intake is 2,400. That was France in 1975, and a rapid websearch suggests that UK women are advised by the National Health Service to keep calories down to 2000 a day. Of course, there is a big difference in how many calories the nuns were burning in just not freezing for at least half the year, but Verdon is presumably still right when he observes that this diet was seriously lacking in protein and vitamins.

So what do you say, informed eaters?

PS:  Historians of earlier eras are often forced to look at documents that were forged by institution trying to nail down what they thought were their historic rights.

Image:  Escapee nuns eating fast food.

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