The late Medieval shift away from carbs and toward meat
30th June 2009
The past may have always been worse than the present, but some periods were better than others. And as Thomas Malthus showed, what made for an enjoyable era was plenty of disease, war, and other disasters beforehand — to clear out a good chunk of the population, leaving much more stuff to go around per person among the survivors.
So, the simple way to get plenty of this vitamin is to steal it. Find an animal that has spent all day processing the plants that are rich in the precursors — this animal will have created true vitamin A from all this junk, and it will have stored most of the unused portion in its liver. Kill this animal and eat its liver — and boom, you’ve hit the vitamin A jackpot. And all without letting a single leaf of spinach enter your mouth.