At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

It was the beginning of an understanding of “deficiency disease,” as it was known, and it won Eijkman the Nobel Prize in medicine even though he had no idea what these active agents were.

Worse still, in 1917 America’s leading nutritionist, E. V. McCollum of the University of Wisconsin—the very man who coined the terms vitamin A and B—declared that scurvy was not in fact a dietary deficiency disease at all, but was caused by constipation.

Finally in 1939, a Harvard Medical School surgeon named John Crandon decided to settle matters once and for all by the age-old method of withholding vitamin C from his diet for as long as it took to make himself really ill.

But in the nineteenth week he took an abrupt turn for the worse—so much so that he would almost certainly have quickly died had he not been under close medical supervision. He was injected with 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C and was restored to life almost at once.

Two other vitamins—pantothenic acid and biotin—don’t have numbers or, come to that, much profile, but that is largely because they almost never cause us problems. No human has yet been found with insufficient quantities of either.

Three ounces of vitamin A, lightly but evenly distributed, will keep you purring for a lifetime. Your B1 requirement is even less—just one ounce spread over seventy or eighty years.

Remove zinc from your diet and you will get a condition known as hypogeusia, in which your taste buds stop working, making food boring or even revolting, but until as recently as 1977 zinc was thought to have no role in diet at all.

Nutrition is a remarkably inexact science. Consider magnesium, which is necessary for the successful management of proteins within the cells. Magnesium abounds in beans, cereals, and leafy vegetables, but modern food processing reduces the magnesium content by up to 90 percent—effectively annihilates it.

the absence of salt in the diet awakes no craving.

It makes you feel bad and eventually it kills you—without the chloride in salt, cells simply shut down like an engine without fuel—but at no point would a human being think: “Gosh, I could sure do with some salt.”

So how they knew to go searching for it is an interesting question, particularly as in some places getti...

Aztecs, by contrast, acquired salt by evaporating their own urine. These are not intuitive acts, to put it mildly.

Yet getting salt into the diet is one of the most profound urges in nature, and it is a universal one.

Every society in the world in which salt is freely available consumes, on average, forty times the amount needed to sustain life. W...

People have fought wars over it and been sold into slavery for it.

Romans loved pepper. They even peppered their desserts.

“They arrive with gold and depart with pepper,” one Tamil trader remarked in wonder.

Incidentally, the long-held idea that spices were used to mask rotting food doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. The only people who could afford most spices were the ones least likely to have bad meat, and anyway spices were too valuable to be used as a mask. So when people had spices they used them carefully and sparingly, and not as a sort of flavorsome cover-up.

For centuries spices were not just the world’s most valued foodstuffs, they were the most treasured commodities of any type.

Cloves, the dried flowerbuds of a type of myrtle tree,

By the time they reached European markets, nutmeg and mace fetched as much as sixty thousand times what they sold for in the Far East. Inevitably, it was only a matter of time before those at the end of the supply chain concluded it would be a lot more lucrative to cut out the intermediate stages and get all the profits at the front end.

Fernão Dulmo and João Estreito set off from Portugal into the uncharted Atlantic, vowing to turn back after forty days if they hadn’t found anything by then. That was the last anyone ever heard of them. It turned out that finding the right winds to bring one back to Europe wasn’t at all easy.

Columbus’s real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions.

he was not terribly good at a great deal else, espe...

It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fa...

It has been estimated that 60 percent of all the crops grown in the world today originated in the Americas.

There was scarcely a dinner table in the world in any land east or west that wasn’t drastically improved by the foods of the Americas.

For the Europeans the irony is that the foods they found they mostly didn’t want, while the ones they wanted they didn’t find.

Spices were what they w...

Farther north, the Aztecs had a great fondness for amaranth, a cereal that produces a nutritious and tasty grain. It was as popular a foodstuff in Mexico as maize, but the Spanish—offended by the way the Aztecs used it, mixed with blood, in rites involving human sacrifice—refused to touch it.

Without European meat and cheese, Mexican food as we know it could not exist. Wheat in Kansas, coffee in Brazil, beef in Argentina, and a great deal more would not be possible.

Almost no single act in history has more profoundly changed the world than Columbus’s blundering search for eastern spices.

Had Pepys not had that cup of tea, Macpherson not mentioned it in a dull history, Neville been less curious, and young Smith less intelligent and dogged, the name Samuel Pepys would mean nothing to anyone but naval historians, and a very considerable part of what we know about how people lived in the second half of the seventeenth century would in fact be unknown. So it was a good thing that he had that cup of tea.

A traveler named George Sandys in 1610 grimly described coffee as being “blacke as soot, and tasting not much unlike it.”

Credit for coffee’s popularity in England belongs to a man named Pasqua Rosee,

Rosee served coffee to Edwards’s guests, and this proved so popular that he was emboldened to open a café—the first in London—in a shed in the churchyard of St. Michael Cornhill in the City of London in 1652.

Sometime after 1656, he was compelled to leave the country “for some misdemeanour,” which the record unfortunately doesn’t specify. All

Others swiftly moved in to take his place. By the time of the Great Fire, London’s eighty-plus coffeehouses had become a central part of the life of the city.

Because of the way coffee was taxed in Britain (by the gallon), the practice was to brew it in large batches, store it cold in barrels, and reheat it a little at a time for serving.

People went to coffeehouses to meet people of shared interests, gossip, read the latest journals and newspapers—a brand-new word and concept in the 1660s—and exchange information of value to their lives and business.

William Hogarth’s father hit on the idea of opening a coffeehouse in which only Latin would be spoken. It failed spectacularly—toto bene, as Mr. Hogarth himself might have said—and he spent years in debtors’ prison in unhappy consequence.

In 1696, the government introduced the first in a series of cuts in the tea tax.

Tea was slurped by laborers and daintily sipped by ladies. It was taken at breakfast, dinner, and supper. It was the first beverage in history to belong to no class, and the first to have its own ritual slot in the day: teatime.

For something over a century and a half, tea was at the heart of the East India Company, and the East India Company was at the heart of the British Empire.

Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn’t turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.

We have a narrow tendency to associate slavery exclusively with the plantation economy of the southern United States, but in fact plenty of other people got rich from slavery, not least the traders who shipped 3.1 million Africans across the ocean before the United Kingdom abolished the trade in humans in 1807.

painful punishment that involved the application of hot tar to bare skin. Usually, the tar was applied with stiff brushes, which were painful enough in themselves, though in at least one instance the victim was simply held by his ankles and dunked headfirst into a barrel of tar. To the coating of tar was added handfuls of feathers before the victim was paraded through the streets; often victims were beaten or even hanged.

“Yankee jacket,” as it was also known.

Imports of opium to the United States went from 24,000 pounds in 1840 to no less than 400,000 pounds in 1872, and it was women who mostly sucked it down, though quite a lot was given to children, too, as a treatment for croup. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather Warren Delano made much of the family’s fortune by trading opium, a fact that the Roosevelt family has never exactly crowed about.

The problem was that the Chinese had always been secretive about the complicated processes of turning tea leaves into a refreshing beverage, and no one outside China knew how to get an industry going. Enter a remarkable Scotsman named Robert Fortune.