I keep coming back to this, especially when people talk about how great a vegan diet is. It simply does not make sense that people who were doing hard physical labor (because there were no mechanical innovations that made it possible to avoid hard physical labor) were eating that sort of diet. Ever.

And even once we started storing food for the winter, it had to essentially be rationed over the entire winter and far enough into spring so that you wouldn't run out of grain, dried beans, dried fruit, and some root veggies or winter squash that kept well for months at a time. You NEEDED to make sure that stored food would last until there would be enough spring and summer foods to eat.

Even when the first spring foods could be gathered, think about how a big bag (or clam-shell container) of spinach cooks down to maybe a cup of greens - that won't go far if you're trying to feed a family of 4, much less a family of 8 or 12. So greens certainly couldn't have been a huge part of their diet even in spring or summer. It would take a bushel of raw greens to get a few cups of cooked greens. Not to mention the calorie value - a cup of cooked spinach only has 41 calories - how are you going to survive on that when doing the hard physical labor of doing absolutely everything by hand?

I have no doubt that a lot of people ate very little during the winter months to make sure the food lasted all winter, but for the most part they were eating lower carb foods: cheese and sausages or other smoked or salt-cured meats (the only way to safely store meats and dairy for several months back then), but also fresh milk and cream if they had a cow/ewe/goat doe that was still producing milk - which could be made into yogurt (or other fermented dairy), an egg if they had at least one precocious hen who still produced the occasional egg during the short days of winter, the occasional chicken from among those who were too old to produce eggs (and excess roosters since you only need one to maintain your flock), and fish, even if you needed to break through ice to catch the fish.

But the idea that they were all vegans, or lived primarily on plants way back when it absolutely preposterous, especially during the winter.