Professor Geoffrey Pilcher
speaker
42 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 22 Jul
Professor Geoffrey Pilcher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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For the first 200,000 years, humans ate what was called one continuous picnic, right?
About six, something around there.
Well, let me start by just saying that the whole idea of the meal is relatively modern.
For the first 200,000 years, humans ate what was called one continuous picnic, right, where hunter-gatherers would just munch whatever they found as they wandered through the landscape.
And so it was only with the origins of agriculture about 10,000 years ago that it became convenient to break up the food preparation into meals.
And for most people, you would have a meal before you started work and a meal when you came back from the fields, because most people were farmers.
And as societies became more stratified, then people who were wealthy and powerful would eat their meals, and when other people couldn't, as kind of a way of claiming status.
And so the ancient Romans and medieval nobles, the Chinese emperor, would all eat their meals in the midday.
Not that they wouldn't have other snacks later on, and certainly they would, but in some ways the dinner as such is sort of a more industrial, I think, phenomenon of eating large meals later on.
Oh, no, no.
I wouldn't say that.
I mean, because, so for example, I mean, the Chinese emperor, his whole kind of diet, including his mealtimes, were set by these physician chefs.
And so they would pick what they considered to be the ideal times for
But of course, you know, science is often as much at the service of culture as it is about what people consider to be, you know, objectively the most healthy or whatever.
Well, I think that if they did, it was really more accidental.
I mean, that that was their life and it just happened to coincide with what was very healthy.
In terms of modern changes, right, and the ways that industrialization has imposed all of these rhythms of the time clock and...
well, the school bill, which teaches us time discipline.
These were sort of created for more efficient factory production.
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