Pictish diet - not keen on fish

[Imperial Dave]

but even assuming they sent it on or sold it on, surely they would eat it as well?

[Erpingham]

Also no mention of shell fish or did I miss that?

May have been hard to distinguish with the isotope tests they were using.  Shellfish should be much more visible on settlement sites than fishbones though.

[Imperial Dave]

https://www.historyextra.com/period/early-medieval/medieval-matters-news-blog-salmon-knowledge-rolling-roman-mosaics-eels-crusades/

more info

[Erpingham]

People do know that in the Salmon of Wisdom legend, the salmon got eaten, don't they?

[Imperial Dave]

People do know that in the Salmon of Wisdom legend, the salmon got eaten, don't they?

[DougM]

its seems odd that if fish as plentiful that more use of them in the diet isnt made...?

I'm intrigued by the monastic evidence, when you might have expected fish to be served one day a week

Remembering the early church was not aligned to Rome, so the practices might have been altogether different in regards to fasting, fish and Fridays.

[Dangun]

How much did people really eat fish anyway?
This may be a Japanese perspective, but the presumption of the historical consumption of fish feels exaggerated by modern food culture.

[Duncan Head]

How much did people really eat fish anyway?

Well,

The last decade has also seen greater consensus that fishing and fish processing was an economically important and profitable enterprise in Classical antiquity, especially in the Roman western Mediterranean—a topic which has generated great interest amongst Classical scholars...

Or,

In medieval Europe, an era stretching from about a.d. 500 to 1500, fish was a prestigious food. Chefs experimented with ways to disguise beef as fish: At least half a dozen cookbooks of the era include recipes for turning veal into imitation sturgeon for wealthy lords and ladies. Sturgeon was so rare in England and France that it was reserved for the monarchs, and the Cistercians, a Catholic religious order that used sign language to communicate, referred to it using the sign for fish and then the sign for pride.

People of all social classes, though, ate freshwater fish—trout, whitefish, pike, eel, lamprey, and shads. This taste started to have consequences. Today, fish populations around the world are rapidly declining; a millennium ago, Europeans faced similar challenges. Overfishing resulted in local extinctions, and popular food fish had to be domesticated through aquaculture. The population pressures created by humans may have even changed the size of fish.

The answer would appear to be "quite a lot", in some times and places at least.

[Dangun]

The answer would appear to be "quite a lot", in some times and places at least.

What's our a priori...
A quick google suggests fish contributes about 6% of animal protein in the modern US.
Given electricity, road transport and refrigeration, I imagine (don't know, just a thought) that percentage is higher now that it was.
Meat consumption is historically high today too... so across the Roman Empire I'm not sure where else to start other than a small number.

[Duncan Head]

I would be very reluctant to take the modern US as a yardtsick for anything.

However this older article does suggest that fish were not a great item of consumption in Iron Age Britain as a whole. This one suggests however that Vikiing fishing practices changed that picture, and that in Viking Orkney, fish made up about 30% of dietary protein. (Remember the Viking freeze-dried cod trade?)

So actually the site in the original story may have been less unusual for pre-Viking Pictland than first thought.

I'm sure it's all very regional and time-dependent; I would expect a very different picture in the ancient Mediterranean, for instance.

[Erpingham]

The US figure is very low.  In the UK between a quarter and a third of people eat fish regularly but we don't eat it as ancient peoples might - a lot of it is processed (frozen, tinned, smoked).  So, I think modern comparisons are of limited use. 

[Jim Webster]

I would be very reluctant to take the modern US as a yardtsick for anything.

However this older article does suggest that fish were not a great item of consumption in Iron Age Britain as a whole. This one suggests however that Vikiing fishing practices changed that picture, and that in Viking Orkney, fish made up about 30% of dietary protein. (Remember the Viking freeze-dried cod trade?)

So actually the site in the original story may have been less unusual for pre-Viking Pictland than first thought.

I'm sure it's all very regional and time-dependent; I would expect a very different picture in the ancient Mediterranean, for instance.

I suspect the importance of garum as a savoury in the diet probably distorts the amount of fish eaten

[Dangun]

The US figure is very low.  In the UK between a quarter and a third of people eat fish regularly but we don't eat it as ancient peoples might - a lot of it is processed (frozen, tinned, smoked).  So, I think modern comparisons are of limited use.

When I googled about fish's contribution to diet there is a lot of non-data like yous point to, basically surveys about behavior. The data is without scale. (Pardon the pun.) UK vs US is not going to be very different - fish protein is just more expensive. There may be some data about whether this was also true in the classical period...

Here is another source, I haven't done more than scan it, but it says that in 1961 ex-China fish made up 13% of global animal protein.
https://www.greenfacts.org/en/fisheries/l-2/06-fish-consumption.htm

Granted a modern comp is of limited interest, but we do know, in the classical period people ate less calories and ate less meat protein.
So I am confused by why our a priori is - they ate a lot more fish?

[DougM]

I think there are a couple of potential factors: we know that fish were available in greater numbers than in our modern period. Without modern farming and transport methods, food had to be sourced largely locally, with exceptions for grain shipments and luxury food stuffs.

Which all tends to lead to the assumption that if you lived in a location with an abundance of fish protein available, it simply couldn't be ignored as a food source as there were few substitutes available at reasonable cost.

Secondly, within living memory there was a much heavier reliance on fish as a food source. I lived within 20 miles of at least 8 fish markets as a child, and now there is one. On the coast where I live, entire communities were based on fishing. Now arguably, they can all just go buy fish from the freezer in the supermarket, but they don't.

Finally, comparatively,  fish has become more expensive relative to other sources of protein.

So those of us living in coastal communities have a lived experience of a reduction in fish consumption. We have anecdotal and historical evidence of diet. There has been a reduction in fish stocks, increasing scarcity. (The mussel and shellfish that once supplied the basic diet of poor folk in Edinburgh are mostly gone.)

So whether it is correct or not, there are valid explanations for the assumption.