Hunger worldwide has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so.

733 million people don’t have food security. I think about 5-10 million die every year from starvation.

In medieval times there were famines, but they were caused by there not being enough food to go around due to disease or bad harvests.

Today millions of people starve even if there is no bad harvest or animal pandemics.

> Similarly, new estimates of adult obesity show a steady increase over the last decade, from 12.1 percent (2012) to 15.8 percent (2022). Projections indicate that by 2030, the world will have more than 1.2 billion obese adults. The double burden of malnutrition – the co-existence of undernutrition together with overweight and obesity – has also surged globally across all age groups.

Obesity will soon, if not already, become a major public health disaster in poor countries.

Why doesn't Africa have more farms and infrastructure?

Long answer: Western colonialism.

How do you explain lack of farming / infrastructure prior to colonialism? More or less all environments populated by sub saharans struggle with infrastructure. This is true before, during, and after colonialism.

That doesn't appear to be true. E.g., following links from the WHO page you cite gets me to https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/39d... ...

where Figure 1 shows hunger consistently decreasing from the start of the graph in 2005 to somewhere around 2014, at which point it plateaus for a while and then starts increasing somewhere around 2019-2020.

My recollection is that by 2005 where that graph begins, hunger had been consistently decreasing for quite some time, but a bit of googling hasn't found anything that quite answers that question. I did find https://www.jstor.org/stable/40572886 (looking at data from 1930 to 1990) whose publicly-accessible abstract says that "the proportion undernourished has been in decline since the 1960s and that the absolute number has also declined in recent years".

So I think the truth is not "hunger has been getting worse for the last quarter century or so" but something more like "10 years ago, hunger had been improving for about half a century; the improvement stalled for about 5 years and over about the last five years it has been getting worse".

(Which is still bad news, as far as the present state of things is concerned, but a rather different sort of bad news.)

That's an outrageous claim you need to back with some hard facts, otherwise patently untrue.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+people+die+worldwid...

Unsupported claims are not "patently untrue"; THAT claim also requires citation.

I find the percentile measure terrible to technically mean 95% of the population, but is often colloquially understood the other way around. It's like German numbers, when people say five and forty to mean 45. The general population rejects needless complexity.

> For England, including the Kings of Wessex from Æthelberht on (the first I could find a birthdate for), and the Kings of England up to Edward IV, whose reigns extends to 1483 (and consequently into Modern Ages, if we take the usual date of 1453 - the fall of Constantinople - as the end of the Middle Ages), I found the average age of death of monarchs to be 44 years. (http://ideias.wikidot.com/reis-da-inglaterra-na-idade-media)

Life expectancy is longer than that in even the poorest countries today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

Given that until roughly the 1700s infant mortality was brutal (according to [1] fully 50% of children died before reaching adulthood), this comparison becomes even starker, since average life expectancy of a crown prince at birth would be far lower (somewhere in their 20s).

[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_XI_of_Sweden#Greycoat

I'm going to go with a cautious "yes" to the first: the ages at death of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_monarchs are not great.

"No" on the second (king is never going to have to worry about food security, that's for the peasants)

And "life opportunties" .. bit of a divide by zero situation. As king, you technically have all the opportunities. But you can only do things which actually exist at the time. And you're bound by the social and religious conventions of the time, which you mess with at your peril. Doing so worked for Henry VIII but not for the various Georges. See, for example, the controversy over whether James 6 might have been gay.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury

This is where you get the memes about shocking medieval Europeans with a time travelling bag of Doritos: both the bag and its contents are completely impossible items for them.

Worth noting that durable items could be shipped long distance - precious metals, gems, textiles - but foodstuff shipping was more limited to high value density stuff like spices and the European wine trade.

Speaking of wine: no modern stimulants. No coffee, no tobacco, no weed, no cocaine, no opiates. No painkillers, no anasthesia. For all those situations, you have one option: alcohol.

A huge number of critical historical decisions were taken by people who would fail a brethalyser.

Not by the standards of the world 5th percentile, as in the question posed. The 5th percentile today is mostly subsistence farming and doesn't have access to imported foods or own a refrigerator (though there probably is one in their local village, and they may well own a mobile phone).

Well, except for food preserved via pickling, salting, drying, smoking, fermenting, sugaring, and confit. Which makes for quite a long list.

Plus, various foods like grains, root vegetables, onions, and even apples could be stored for months using proper techniques. They didn't have the luxury we have of not paying much attention to how we store things and just replacing them when they go bad, so they became quite good at this.

None of which preserves the taste/nutrition well for a wide range of foods like greens/fruits/vegetables, you the limits in seasonal availability don't get resolved

Plus the excellent point that dylan604 made, they weren't bougie bitches.

Yes, but also my understanding is that the preservation technique of that name involves much more salt than modern palettes are willing to tolerate, and also salt itself was much more limited in supply.

Despite this, salt as a preservative was indeed critical to civilisation.

> fermenting

True, and also I want to say "blessed are the cheesemakers" etc. here. :)

I have been told there is a huge difference between the two.

There are the fermented pickles

There are the pickles that get mixed with prefermented preservative (usually vinegar/salt) and pressure-canned

And then there are the pickles that get flash cooked or not cooked, mixed with preservative, and refrigerated for a limited time

There is some difference in taste, due to modern additiomal conservants and minor changes in receipta, but not all that much.

And thus potatoes and sauerkraut was born.

I would also expect them to have various special variaties of apples/pears that actually improved their taste with storage. For example a variety that was best with 2 months of storage, another one that was best after 6 months.

Then you have cheeses, yoghurts, milk. Those things could be available year round. One would expect the king of France to have quite a variety of cheeses at his disposal. Then we have meats prepared in a hundred different ways. From simple roasting, to gelling, pickling like modern hams. And so on.

Then we have various types of wild mushrooms. I wonder if the king ate wild mushrooms and who picked these mushrooms for him... Poisoning would be so easy to get away with if he did.

It would be tough without potatoes, tomatoes and peppers, but I think food-wise I'd be just fine (assuming money and power).

Hemlock and henbane were both used as painkillers and dulling agents .. up to unconsciousness and death, depending on dosage.

Added: Monastery herb gardens often had quite the range, eg: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/blog/ar...

The taste wasn't so fun though.

https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.92.15_supplement.P...

Alcohol, though, is great for dissolving opium into an easily ingestible potion, whence one gets dwale or laudanum.

[citation needed]

The idea that historically people went around hammered because the water supply was poor is a myth.

The water myth is not the cause.

He wasn't gay, but his many male lovers might have been. :D

Apart from his painful, smelly leg ulcers that he had to tolerate for years

Simplest example? Indoor plumbing: Boom, 15th century king.

Silly example? I got my wife seven silk pillow cases one year as a Christmas gift. A bit spendy, but instantly "living like a king".

We don't have "the royal kitchens", but do have Door-Dash. We took a tour of a castle somewhere in Canada (probably Craigdarroch) and they had a bunch of sitting rooms and reading nooks with extra lights and stuff... Steal Those Ideas! You too can live like a king, you just have to rewind a century or two, and be strategic about the luxuries you pick.

"The child mortality rate in the United States, for children under the age of five, was 462.9 deaths per thousand births in 1800. This means that for every thousand babies born in 1800, over 46 percent did not make it to their fifth birthday"

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...

It is so horrendous that I don't think we are really able to process the difference in 2025.

Now, when you compare a low wealth person today to a peasant from the medieval era, if you remove child mortality, they likely had a similar life expectancy, although again, the modern human is more likely to have access to antibiotics, regardless of wealth--as others have mentioned, they just didn't exist back then.

maybe .. most mammals do not get infections from an ordinary cut.. it is humans that are uniquely weak that way

source: retired medical surgeon

Nothing in your career particularly informed you of non-human mammal infection rates, unless you moonlighted as a veterinarian.

Wasn't Arthur alone responsible for the untimely death of like a dozen kings? :)

Yearly.

Edit: duh, just saw the smiley. Carry on!