Welcome to the romance of the Three Kingdoms podcast.

This is a supplemental episode.

In this episode, we are going to take a look at food during the Three Kingdoms era.

Now, in the novel, food plays a significant role.

It seems like every other scene we're having a feast or banquet of some sort for some reason

or another, so let's talk about what people ate in this era.

I should mention that much of the information for this episode comes from a book

called Society and Life in the Wei, Jin, and the South and North dynasties. I talked about

those dynasties in the 100th episode Q&A. Together, they span the years between 220 and

589, so that's more than 350 years, so obviously, not everything

in that book would apply to the Three Kingdoms period, which is at the beginning of the time period

covered by the book. I'm going to do my best to limit our discussion to only things relevant to the Three Kingdoms period,

but just know that some of the things we touch on might be more extrapolations based on what happened before and after the Three Kingdoms period,

and I will note that when the information is about periods before or after the Three Kingdoms.

It's not an exact science, but we'll do our best.

Before we talk about food, let's first talk about the absence of food.

The end of the Han Dynasty was a time of chaos, warfare, and natural disasters,

all of which contributed to mass-scale famines.

We see this mentioned in passing in the novel on a few occasions, but it didn't really get

much attention.

In real life, though, this was a serious problem.

For instance, there was a kid's limerick that circulated around the region around the Yangtze River at this time

...