Comment by woah

Most people lived on the knife's edge of starvation before the application of fossil fuel energy and nitrogen to agriculture in the 20th century. That's why the global population exploded after the introduction of these technologies. Read "Energy and Civilization" by Vaclav Smil. For most of history, it was an open question the crops you grew would even contain more calories than the physical effort it took to grow them. This means you were spending ~90% of your time (or money if you were in a specialized trade) just on getting enough carbs in grain to avoid keeling over. And, your diet was 90% grain with almost no variety.

Were there a lucky few who found an unoccupied niche where there was some surplus for a generation or two? Sure. But pretending like this was commonplace is like pretending that everyone in the 1600's was a nobleman.

> Compared to someone from the 1600s who could eat a gourmet meal prepared by their 10 cooks every night, we are quite oppressed.