I’ll bet you didn’t know what the passengers on the ill-fated Titanic ate for dinner. Sama Hoole has posted the menu cards for all the classes on the ship, and discusses their food below. VERY interesting!

First class dined on nine different animals on the Titanic’s last night. Oysters, salmon, filet mignon, chicken, lamb, duckling, sirloin, squab, foie gras.

Now read down the ship, because the interesting part is not the luxury.

Second class: haddock, curried chicken, spring lamb, roast turkey. Third class, the cheapest berth aboard: rice soup, roast beef and brown gravy, boiled potatoes.

Same prize on every deck. The only thing money bought was more of it.

Look harder at the first class card and it gets stranger. The luncheon buffet alone lists thirteen meats. Potted shrimps, Norwegian anchovies, soused herrings, sardines, spiced beef, veal and ham pie, Cumberland ham, brawn, ox tongue. Underneath all of it, one line: lettuce, beetroot, tomatoes.

Eight cheeses named on that menu. Three vegetables. Nobody rich has ever bought their way up to a salad.

The stores confirm it. The ship loaded 75,000 pounds of fresh meat, 40,000 eggs and 6,000 pounds of butter for roughly 2,200 people on a six day crossing. Eighteen eggs and three pounds of butter each. It also loaded 7,000 heads of lettuce, which is three apiece.

And the beef in steerage was not White Star’s idea. It was Parliament’s. The Merchant Shipping Act 1894 set a statutory weekly ration for the poorest passengers afloat: a pound four ounces of beef, a pound of pork, potatoes, oatmeal, flour, sugar and tea, all required by law to be sweet and wholesome provisions of good quality. The state had grasped that meat is the thing a poor man must not be cheated of.

Then there is what appears on none of the four cards, at any price. Not a drop of seed oil.

Crisco launched ten months earlier, June 1911. The first food ever built on partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, pressed from cottonseed, a waste stream of mills Procter and Gamble already owned, sold from the opening advert as the healthy alternative to animal fat. It had not yet reached a ship’s galley.

Those menus are a photograph of the last moment before the switch.

Here is the part that should stop you.

For every century before this one, wealth was measured in flesh. Kings hoarded venison, the peasant got pottage, and the fight was always over who got the animal. The Titanic is that arrangement in its final year: the millionaire and the labourer eating the same beef, separated by portion size and a French menu.

Then the cheapest calories stopped being animal and started being starch and seed oil, and for the first time in human history the poor got fatter than the rich.

The rich still eat the meat. They simply stopped telling you to.

Wow! Those people ate very well, didn’t they? Maybe we should try eating that kind of food for a while instead of so much “plant-based” stuff.