Quote:
Originally Posted by Tar-Jêx
In medieval times, it was hard to be a healthy person without eating meat. For the peasants, meat was a luxury, but they weren't vegetarian.
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Particularly if you are not really agrarian, as some of the elves probably were not (i.e. I not sure ALL the elves had farms around). Getting enough protein to stay alive is hard unless you are actively growing something you can stockpile, or live in a tropical region where there are seeds and nuts of some sort year round. That's one of the big reasons that most of the major agrarian societies relied so heavily on legumes of one kind or another. Once your population gets big enough that major meat consumption for everyone is not longer feasible, you NEED that pulse crop to make up the gap. Or why I say "Contrary to what most people thing, a hill of beans amounts to quite a lot." Even dairy can only get you so far, as you have to make sure that you dairy stock is perpetually lactating (not always easy to do, if you can't convince your rams and bucks to do their job on a given doe/ewe or you're a peasant family with only one or two milk cows who needs to find someone ELSE with a bull to "freshen" her.) or get really, really good at making hard cheese. It's a little hard to imagine Beren spending his whole autumn gathering nuts and acorns with the mania of a squirrel, but that is probably what he would have to do I he had really committed to a no meat lifestyle (unless I am right, and the animals got so close to him that he could milk the deer and collect the unfertilized eggs of the wild birds. and even those would be seasonal)