In late Edo-period Osaka, itinerant fish vendors carried fresh catches to regular customers in the city’s residential neighborhoods. In March and April, that could include red sea bream, a high-grade fish people exchanged as a seasonal gift. After dark, deer meat also went on sale in the streets. Although eating four-legged animals was frowned upon, people could consume wild meat as medicinal food.
Records tell us these foods made their way through Osaka, but they say much less about who actually ate them. The surviving accounts that reveal individual diets tend to concern samurai and wealthy merchants, leaving the meals of ordinary residents harder to trace.
Now, hardened plaque from eight adults buried in a cemetery for commoners shows that some of those foods reached them, too. Red sea bream proteins appeared in six people. Their teeth also held evidence of cold-water fish brought from outside the region and wild meat eaten despite public taboos. The study, published in Anthropological Science, ties their diets to the food trade that earned Osaka the name “Kitchen of the Realm.”
How Dental Calculus Revealed What Osaka Commoners Ate
Bone chemistry from seven usable samples resembled that of other premodern Japanese commoners, pointing to diets that included land plants and seafood. Proteins sealed inside dental calculus, the plaque that hardens on teeth, allowed the researchers to identify more specific foods.
Explore All OptionsAcross the eight people, the team found 38 dietary proteins connected to 17 kinds of plants and animals. Fish proteins appeared in seven people, plant proteins in six, and proteins from mammals other than humans in four.
Fish From Osaka Bay and Beyond
To understand how red sea bream may have reached six of the eight commoners, the researchers looked to Osaka’s fish markets. Sea bream varied in size and quality, and lower-grade or surplus catches may have sold for less.
The salmon-family proteins came from fish that favored colder water and did not live along Osaka’s coast. Ships called kitamae-bune carried seafood from Ezo, now Hokkaido, and settlements along the Sea of Japan, providing one likely route into the city.
The calculus also contained proteins from flatfish such as tonguefish, which remains part of Kansai cuisine. Goldfish-like proteins appeared in three people and may have come from actual goldfish, listed as edible in one period herbal text, or a related fish such as carp.
Meat, Cottonseed, and Unanswered Questions
Alongside the fish, the calculus contained proteins from badgers and Sus, the group that includes pigs and wild boars. Domestic pigs were limited in most of Japan, so the researchers think the protein probably came from wild boar. Dolphin-family proteins also appeared, although people then regarded dolphins as fish and did not apply the meat taboo to them.
One man’s calculus also contained a cottonseed protein. Raw cottonseed contains toxic compounds, but Osaka was a center of cotton growing and oil production. He may have consumed heated material left after oil processing. Medicine, food eaten during a shortage, or material that entered his mouth while he worked could also explain it.
Only eight people were included in the analysis, a small fraction of the more than 1,700 skeletons recovered from Umeda Cemetery. Applying the same method to samurai, rural communities, and residents of Edo and Kyoto could show how wealth and location affected people’s meals.
For the people buried at Umeda, the plaque on their teeth preserves a personal record of some of the foods they actually ate, one that does not appear in the surviving accounts.
Read More: Hobbit-Like Hominins May Have Scavenged Komodo Dragons' Leftovers Instead of Hunting Big Game
Article Sources
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- This article references information from a study published in Anthropological Science: Dietary reconstruction of individual premodern commoners in Osaka, Japan, through the palaeoproteomic analysis of human dental calculus
