6. The Crusades brought foods and spices to Europe
The crusaders returned from their noble efforts in the Holy Lands bringing with them, besides plunder, foods which they adopted from the infidels they had encountered. Among them were dates and figs, which they had heard about from their priests reading the Bible. They also found foods indigenous to the Mediterranean relatively unknown in the northern European climes, lemons, oranges, olives and others. Pepper began to grow in importance, as a flavoring which vastly improved the taste of meats which until then had been flavored only with locally grown herbs and salt.
Still, most of the new foods brought back from the exotic lands visited by the crusaders remained in the purview of the wealthy, since only they could afford them. The rest lived very much by doing what in a much later day would be called eating local. Methods of food preservation, which were limited to drying, salting, and smoking, and pickling, as well as poor roads and transportation, made it the only practical means of obtaining food. Even the animals brought to butchers and poulterers usually arrived at their final destination on foot, or in the case of chickens in cages carried by horse or goat-drawn carts. Because of the nature of their journey, they could not travel very far.