10 Medieval Survival Tricks That Were Far Smarter Than They Look

10 Medieval Survival Tricks That Were Far Smarter Than They Look Number ten: Eating Insects and Grubs as Emergency Protein. During the famine years that tore through northern Europe in the early fourteenth century, peasants facing starvation turned to a food source that every instinct told them to avoid. The Great Famine, which historians date from thirteen fifteen to thirteen twenty-two, destroyed harvests across England, France, and the Low Countries with a thoroughness that left entire communities with nothing recognisable to eat. Historian William Chester Jordan, whose research on this period remains foundational, documented the desperate ingenuity of survival strategies that ordinary people developed when conventional food sources failed entirely. Among those strategies was the deliberate consumption of insects, grubs, and larvae, creatures that were not eaten from ignorance but from a hardscrabble calculation that something was better than nothing.