At a certain point, while scrolling through Instagram, you come across a Viking making dinner. Not a real Viking, of course: a Viking generated by artificial intelligence, meaning a man with Jason Momoa’s beard, the hands of a crustacean, and a relationship with cutlery that still needs clarifying. He is cutting some kind of black bread on a wooden table, with the solemnity of someone who knows he is about to invade England or open a ghost kitchen in Reykjavík.
The video promises: “What Vikings really ate.”
Really.
What a wonderful word, “really.” A word that on social media now serves the same purpose as holy water in horror films: you pour it over something obviously suspicious and hope it stops writhing.For a few months now, pages like Peculiar History have been proliferating: accounts with reassuring, vaguely librarian names that post AI reels about what Romans, Quakers, Wehrmacht soldiers, medieval monks, Spartans, pilgrims, Tudor aristocrats, and, I imagine soon enough, Charlemagne’s assistant deputy accountant on a business trip to Pavia used to eat. Everything is served in ASMR format: knives scraping, bread crackling, soup steaming, spoons tapping on bowls as if Brian Eno had produced a documentary about famine.
The formula is always the same. Rustic table. Honey-colored light. Hands in the foreground. Objects old-looking enough. A deep voice or very confident subtitles. Then the food: loaves, meat, broths, cheeses, apples, grains, some brown bowls. Every era of history, as seen by artificial intelligence, seems to have eaten at the same Umbrian farmhouse with Norse decor.
The Viking eats at a wooden table.
The Quaker eats at a wooden table, but with more guilt.
The Wehrmacht soldier eats at a wooden table, but a gray one, because history does have to strike a tone.
The medieval peasant eats bread and soup. The Roman eats bread, soup, and olives. The pilgrim eats bread, soup, and repentance. The Spartan eats something dark, probably black broth, probably liquid depression.
The problem, and this is where the genre becomes beautiful, is that AI still has not quite understood the physical world. It has immense visual culture and the manual dexterity of a blindfolded raccoon. In the videos, the knife starts out as a knife and ends up as a fork. The hand grabs a loaf with five fingers, breaks it with seven, puts it down with four and a sort of conceptual claw. A sausage turns into a carrot on its way to the plate. A piece of cheese, cut with great pathos, becomes fish, then butter, then a substance Spinoza would have defined as the one substance.
These are fantastic mistakes because they tell the truth precisely while the video is trying to sell us the “really.” It is as if, in the middle of an Oxford lecture, the speaker took off his mask and underneath there was a toaster.
The best part is that the audience falls for it willingly. In the comments there is always someone writing: “Bro ate better than me.” A perfect sentence, because it contains the entire tragedy of late-capitalist West: we look at a medieval ration generated by a computer and feel envy. The serf had rotten teeth, the life expectancy of a cheap household appliance, and a 70 percent chance of dying from something today treatable with an ointment; but that bread, on Instagram, looks artisanal.
Vikings, naturally, did not spend their lives biting into animal thighs under Copenhagen-pub lighting. They ate grains, fish, dairy, soups, porridge, legumes, fruit, preserved foods. Interesting stuff, hard stuff, seasonal stuff, much less “alpha male with an axe” and much more “family trying to make it to winter.” But the algorithm does not love porridge. Porridge does not perform. Porridge does not have enough jawline. So the AI Viking is turned into a carnivore influencer in a cloak.
Quakers, on the other hand, are AI’s dream because they allow it to generate beige without guilt. Everything becomes simple bread, simple apples, simple broth, simple bowls, simple light, simple soul. The AI Quaker looks like someone who considers salt a form of theater. Religious history turned into a moodboard. William Penn, but plated by Kinfolk.
With the Wehrmacht, the question becomes more delicate and more absurd. The typical video puts together black bread, tins, soup, metal, snow, a metal spoon. All very bleak, very cinematic, very “breakfast before the Eastern Front.” But a military ration is not a vintage lunch box. It is logistics, industry, hunger, occupation, propaganda, the collapse of supply lines. Telling that story as a nice close-up of a can means turning war into a picnic with terrible intentions. AI, however, does not understand historical evil. It understands dull metal perfectly.
The truly comic thing is that these videos want to seem anti-schoolbook. Finally, history outside the manuals! Finally, everyday life! Finally, what they really ate! And yet they produce a past more stereotyped than an elementary textbook. Middle Ages equals wood. Ancient Rome equals olives. Vikings equal meat. Quakers equal pale sadness. Second World War equals iron spoon. It is a nativity scene, but with Midjourney.
And yet the phenomenon works because it starts from a beautiful question: what did people before us eat? It is a much smarter question than it seems. Food is the point where history stops posing like a statue and sits down. Tell me what you ate and I will tell you what climate you lived in, how rich you were, what trade routes you had, who worked for you, who starved so you could afford sugar.
The trouble is that reels cut away everything that makes historical food truly interesting: boredom, scarcity, repetition, smell, mold, social class, season, the grain tax, the ship that does not arrive, the failed harvest, the master eating white bread and the servant eating dark. In AI videos, every meal is representative. In life, many meals were simply the unglamorous attempt not to die before evening.
Still, one thing must be acknowledged: AI has accidentally invented a new form of historical comedy. A comedy in which the anachronism is no longer the centurion with a wristwatch, but an eleventh-century soup that looks photographed for a restaurant in Brooklyn. Not the gladiator in Nikes, but the Benedictine monk served like a tasting-menu appetizer. Not the western with the airplane in the background, but the Saxon loaf with a sourdough crumb nurtured by a Milanese engineer.
In the end, these videos tell us little about the past and a great deal about the present. We no longer want merely to know history. We want it to be crunchy. We want to feel it under our teeth, preferably in 9:16, preferably with a satisfying sound. We want Caesar, a Viking, and a Quaker to enter the same algorithm and come out as three variations on a charcuterie board.
That is perfectly fine, as long as we remember that this is not the past. It is our appetite disguised as an archive.
Real history begins afterward, when the video ends and a less sexy question remains: but did it really happen like that? Perhaps the value of these reels lies precisely there. They are wrong, often ridiculous, occasionally irresistible. They bring people in through the buffet door. Then it is up to someone, preferably with fewer generated fingers and more sources, to explain that behind that glossy bread there were fields, hands, hunger, money, violence, habits, seasons, and all the complicated human mess that no AI candle can yet illuminate properly.
Niccolò Carradori