Medieval cuisine refers to the foods, eating habits, and cooking methods of various European cultures during the Middle Ages, a period roughly dating from the 5th to the 16th century. During this period, diets and cooking changed across Europe, and these changes helped lay the foundations for modern European cuisine.Bread was the staple, followed by other foods made from cereals, such as porridge and pasta. Meat was more prestigious and more expensive than grain or vegetables. Common seasonings included verjuice, wine and vinegar. These, along with the widespread use of honey or sugar (among those who could afford it), gave many dishes a sweet-sour flavor. The most popular types of meat were pork and chicken, while beef, which required greater investment in land, was less common. Cod and herring were mainstays among the northern population, but a wide variety of other saltwater and freshwater fish were also eaten. Almonds, both sweet and bitter, were eaten whole as garnish, or more commonly ground up and used as a thickener in soups, stews, and sauces. Particularly popular was almond milk, which was a common substitute for animal milk during Lent and fasts.Slow transportation and inefficient food preservation techniques prevented long-distance trade of many foods. For the most part, only the wealthy, especially the nobility, could afford imported ingredients such as spices, so their cuisine was more prone to foreign influence than the cuisine of poorer people. As each level of society imitated the one above it, innovations from international trade and foreign wars gradually disseminated through the upper middle class of medieval cities.In a time when famine was commonplace and social hierarchies were often brutally enforced, food was an important marker of social status in a way that has no equivalent today in most developed countries. Aside from economic unavailability of luxuries such as spices, decrees outlawed consumption of certain foods among certain social classes, and sumptuary laws limited the conspicuous consumption among the nouveau riche who were not nobility. Social norms also dictated that the food of the working class be less refined, since it was believed there was a divine or natural resemblance between one's labor and one's food, so manual labor required coarser, cheaper food.