"Roman slaves were well fed" Topic

Workers at villa received nutritional supplements, including pears, apples and protein-rich legumes

Fox News: link

Read this today too. 🙂

You don't think the villa just had an orchard with a glut of fruit?

And beans are a pretty common subsistence food.

It is not safe to make a sweeping generalization off a basket of fruit.

Sounds like the beginning of a marketing campaign about why someone should become a slave tomorrow… All the advantages of being one

And beans are a pretty common subsistence food.

For all Romans, whether slave, freedman, or citizen. Bread and pulses were staples of their diet. And while it's always cool when they uncover stuff, it's not exactly revelatory. Our understanding of Roman slavery has long been that there a wide variance in conditions and treatment, ranging from the effective death sentence of the mines to the coveted household positions with the well-to-do.

SOME, Bill. SOME Roman slaves were well fed. Not exactly a revelation. Starving workers are seldom productive. (We know this because the experiment has been tried repeatedly. Just wrapped Applebaum's Gulag.)

It's reasonable to assume the archeologists are correct in that the food was intended for the slaves, as it was found in the upper story of the slaves' quarters. A disaster or random chance would not put the food in that location, much less intact. And the food would have been of easy access to the slaves, but not anyone else. So it's logical to conclude that it was their food.

Also, keep in mind that grown food as fruits and beans and wheat were not so prevalent then as they are now. It took a good deal of land and labor to grow food. So it's highly unlikely that the food was a "glut" or excess. There was little to no way of preserving food in that era, especially fruit. So if you find food in a slaves' sleeping quarters, that fruit is not just a happy coincidence. It's a deliberate expenditure of either money or labor to benefit the slaves.

Slaves were a commodity, and depending on their skill level/ability could have very high value to the owners. This is true of many if not all slave societies in history (which, by the way, is pretty much every society and culture with any level of advancement above sustenance living). Even with slavery, supply and demand is a real thing, and maintaining good general overall health is important for both the utility and value of a slave— no different than a working horse, a vehicle, a set of tools, etc., in that sense. The higher the utility of the slave (such as a cook, teacher, clothes-maker, craftsman, blacksmith, etc.) the greater the motivation to preserve that slave, and even reward that slave. (Many gladiators were slaves. They were also celebrities with an avid fandom, and received many things from their owners— clothes, food and women— as reward for their abilities in the arena.)
I'm not defending slavery by any sense or the Romans— but the nature of slavery and how it impacts the slave (and the owner) differs by culture but also economic reality of the situation. You don't mistreat the man who cooks your breakfast, not if you have any brains at all. The further removed from the slaves' actions the owner becomes, the worse the treatment (or the less money he is willing to expend on such).