I've Always seen midevil people outside of nobility portrayed as only eating vegetables and fruits with little access to if any at all to meat, and then the colonial European empires seem to be entirely spurred by a desire to participate in the spice trade. so, Prior to the 20th century how well was access to meat and spices?
Depends on the type of society, if it was an empire based society, people could go to markets, but meat would be expensive so families would have to save for it. Now in hunter gatherer societies if cattle was apart of it, they would eat them and breed them so there was more food. Vegetable consumption and bread was common, because it’s easy to mass produce. Fishing has also been common in most societies. The only reason meat is mass produced now is due to mechanization. Plus societies back then didn’t have the refrigeration that we have. Some times butchers would wait to kill until they for sure had a buyer.