THE EARLIEST WRITTEN recipes date from around 1600 BCE in the form of Sumerian tablets from the Tigris and Euphrates river basin in present-day Iraq—about forty recipes contained in 350 lines of text.1 Irrigation allowed the intensive cultivation of grains and other crops in the fertile alluvial soil that nourished this cradle of civilization; date palms flourished in the southern areas and livestock, mainly cattle and sheep, populated the grassy steppes. The best-preserved tablet contains twenty-five brief recipes; of these, four are vegetable broths and twenty-one are meat stews made from fresh beef, organ meats (intestines, stomach, spleen), venison, gazelle, goat, lamb, mutton, salted meat, pigeon and francolin (a large game bird).
Some of the recipes have added blood, or call for marinating the meat in blood before cooking. All have added vegetables, especially garlic, leeks and onion, and a variety of herbs, especially cumin and coriander. And, most important, all but one call for the addition of fat—that would be highly saturated lamb fat a practice still followed today in Iraq and other areas of the Middle East. As explained in a cookbook for Iraqi cuisine, “dissolved fat from sheep tail… was important not only for flavor but because it helped raise the boiling temperature, which allowed for a more tenderizing process for tough cuts of meat.”2 A second tablet gives seven recipes for various types of domestic birds and game, some of which are lined and topped with a bread crust, like a potpie!*
We also know from these ancient texts that the Sumerians prepared many types of sour bread and porridge, made sour milk products and cheese, and manufactured a vast array of beers from barley and other grains. Many of the stews feature a kind of sweet-and-sour gravy containing vinegar and honey; fermented fish sauce, the universal seasoning, is another frequent ingredient. We find the same practices in Roman cooking, which features elaborate sauces flavored with a variety of herbs, vinegar, honey and fish sauce served at banquets for the rich.
Whether they were rich or poor, fat was no less important to the Greeks and Romans than it was to the Sumerians. The Iliad makes reference to fat bulls, fat goats and pork meat “rich with fat.” From Book XIII we read, “Verily our kings that rule Lykia be no inglorious men, they that eat fat sheep, and drink the choice wine honey-sweet.” Sea urchins, cockles, sturgeon, fattened peacocks, crocodiles, cicadas and grasshoppers—foods rich in fat-soluble vitamins—all had a place in the diet of ancient Greeks.3
In the Roman Empire, fat was an ingredient in the peasant’s simple breakfast porridge, made from emmer (a type of wheat), salt, water and fat. The Roman soldier’s rations consisted of bread or porridge, a lump of pork fat, cheese and sometimes salt-cured pork (prosciutto) or sausage (salami).*4 The typical Roman citizen ate pork, seafood (including fish roe), poultry (including fatty goose and duck), lamb and cheese; beef was reserved for temple sacrifices and the banquets of the ruling classes. Vegetables like cabbage and greens were often preserved in large crocks, the prototypes of sauerkraut.†
We see similar practices today in Iran and other parts of the Middle East, where sheep’s cheese, sour milk products and stews provide nourishment for all classes. A typical soup made from lamb’s head is simmered until the meat is tender and can be stripped from the skull. The brains, eyes, tongue and cheek meat float to the top of the pot, to be skimmed off as the main dish, with the broth served separately.5
The influential eleventh-century Persian philosopher and scientist Avicenna (AD 980–1037), author of The Book of Healing and the five-volume Canon of Medicine, recognized the relationship between sound dietary practices and good health. Avicenna’s seminal works lauded the virtues of nutrient-dense animal foods, including yogurt cultured from raw milk, bone broth, and meats and organ meats from veal, lamb and goat.‡6
Typical throughout the Middle East is a product called kishk, a mixture of sprouted cracked wheat, mixed with sour milk, allowed to ferment for several days, dried in the sun and then reduced to a powder. Added to boiling water, kishk and similar products make an instant soup; added to stews, kishk serves as a convenient thickening agent.
Until industrialization wrested food processing from the hands of the artisan, we find the same dietary principles throughout the Middle East, Russia and eastern and western Europe: a variety of meats and poultry, including the bones and organ meats, most often cooked in a cauldron to make a nourishing soup or stew; seafood including shellfish and fish of all types, often salted, smoked or preserved in fat;* grains made into sourdough bread or sour porridges; milk consumed fresh, soured or made into cheese; cured pork, pâtés, terrines and sausages containing organ meats; vitamin B–laden beers, some of which provided lactic acid and lactobacilli as well as alcohol; fermented vegetables like sauerkraut, a source of digestive enzymes, friendly bacteria and vitamin C; and salt, widely available from the British Isles to the borders of Asia.†
This diet provided everything the body needed for good health when times were good; during periods of famine, war, and disease, the people—mostly the peasantry—suffered greatly. For example, excavations show that around the year 1000, the people of the British Isles were strong and well formed, with excellent teeth. After that, the health of everyone, even the nobility, declined. Archeologists can pinpoint waves of plague in skeletons that are shorter and more frail.7 In times of famine, or even during the “hunger gap” before the next harvest, the peasants ground beans, peas, beechnuts, acorns, roots and even bark to supplement flour. The desperate gathered up poppies, hemp and darnel (a weed that harbors a toxic fungus) to make a kind of cake called “crazy bread,” resulting in mass hallucinations and hysteria.
The Italian historian Piero Camporesi gives the following description of peasant lives in Italy:
The masses of the pre-industrial era—suffering from protein and vitamin deficiencies, poorly protected from the attacks of infectious diseases by precarious and inadequate diets, tormented by shingles (particularly widespread in the areas of rye consumption), subjected to sudden attacks of convulsions and epilepsy, the deliria of fevers, the festering of wounds, ulcers which ate away at the tissues, unrelenting gangrene and disgusting scrofula, the crazed patterns of “St Vitus’s dance” and other choreographic epidemics, and the constant nightmare of worms and choleric diarrhoea—also suffered the harmful effects of “ignoble” breads, the toxic deliria of impure flour mixtures, and the stunning, demented stupidity and dullness of food poisoning.8
Yet when food was abundant, good health was the rule, even into the twentieth century. Dr. Weston A. Price, who began his studies in the early 1930s, made haste to visit any remaining examples of “primitive” European groups before they disappeared. In fact, he found only two isolated European populations: Swiss villagers living in the remote Lötschen Valley in the Alpine regions of the Vaud, and Gaelic islanders living off the coast of Scotland in the Outer Hebrides. By practicing “accumulated primitive wisdom” in regard to their local foods, both groups exhibited excellent health, immunity to tuberculosis, straight teeth and freedom from tooth decay.9
The isolated Swiss villagers grew tall and strong on a diet of raw dairy products—raw milk, raw butter, raw cream and raw cheese—from their cows and goats, which grazed on lush Alpine pastures, along with dense sourdough rye bread. Nothing came into their villages from the outside except salt; they ate meat about once a week, usually veal, including the organ meats. Bones went into the soup pot, along with seasonal vegetables from their gardens, but their dietary staples were dairy foods and grain, a fact that challenges the primary tenet of the paleo diet, namely that good health can be achieved only by avoiding dairy foods and grains.
The inhabitants of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides raised no livestock on their windswept island, nor could they cultivate gardens or even trees. Instead they consumed seafood and shellfish of all types, including the heads, organ meats and oil. They lived in thatched cottages with no chimneys, but suffered no lung disease in spite of their smoky environment.
They also managed to grow oats in the thin soil by spreading the smoke-blackened thatch of their cottages onto their fields in the spring.* The other important plant food was seaweed. A typical dish, considered very important for growing children, was fish heads stuffed with oatmeal and chopped fish liver. Often, the fish heads were further “ripened” for two days or more, as the Scots considered fresh fish to be “harsh.” For additional “high” flavor, the good Scots housewife rolled the fish heads in a cloth and stuffed them in the crevice of a stone wall.†
THE MENU FOR A MONDAY morning breakfast served in honor of King James I’s visit to the northern English town of Preston in August of 1607 read as such: Pullets; Boiled capon; Shoulder of mutton; Veal roast; Boiled chickens; Rabbits roast; Shoulder of mutton roast; Chine of beef roast; Pasty of venison; Turkey roast; Pig roast; Venison roast; Ducks boiled; Pullet; Red deer pye cold; Four capons roast; Poults [young chickens] roast; Pheasant; Herons; Mutton boiled; Wild boar pye; Jiggits of mutton boiled; Jiggits of mutton burred [buttered]; Gammon of bacon; Chicken pye; Burred [buttered] capon; Dried hog’s cheek; Umble pye; Tart; Made dish. Dinner the previous evening featured thirty dishes for the first course and twenty-seven in the second.
Travelers of less exalted station did not find such elaborate banquets at the end of their day’s journey, but nevertheless expected a variety of meats for their evening meal. John Byng, a guest at the White Swan Inn at Middleham in 1792 made the following inscription in his diary: “I now felt a haste for dinner, and this is a description of it: Cold ham; A boiled fowl; Yorkshire pudding; Gooseberry pye; Loyn of mutton roast; Cheesecake.”10
Further north, in Scottish manor houses, large breakfasts were the norm. The following description of an eighteenth-century Highland breakfast appears in the novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett: “One kit of boiled eggs; a second, full of butter; a third, full of cream; an entire cheese made of goat’s milk; a large earthen pot, full of honey; the best part of a ham; a cold venison pasty; a bushel of oatmeal, made into thin cakes and bannocks; with a small wheaten loaf in the middle, for the strangers; a stone bottle full of whiskey; another of brandy, and a kilderkin [half a barrel] of ale.”
The French geologist Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond noted that a 1784 breakfast served at the house of Maclean of Torloisk on the Isle of Mull included “plates of smoked beef, cheese of the country and English cheese, fresh eggs, salted herrings, butter, milk and cream; a sort of bouillie of oatmeal and water, in eating which, each spoonful is plunged into a basin of cream; milk worked up with the yolks of eggs, sugar, and rum; currant jelly, conserve of myrtle, a wild fruit that grows among the heath; tea, coffee, three kinds of bread (sea biscuits, oatmeal cakes, and very thin and fine barley cakes); and Jamaica rum.”11
Starting with the Elizabethan era, a time of increased prosperity in Britain, animal foods of every description served as the basis of the British diet for all but the poorest, from game—including deer, beaver, boar, pheasant and heron—for the aristocrat to domestic animals—including beef, veal, lamb, mutton, pork, rabbit, chicken, pigeon, turkey, goose and duck—for the less privileged. The diet also included organ meats such as liver, kidneys, tongue, calf heads, sweetbreads, brains, heart, ears and feet. The English Housewife, written during the early part of the seventeenth century, contains recipes for “puddings of a calf’s mugget [entrails]” and “roast cow’s udder.”12 Umble pie, made from the entrails, or umbles, of deer, was a peasant food—the nobleman kept the muscle meats of the deer he hunted,* while the umbles went to his huntsman and servants. Tripe (cow’s stomach) formed an important part of the diet, especially among the poor. Organ meats began to go out of fashion, particularly among the upper classes, during the Victorian era, but even today tripe is still sold in specialty shops in some parts of the British Isles.
Various sorts of puddings—black pudding, kidney pudding, marrow pudding, blood pudding, suet pudding and so on—also supplied nutrient-dense organ meats and fat to the English diet. These puddings came to the British Isles from the Romans, who made ur-puddings by stuffing minced meat, fat and organ meats along with blood, salt, spices and other ingredients into an animal’s intestines.† Sometimes these puddings were then smoked. At some unknown date, the animal intestines were replaced with a pudding cloth and puddings came to be distinguished from sausages, smaller versions still encased in animal intestines.‡ Later, sweet things like raisins found their way into these puddings, resulting finally in the Christmas pudding, containing sugar, breadcrumbs, dried fruits and suet. In some parts of the British Isles, these Christmas puddings still contained meat as late as the early 1800s.13
Of course, the most famous “pudding” of all is the Scottish haggis—still enjoyed today—made from finely minced organ meats mixed with oats and aged or fermented in a sheep’s stomach, According to the 2001 English edition of the Larousse Gastronomique: “Although its description is not immediately appealing, haggis has an excellent nutty texture and delicious savoury flavor.”14
Beef, pastured on lush Irish grass, predominated in Ireland. “Flesh they devour without bread,” wrote an observer in 1570, and of course dairy products of many types. “They drink whey, milk and beef-broth.”15
Seafood for fast days (which amounted to almost half the days of the year) included trout, turbot, sole, whitebait, carp, cod, mackerel, anchovies, cockles, mussels, oysters, eel and crab. Salmon was brought in fresh from the northwest of England to the London markets. According to the novelist Daniel Defoe, “This is performed with horses, which changing often go night and day without intermission, and, as they say, very much outgo the post, so that the fish come very sweet and good to London.” Fresh shellfish were available in season in the largest towns, particularly near the seacoast. Oysters were a favorite snack food consumed at the Elizabethan theater. However, inhabitants of inland smaller towns had to content themselves with preserved seafood, such as pickled or salted oysters. Oysters, being cheap, were a favorite food of the poor. “Poverty and oysters always seem to go together,” observes Sam Weller in Dickens’s 1836 novel The Pickwick Papers.
Scots cuisine features a number of recipes for fish livers. According to F. Marion McNeill in her 1929 cookbook The Scots Kitchen: Its Lore and Recipes, “The livers, which must be perfectly fresh, make a rich and nourishing stuffing. (Cod liver is richest in oil.) In Shetland, where they are much used, a special utensil called a pannabrad… is used for melting fish livers, and the oil obtained is stored for winter use.”16
Dairy products added richness to the diet and, unlike meat and fish, were available to those on the lowest rungs of the social ladder. Until the twentieth century, most peasant families owned a cow, or a cow and a goat. “Why, sir, alas, my cow is a commonwealth to me,” says a rustic character in the Elizabethan play A Looking Glass for London and England, “for first, sir, she allows me, my wife and son, for to banquet ourselves withal: butter, cheese, whey, curds, cream, sod [boiled] milk, raw milk, sour milk, sweet milk and buttermilk.”17 Eggs were used liberally in omelets, puddings and pastries.
Without refrigeration and cookstoves, food storage and preparation presented challenges to families and innkeepers alike. Fortunately, the salt needed for preservation was plentiful in England. Cattle were brought into the market towns in September and October. The beef was salted and then hung up and preserved by smoking. Pork was likewise both salted and smoked to make bacon and ham. For poorer families, these were practically the only meats available during the winter months. Fish such as cod was also preserved by salting or, in the case of salmon, by pickling in salt brine, and transported in tubs to the larger markets. Another preservation method was “potting,” in which shrimp and smaller fish such as trout were placed in small containers and covered with butter or other fat mixed with spices.*18
Dinners in the houses of the gentry could be elaborate affairs, with roast meats and “made” dishes—elaborate concoctions featuring dozens of ingredients, including a variety of spices. Chefs for the great lords often used a cullis, a stock made from large quantities of meat and bone cooked in water over a long period to extract all the goodness, after which the meat and bones were discarded, leaving a rich broth that served for sauces and “made dishes.”19
But most English households lacked ovens and utensils necessary for complicated dishes. Food preparation was achieved by slow boiling in pots hung over the hearth fire; the Christmas turkey or goose required carrying to the baker’s for roasting. This meant that soups formed the mainstay of peasant diet, prepared by boiling bones, meat, organ meats and vegetables in a pot over the fire. Soups were known either as “running” or “standing” pottages. A running pottage, or broth, was a thin soup containing bits of meat, vegetables and herbs in season. A standing pottage was thickened with bread crumbs or grain until it was similar in consistency to a present-day mousse.20 Sausages could be cooked on a grill or in a skillet—or even speared with a stick and held over the fire. Preparation of haggis-like pudding—purchased from the butcher—was a simple matter of seething it in a pot over the hearth fire, resulting in a dish that was satisfying, nutritious and easy to prepare—a kind of Shakespearean takeout.
As for grains, rye, barley and oats were staple crops, made into coarse gruels or cakes. Oats and other grains were prepared as porridges or “frumenty” by soaking in warm water for twenty-four hours. Butter or cream along with honey or sugar made them palatable.21 A Welsh recipe for llymru reads as follows: “Mix oatmeal with sufficient buttermilk and water to make a liquid consistency. Leave for 2 nights then rinse through a hair sieve. Let it stand and pour off the surface water. Simmer for 40 minutes and keep stirring. Serve with sweet milk.”22
Oats and barley were also made into cakes, often cooked on a griddle. Before baking soda made its appearance in the middle of the nineteenth century, such cakes would have been prepared using a sourdough starter, and allowed plenty of time to rise. In the north, dough made from oats was “clapped and driven out as thin as paper on a round board, then transferred to a round iron plate of like size and baked over the coals.” Such “clapbread” was crisp and wafer-thin, like modern-day crackers, the perfect accompaniment for butter and cheese.
The Scots prided themselves on kiln-dried oats. According to the 1920 article “Gastrologue,” which appeared in The Scotsman Magazine, “A good miller knows just what samples of grain to select, just how long the process of drying in the kiln requires, just how to set the stones for the correct shelling and grinding of the cleaned and dried oats. The method of kiln-drying is somewhat more arduous than the modern method of mechanical drying, but it is to the kiln that we owe the delectable flavor of the best oatmeal.”*23
Farmers who grew their own oats but sent them to the local mill to be threshed, winnowed and ground into meal also received in return a bag of sids—the inner husks of the oats to which some of the nutritious kernel would adhere. From these sids an ancient Celtic dish called sowens was made.
The sids were soaked in water for several days until they were well soured. The liquid was then poured off and reserved, and the sids squeezed to extract the last bits of goodness and then discarded. The reserved liquid would sit for another two days, collecting as sediment at the bottom of the vessel. F. Marion McNeill noted that sids “contains practically all the nutritious properties of the oatmeal in its most easily digested form. When required for use, pour off all of the clear liquid (swats) and put some of the sediment (sowens) into a saucepan, allowing a gill [five ounces] for each person, with two gills of water and salt to taste. Bring to the boil, stirring continuously, and cook gently for ten minutes or longer, until thick and creamy. Serve like porridge, in wooden bowls or deep plates, with cream or rich milk.”24
In the British Isles, wheat was the grain for breadmaking among the upper classes and in the large towns. White bread made from refined flour was available from medieval times and held in high prestige. While the lower classes ate dark coarse bread, usually made with rye and often with ground peas or other pulses mixed into the dough, the upper classes regarded black and brown breads with aversion.25 White flour was also used for making pastries of various sorts—both those that enclosed meat dishes such as umble pie or chicken pasties, and those that served as a basis for dessert tarts and pies. Pastry dough was prepared by mixing butter, lard or suet with “fine white flour.” As long as the diet provides plentiful vitamins and minerals, small amounts of white flour do not pose an impediment to good health; but when white flour predominates, as it did among the British upper classes and as it does in Westernized countries today, the consequences can be tragic.
Fermented grains were the key ingredient in various sorts of ales and lagers—either made at home or in alehouses that existed in almost every town. These beers served as an excellent source of nutrients including B vitamins, minerals and enzymes. Small beer, which contained only a small amount of alcohol but large amounts of lactic acid and beneficial enzymes (and reminiscent of the low-alcohol lacto-fermented grain beers we have seen in Africa), was traditionally consumed in the morning, accompanying a heavy breakfast of fish or cold meat, bacon and eggs.26 Strong beers, with their high alcohol content, were recognized as providing “comfort for the poor.” During a visit to Manchester in 1618, the poet John Taylor recorded a total of nine different ales served at the same meal. Eight of them were herbal ales, flavored with hyssop, wormwood, rosemary, betony and scurvy grass. Wines from France and Spain were imported to England and found their way to almost every region, but they were beyond the means of most.
Farm families drank milk, buttermilk, whey or small beer. Even as late as Victorian times, farm families and laborers drank small beer at every meal.27 Whey, in particular, was recognized as a digestive aid and thirst quencher, and was thought to be beneficial to the skin.28 It was served at spas or baths—frequented by the well-to-do for “cures”—and often mixed with herbs, fruit or wine.*
In the north, both rural and city-dwelling Scots drank buttermilk in the summertime. It “was valued as both food and drink, and was held to cool the stomach in fever and to aid the cure of dysentery and other ailments.”29 In the Book of the Old Edinburgh Club, J. Jamieson recounts the popularity of buttermilk in the city:
In old Edinburgh, throughout the summer months, one might witness daily the picturesque sight of milkmaids on horseback riding into town with soordook [buttermilk] barrels strapped across the saddle behind them… It has been estimated that at the end of the eighteenth century a thousand pounds a year was paid in Edinburgh during the months of June, July, August, and September for this very inexpensive beverage, which was sold for a penny the Scots pint (i.e. two Imperial quarts).*
Cookbooks up to the twentieth century attest to the availability of a wide variety of vegetables in Britain, including those of the allium family—onions, leeks, and garlic—plus root vegetables such as parsnips and beets, along with spinach, asparagus and artichokes. These were used in soups and stews rather than served plain. Most cookbooks list a salad made of lettuces and herbs. In general, the upper classes looked upon vegetables with disdain, as a lower-class food, to be eaten by the farmers who grew them.30 Potatoes† and tomatoes, although introduced in the sixteenth century, did not gain acceptance until the Victorian era. Poorer families ate lots of porridge made from dried peas, as we know from the nursery rhyme: Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine days old.
As with meats, preservation of vegetables was a problem and most recipes books of the period contain a number of recipes for pickled vegetables—french beans, cucumbers, onions, cabbages, artichokes, mushrooms, asparagus, beet, cauliflower, radishes, herbs and even walnuts and grapes—prepared with a salt and vinegar brine, then protected from the air with a weighted cover or a layer of butter or tallow. A number of foodstuffs, including mushrooms, walnuts, cucumbers and oysters, were added to “catsup,” originally a pickled fish sauce made from anchovies or other small fish, something like Worcestershire sauce. Writing in 1730, Dean Swift mentions catsup as one of several fermented foods favored by the English: “And for our homebred British cheer, Botargo [fish roe relish], catsup and cabiar [caviar].”
The British considered raw fruits “unwholesome.” Medical books of the period warned that fresh fruits “filled the body with crude and waterish humours, that dispose the blood unto putrefaction.”31 Apples, pears, quince and berries were stewed or made into tarts, pies and other sweet “puddings.”
Not all foodstuffs in wide use were locally produced. Since the Crusades, a variety of spices and other exotic foods enriched the diets of the upper classes and townspeople. In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Perdita instructs the Clown to obtain foods for the sheep-shearing feast. Her shopping list includes rice, saffron, mace, dates, nutmegs, ginger and sugar. Almonds were another imported food, widely used, often made into almond milk, which served as a thickener for sauces on feast days when dairy products were forbidden.32 Liberal amounts of sugar and spices went into piquant sauces, served with the ubiquitous cold meats, and in “made dishes” for the tables of the well-to-do.
Inhabitants of the British Isles enjoyed sweet desserts, sometimes made with honey but more often with sugar, which was available since the time of the Crusades.* In fact, it was the British demand for sugar, even more than spices, that fueled the era of exploration and colonization. The English Housewife, published in Shakespeare’s day, calls for sugar in almost every dish—salads, omelets, fritters, pancakes, broth, boiled meat, stewed fish, roast meats, meat pies, and of course dessert pies, tarts and puddings.33 Later it became unfashionable to use too much sugar in sauces and meat dishes, but the consumption of sugared foods continued to grow with the advent of confectioners and pastry shops in every town, and the popularity of a new custom—taking tea with sweet cakes in the afternoon. The widespread use of sweet wines added to the amount of sugar in the diet—and often sugar was added to wines to make them sweeter.34 Excess sugar was the cause of the proverbial English bad teeth. A visitor to England in 1598 said of the sixty-four-year-old Queen Elizabeth that her “teeth [were] black, a defect the English seem subject to from their too great use of sugar.”35
Until the Victorian Age, the British diet contained many protective factors that offset the deleterious effects of sugar—most notably organ meats, raw dairy foods, eggs and butter, all rich in fat-soluble vitamins. Bone broths and whole grain products, including hearty ales, provided minerals in abundance and fermented foods provided enzymes. During the nineteenth century, these homespun foodstuffs gradually gave way to factory-produced, canned and pasteurized foods. Organ meats fell out of favor, and toast and tea replaced the hearty English breakfast of bacon, black pudding and eggs. In fact, tea became the national drink, replacing buttermilk, ale and whey at the morning meal.
The disruption of industrialization left many in extreme poverty. A survey taken in the 1840s revealed that most factory workers were limited in their choice of food to white bread (now cheap and available to the poor), cheese, butter, sugar, tea, salt and potatoes, with a small amount of bacon or other meat used for flavoring.36 The decline in the use of traditional foods, accompanied by crowding and unsanitary conditions in the major cities, paralleled the rise of disease in the 1800s—cholera, tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid fever and typhus. Later in the century, fresh meat, vegetables and fruit became more available, but the trend toward the use of fabricated foods was exacerbated with the introduction of margarine as a substitute for butter and bouillon cubes as a substitute for the rich broths of earlier days.
Ironically, the nutrition of British Islanders improved during the Second World War and even into the early 1950s, when sugar was largely unavailable and food rationing ensured that every British child got cod liver oil, eggs and whole milk.* Nutrition pioneers such as Sir John Boyd Orr lobbied for more meat and whole-milk products in the British diet.
But by 1953, sugar was back with a vengeance, and in recent years, the English have fallen for claims about the “Prudent Diet,” one in which vegetable oils are substituted for animal fats and the use of cholesterol-rich foods is minimized. The suet, lard, butter, eggs and shellfish of Shakespeare’s day are spurned as unhealthful; government campaigns discourage the consumption of liver as too high in cholesterol. These are the very foods that Dr. Weston A. Price discovered to be so necessary for attractive development, good health and successful reproduction. The diet of Merrie Olde England may not have been perfect, but it nourished a people who were energetic, curious, lusty, capable and strong. “Prudence,” said the English poet William Blake, “is a rich, ugly old maid, courted by incapacity.”
“THERE ARE AMONG the Russians many people aged eighty, one hundred, to one hundred twenty years old. They are not subject to illness as in these parts. Except for the emperor and some principal lords, they do not know about physicians. They even consider to be unclean several things which one uses in medicine. Among other things, they do not take pills voluntarily. As for enemas, they abhor them… If the common people are sick, they usually take a good draught of aqua vitae, place in it… a peeled clove of garlic, stir this and drink it. Then they go immediately into a hot house which is so hot as to be almost unendurable, and remain there until they have sweated an hour or two. They do the same for all sorts of maladies.”
This excerpt is from the account of a French soldier of fortune, Jacques Margeret, who served Tsar Boris Godunov of Russia from 1600 to 1606. “’Tis almost a miracle to see how their bodies, accustomed to and hardened by cold, can endure so intense a heat, and how that, when they are not able to endure it any longer, they come out of the stoves, naked as the back of a man’s hand, both men and women, and go into the cold water… and in winter how they wallow in the snow… The Muscovites are of a healthy and strong constitution, long lived and seldom sick; which when they are, their ordinary remedies, even in burning fevers, are only garlic and strong waters.”
Like other European nations before the twentieth century, Russia fostered a highly sophisticated diet for the nobility while also supporting a simple and nutritious peasant cuisine. And, as in other areas of Europe, the famines of the Middle Ages remained as searing memories for the Russian peasant. When the grain harvest on which the Russian peasant depended failed, the suffering was intense. From the Russian The Chronicle of Novgorod (1017–1471), we read:
AD 1125… The same year there was a great storm with thunder and hail… it drowned droves of cattle in the Volkhov, and others they hardly saved alive.
AD 1127… And in the autumn the frost killed all the [grain] and the winter crop; and there was famine throughout the winter.
AD 1128… This year it was cruel; the people ate [linden] leaves, birch bark, pounded wood pulp mixed with husks and straw; some ate buttercups, moss, horse flesh; and thus many dropping down from hunger, their corpses were in the streets, in the market place, and on the roads, and everywhere… fathers and mothers would put their children into boats in gift to [foreign] merchants [to be slaves], or else put them to death.
When crops were good, the Russian peasant consumed close to two pounds of dense sourdough bread per day, especially that made from rye, but also from spelt, millet, barley, oats and buckwheat, as well as kasha or porridge from buckwheat and other grains. A sour grain product called kissel, virtually identical to sowens in Scotland, was made by soaking, fermenting and cooking grain or even grain leavings (and also dried peas) to produce a gelatinous liquid “concentrate” of the grain. The procedure for oat kissel, for example, involved drying whole oats carefully on the floor of a warm brick oven and then pounding the oats in a mortar to partially crush them. The oats were covered in hot water and left to sour in a warm place for a day and a half. The soured oats were then pushed through a sieve, and the thick oat “milk” collected and slowly cooked until it thickened further like a jelly. It was then poured onto a wide plate and left to cool, jelling even further. Russian folk wisdom considered this oat aspic especially good for children, the elderly and convalescents—nutritious and easy to digest. The soured oat remnants did not go to waste, but were stirred into flour, left for twenty-four hours to further sour, and baked into flatbreads called lepyoshki.37
The other mainstay of the Russian diet was soup, and in particular shchi, a soup made from green cabbage in the summer and soured cabbage or sorrel in the winter, often made with a rich meat broth. Two other basic soups were borshch* (or borscht) and ukha. Today, there are literally hundreds of borshch recipes, some including sausages and other cuts of meat and even beans; some are vegetarian, but always containing beets and often enhanced with pickle brine. Borshch is traditionally served in a soup plate and garnished with sour cream.
Ukha is made from poaching whole fish in water with herbs and seasonings; the entire fish (including softened bones) with its broth serve as a meal. The Russian Orthodox church calls for fasting from meat about 250 days per year, including every Wednesday and Friday, and fifty days in Lent, so the Russians have been particularly creative when it comes to preparing the fish and crayfish that thrive in the country’s many lakes, streams, rivers and ponds. A menu for a feast day in a nineteenth-century middle-class household featured fish in four dishes: mushroom and sturgeon marrow pirog (a dough case with filling); sturgeon head soup; potatoes with herring; and pike in yellow sauce. Accompanying dishes included cranberry kissel; plum soup with wine; potato cutlets with mushroom sauce; and stewed fruit compote.38
Dairy foods play an important part in the traditional Russian diet, consumed fresh, soured as clabbered milk (prostokvasha) and sour cream (smetana), or made into a simple peasant cheese. Another sour milk product, kefir, originally a product of the tribal peoples of the northern Caucasus region, became a popular Russian food later on, along with kumis, fermented mare’s milk.†
Russians enjoy a healthy soft drink called kvass, a lightly fermented, slightly alcoholic beverage made from stale rye bread and sweetened with honey, fruit juices or raisins, still available from street vendors in cities and villages. Like the African low-alcohol beers, kvass is a rich source of B vitamins, amino acids and enzymes. Honey and birch sap also served as ingredients for various mildly alcoholic beverages. Of course, the quintessential Russian distilled alcoholic beverage is vodka made from rye grain, which first appeared in Moscow in the fifteenth century.
Fermented cabbage in the form of sauerkraut is another important Russian food.* In fact, many of the typical tastes in Russian cooking come from sauerkraut, pickled cucumbers and many other brined vegetables and fruits, which provide vitamin C during the winter months. In the warm months, the Russians enjoy a variety of fresh vegetables and herbs including radishes, parsley, dill, chervil, green onions and garlic. Wild-growing chicory, nettles, sorrel and purslane often go into the soup pot, and wild mushrooms from Russia’s forests enhance many recipes.
The ingenious Russian oven,† which served as the focus of family life, determined the distinctive character of Russian cuisine. The oven had no burners, so all food, even soup, was cooked inside in the coals and ashes after the fire had died down: bread was cooked first and then other foods were put inside as the oven cooled. Nooks and shelves built into the sides of the oven served for souring foods at a steady warm temperature. Most food was cooked in earthenware containers that had rounded sides to maximize heat exposure.
Decades of revolution, war and famine forced the Russian people to abandon many dietary and agricultural traditions in the late nineteenth century. War and famine began in the late nineteenth century. But after the fall of communism in the 1990s, one of the first books to appear in the bookstores was the 1861 culinary classic A Gift to Young Housewives by Elena Molokhovets, a compendium of traditional Russian recipes condemned as decadent and bourgeois after the country’s 1917 revolution. The renewed popularity of Molokhovets’s masterpiece, along with an explosion of interest in artisan food, shows that traditional food is alive and well throughout the vast Russian nation.39
PASTA OR PASTRAMI? Will the real Mediterranean diet please stand up? According to modern diet gurus, the Mediterranean diet “is characterized by abundant plant foods (fruit, vegetables, breads, other forms of cereals, beans, nuts and seeds), fresh fruit as the typical daily dessert, olive oil as the principal source of fat, dairy products (principally cheese and yogurt) and fish and poultry consumed in low to moderate amounts, zero to four eggs consumed weekly, red meat consumed in low amounts, and wine consumed in low to moderate amounts, normally with meals. This diet is low in saturated fat (less than or equal to 7–8% of energy) with total fat ranging from less than 25% to greater than 35% of energy throughout the region.”40
This, according to the experts, is the “healthy traditional” European diet we should adopt to protect ourselves from chronic disease, especially heart disease. According to this theory, pasta is fine, but we should definitely avoid that quintessential Mediterranean food, pastrami.
The author of this dogma, and the first to describe the Mediterranean diet in these terms, was Ancel Keys. Keys was the architect of the lipid hypothesis, the premise that heart disease is caused by saturated fat from meat and dairy products, which he called “the major dietary villain.”41
According to Keys, his introduction to the Mediterranean diet began in the early 1950s when he was a visiting professor at Oxford. In 1951, he chaired the first conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations at their headquarters in Rome.
“The conference talked only about nutritional deficiencies,” wrote Keys. “When I asked about the diet and the new epidemic of coronary heart disease, Gino Bergami, Professor of Physiology at the University of Naples, said coronary heart disease was no problem in Naples.”
Dr. Keys returned to Oxford where, as an underpaid visiting professor, he and his wife endured an unheated house and got by on food rations. He then had the brilliant idea of visiting sunny Naples to check out Professor Bergami’s claim. Once there, he discovered the trottorias and dined on “simple pasta and plain pizza.” Keys says he discovered that heart attacks were indeed rare in Naples, “except among the small class of rich people whose diet differed from that of the general population—they ate meat every day instead of every week or two.” His wife amused herself by measuring serum cholesterol concentrations “and found them to be very low except among members of the Rotary Club.” After this exacting research, Keys was able to conclude that “there seemed to be an association between the diet, serum cholesterol and coronary heart disease.”
“The heart of what we now consider the Mediterranean diet is mainly vegetarian,” he reported. “Pasta in many forms, leaves sprinkled with olive oil, all kinds of vegetables in season, and often cheese, all finished off with fruit and frequently washed down with wine.”
At first, Dr. Keys found little support for his revolutionary theories. But he encountered a sympathetic listener in 1952 when he presented his views to a small audience in New York at Mount Sinai Hospital. Fred Epstein found Keys’s data convincing and began spreading the message “with great effect over Europe and America.”42
Keys then published his Seven Countries Study43 in which he claimed a relationship between high rates of coronary heart disease and consumption of saturated fat in seven countries. He was able to do this by handpicking countries where both heart disease and consumption of saturated fats were high and by ignoring countries—such as France and Spain—with the same kind of diet but where heart disease was low.*44
Since Keys published his “research,” the Mediterranean diet—at least, what is perceived to be the Mediterranean diet—has become government policy. The USDA has immortalized Keys’s fond remembrance of trottoria fare from sunny Naples in the form of a food pyramid, based on lots of white bread and pasta topped with a generous layer of fruits and vegetables. This strangely garnished pizza slice then gets a splash of olive oil and cheese, an anchovy or two, a pinch of sugar, and voilà—the dietary solution to rampant chronic disease!
Chronic disease is still rampaging in spite of the food pyramid’s worldwide acceptance, but Keys, at least, fared rather well. In 1993, after Fred Epstein gave the summary lecture at the international celebration of the Seven Countries Study in Fukuoka, Japan, and at the fourth annual Ancel Keys Lecture at the 1993 American Heart Association Convention, Keys was deluged with requests for interviews and advice. “In May 1993, a crew from an American magazine came to our home Minnelea in Minnesota, bringing a photographer from California to record the scene while I talked about the Mediterranean diet.”
Dr. Keys no longer had to winter in Minnesota, but could escape to his second home in southern Italy. But his vacations to Naples included some sad moments, as he observed unfortunate changes in the Mediterranean diet: “The restaurants are increasingly popular but the food they serve is commonly far from the Mediterranean pattern… Everything has to be loaded with butter or margarine and ground meat. Serving only fruit for dessert is not common; ice cream or pie is customary. Whereas Italian restaurants brag about the healthy Mediterranean diet, they serve a travesty of it.” Keys does not tell us whether his newfound prosperity, which allowed him to dine in white-tablecloth restaurants rather than sidewalk cafés, caused him to abandon his monkish regimen of “leaves sprinkled with olive oil” and fresh fruit. It must have been distressing indeed to observe sophisticated Italians feasting on such travesties as pasta Alfredo, veal scallopini and prosciutto, especially to one who has taken the stringent vows of the dietary priesthood.*
But the life of the missionary is never easy. No, it is a lonesome road, filled with disappointment. Imagine the late-night soul-searching of Dr. Francisca Pérez-Llamas and his colleagues, who set out to study the consumption patterns of a group of adolescents in the region of Murcia, in southeastern Spain.45 Were these Mediterranean teenagers consuming a “balanced diet,” with plenty of vegetables and fruit? Not at all. The naughty youngsters consumed mostly sausage! “The results showed a very low consumption of vegetables, some deficiencies in the intake of the milk and fruits and an excessive intake of fats… while the intake of fish and pulses was insufficient in our study.”
Alas, lamented Pérez-Llamas, “the study reveals that although Murcia is a typically Mediterranean region, the characteristics of the diet of Murcian adolescents are quite different in some respects from the typical alimentary habits of the Mediterranean diet.”
Pérez-Llamas proposed to remedy these dietary sins with the modern version of the Spanish Inquisition: “nutritional advice was given to mothers and adolescents. The use of Spanish portions from the six basic food groups proved to be a very helpful method to popularize the principles of balanced diet in our population.”
Another group of diet-priests, headed by Dr. Alberti-Fidanza, made a pilgrimage in 1994 to study elderly Italians in the rural areas of Crevalcore and Montegiorgio, two of the districts Keys had included in the Seven Countries Study.46 But the older generation had fallen away! They no longer practiced the food puritanism that Keys claimed he observed three decades earlier. “In both areas, but particularly in Montegiorgio, these subjects have been abandoning the traditional Mediterranean diet,” wrote Dr. Alberti-Fidanza.
The question that the believers haven’t asked themselves is this: was the lean, so-called Mediterranean diet they observed after World War II the true Mediterranean diet? Or were they observing the tail end of deprivation engendered by half a decade of conflict? Were the inhabitants of Crevalcore and Montegiorgio abandoning the traditional Mediterranean diet, or were they taking it up again? And did Keys miss the sight of Italians enjoying rich food in the early 1950s because Italians had never done such a shameful thing, or was the visiting professor too poor at the time to afford anything more than plain pizza in a sidewalk café?
At the end of the nineteenth century, soon after the unification of Italy into one nation, Pellegrino Artusi wrote Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well,47 a collection of traditional recipes from Tuscany and the “foodie” region of Emilia-Romagna, which became the second most bestselling book in Italy (the first being the Bible).*
In the book, Artusi points out that the most famous Italian products are animal-based, including four hundred types of traditional cheese, many of them raw, and hundreds of cured meat products. The book and its recipes defy the precepts of the Mediterranean diet. For example, one breakfast recipe calls for eggs, butter, anchovies, capers and tuna. Artusi emphasizes the use of animal fat and meat; in fact, the book is a feast of animal food. Artusi rates the different nutritive power of different kinds of meat, with beef at the top of the list. Regarding pasta, he warns children, the elderly and pregnant or lactating women against consuming pasta “because it would distract from the consumption of more nutrient-rich foods, as meat or fish,” and cautions “people with tendency toward obesity” to refrain from consuming it “because every doctor knows that flour has no nutritive power and immediately turns into body fat.”
Countess Morphy’s Recipes of All Nations,48 another important book, was published in 1935, almost two decades before Keys and others proclaimed the new diet religion to the suffering millions. Consider Morphy’s description of the food in Sardinia: grains are certainly a part of their diet, consumed as bread, pasta or polenta, but in most interesting ways. “One of their favorite ways of cooking macaroni is to cook it in either lamb or pork fat… with small pieces of either lamb or pork, chopped tomatoes, chopped garlic and curd, mixed with a little water and salt and moistened with a little game stock, if this is obtainable.” Gnocchi is flavored with saffron and “served with a tomato sauce, or with gravy and cheese made from ewe’s milk.” Bland polenta is enlivened with “chopped salt pork, small pieces of sausages and grated cheese.” Favata, a fava bean stew, is made with “pieces of salt pork, cut in large chunks, ham bone, special homemade sausages, a handful of dried beans, wild fennel, and other herbs and a little water.”
Nothing low-fat so far. But perhaps Keys and his entourage were right when they said that meat is eaten sparingly in the Mediterranean region. Read on. “The Sardinians are great meat eaters, but their methods of cooking various kinds of meat are simple—almost primitive, in fact.” Like most Italians, the Sardinians prefer young animals—lamb, kid or suckling pig—usually roasted in front of a wood fire. “The meat is finally browned by constant basting with hot fat…” The baby pigs “are so tender that even the skin, ears and all can be eaten.”
The diet of Corsica “has in no way been subjected to any outside influence.” No new catechism, no diet evangelists here. So Corsicans can enjoy the following without guilt: all manner of fish, including small lobster, cuttlefish and shellfish; anchovy paste made with the addition of figs; dried salt cod; beef browned in lard; strips of goat fillet, salted and sun-dried; chestnuts mixed with polenta and cream and served with different kinds of meat or black [blood] pudding.
You Eat What You Are,49 a beautiful encyclopedia of traditional foods first published in 1979 and released in a revised edition in 1999, gives yet another view of Italian cuisine than the one proclaimed in the Gospel According to Ancel Keys. Author Thelma Barer-Stein notes that butter is the cooking fat of choice in northern Italy, lard in the middle region, and olive oil in the south. But pork is consumed throughout the entire peninsula, usually in the form of sausages—which anyone but an American visiting professor could discern are the sine qua nons of Italian cuisine. Salami, bologna, mortadella and zamponi—there would be no Italian cuisine without these. Sausage is a way of making offal taste good—as in pezzente, an Italian specialty made from pork sinews, livers and lungs. Cooks use plenty of pancetta (Italian-style bacon) and children love crisp cracklings of pig skin called ciccioli, rich in vitamin D.
The Jewish population living in Italy made sausage and cold cuts, but they did not use pork. In her book The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews,50 author Edda Servi Machlin remembers her father’s carne secca (salt dried meat) and salsicce de minao (beef sausage): “Both dishes were renowned and appreciated among the Jewish communities all over Italy.” These foods were made in late winter and hung in “an open north window” for four to six weeks to air-dry. Other specialties included lingua salmistrata (pickled beef tongue), the aroma of which would “resuscitate the dead,” and salame d’oca (goose sausage). These cured meats were all fermented—and eaten raw.
About eggs, Machlin reported, “Eggs have always been among the most inexpensive of the highly nutritious foods. For us, they were not only a staple, but also a universal remedy for most ailments, real or imaginary, much as vitamins are for many people today. In order to be fully effective, eggs had to be ingested raw and very fresh—in fact, warm, directly from the chicken nest. So, naturally, every family had a small poultry yard in their orchard.”
Italy produces as many kinds of cheese as France, including two of the very best: Parmesan and Gorgonzola, both full fat and creamy rich. Italian cheese garnishes more than pizza. It is used in turnovers, vegetable dishes, salads and sandwiches. A favorite is mozzarella, cut into squares, dipped in batter and deep-fried.
Italians are masters at preparing every kind of meat—from sweetbreads to knucklebones. Lean meat gets a cream sauce or stuffing of ham and ricotta cheese.
Fish and shellfish of every variety appear in seafood platters, fish soups and fish stews. The diet dictocrats, flush with the success of their food pyramid, seem to have missed the ecstatic experience of calamari, dipped in batter, deep-fried and served heaped on platters—a healthy snack as long as traditional fats, not partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, are used in frying. In Naples, where Keys had heard that heart disease was rare, snacks of fresh seafood are as popular as pizzas and small containers of oysters can be eaten on the run.
Italians love their vegetables for sure, and that’s because they know how to make them taste good. They know that salads taste better with a good dressing of aged vinegar and olive oil; and cooked vegetables blossom when anointed with butter, lard or cream.
Italians don’t generally start the day with eggs but they make up for it later on. Eggs are used in rich sauces and custards, like zabaglione. Soups are often served with a poached egg.
And what about ice cream? Is this something new to the Italian diet—an American travesty? Not quite. “The first ice cream shops or gelateria opened in Tuscany in the 1500s, but the southern Italians are believed to be responsible for the popularity of ice cream in North America.”51 And no one uses ice cream with greater inventiveness than the Italians, from the spumone of Naples to cassata, a decorative ice cream cake, to semifreddi, a type of soft foamy ice cream that also comes in many flavors. It is true, however, that Italians sometimes consume ice cream with fresh fruit.
AS IS CLEAR TO ANYONE who has traveled to Italy or eaten in an Italian restaurant, the backsliding Italians have reverted to the food paganism of their ancestors—if they ever left it. So it appears that orthodox nutritionists have recently enshrined the Greek diet as the most virtuous of politically correct Mediterranean cuisines, described as consisting principally of olive oil, bread and tomatoes.
Rosemary Barron ran a cooking school on Crete from 1980 to 1984 and spent many months living there, as far back as 1963 when she participated in an archeological dig. In 1991 she published Flavors of Greece, which received an “Editor’s Choice” award in the New York Times book section.
It is true, Barron reported, that the Greeks eat lots of bread. In the countryside, families still make bread using stone-ground flour baked in wood-burning ovens. White bread is found in the stores but there still is a long and strong tradition of all sorts of brown breads, including a fermented “shepherd’s” loaf made with wheat bran, oat bran and whole wheat flour. Much bread is “twice-baked” into rusks, normally consumed at breakfast.
Two reports indicate that the Greeks practiced soaking and fermented grains. One, from a Greek cookbook, describes soaking wheat grains overnight, then drying them in the sun before grinding and making them into pasta.52 The other involves a product called chodra, made from grinding wheat stalks, mixing them with the whey from cheese, bringing to a simmer, then hanging the mixture in sacks to dehydrate—talk about making the most of an agricultural waste product!
Barron estimates that Cretans eat several pounds of cheese per week, providing about six hundred calories of fat per day, or 25 percent of calories in a 2,400-calorie diet, just from cheese alone. Since the fat in goat milk cheese is almost 70 percent saturated, one-half pound of cheese per day would supply about 18 percent of calories as saturated fat, more than twice as much of that “dietary villain” than allowed by the diet priests, and that’s just from cheese.
Other sources of saturated fat include yogurt, milk and small amounts of butter used in pastries. Olive oil is the preferred fat for cooking and salads. It is used very generously, providing lots more fat calories, including some calories as saturated fat.
And there’s also plenty of saturated fat from meat in the Cretan diet. Lamb or kid are foods for spring, and goat is a food for throughout the year. Pork is a frequent dish, either as chops or roast, and old hens and roosters are served up boiled. The most common meat of all is game in season—birds, rabbit and hare. Tiny birds grilled and wrapped in vine leaves are popular. Thin smoked sausages serve as appetizers and garnishes.
Egg consumption averages about ten per week, used as ingredients in omelets, cakes, savory dishes and avgolemono, an egg-lemon soup. Barron remembers her surprise on cracking her first Cretan egg—the yolk was bright orange, so bright that the scrambled eggs she made with it were also orange.
Cretans love unusual foods like snails and organ meats—kidneys, liver and spleen. Fish roe is a common appetizer, made into small cakes and fried in oil, or whipped into creamy taramosalata dip.
Those who live near the coast eat fresh seafood every day—including shellfish, sea urchins, octopus, squid and cuttlefish. Until recently, the only transport was by donkey, and there were no refrigerators. This meant that unless you lived by the sea, you rarely ate fresh seafood. Cretans had several methods for preserving fish by salting or smoking, and for creating odorous sauces from rotting fish. Smaller fish were placed in earthenware jars and covered with herbs and olive oil. Donkeys then carried these “fish up the path” to the interior.
All of these animal foods, including the orange egg yolks, are excellent sources of vitamins A, D, and K2, the fat-soluble vitamins Dr. Price discovered to be vital for attractive facial development and robust health. When foods rich in these fat-soluble activators are abandoned, subsequent generations have more narrow faces, more tooth decay and more disease. They are less good-looking and less strong. The presence of adequate amounts of fat-soluble vitamins in the Cretan diet is probably what protects populations throughout the Mediterranean from the large amount of bread or pasta and frequent use of sweets.
The main meal in most of Greece is lunch, eaten at home and consisting of a main course, usually a stew or casserole containing meat and organ meats, along with vegetables, salad, bread and cheese. Then everything shuts down until about five in the evening. Dinner is late by American standards, preceded by a few hours of mezedes (little nibbles) taken in a café, or at home with a drink. Mezedes might be bits of cucumber, tomato, cheese, olives, seafood or slices of sausage. In a typical village scene, the men sit in cafés for a couple of hours and the women sit outside their houses chatting. The men then come home to dinner at about ten in the evening. Desserts like ice cream and pastries are eaten in cafés during family outings and at home on feast days.
The European Union is a breeding ground for zealots of food puritanism, so the Greeks are under pressure to conform. No more long lunches and leisurely hors d’oeuvres hours. Greece has to follow the same hours as the rest of Europe—and eat the same foods, like standardized low-fat factory-made cheeses, white bread, lean meat packaged without the bone, commercial baked goods based on vegetable oils and soft drinks. These are the real travesty of the modern Mediterranean diet, not foods rich in animal fats, and this garbage is much easier to sell when doctors say that it’s better for your health than the traditional foods of your ancestors.
“Unhappily,” wrote Keys, “the current changes in Mediterranean countries tend to destroy the health virtues of the diet as we saw them forty years ago. Efforts are needed to reverse this change. Education is important. We should concentrate on the medical profession and the schools. It is not enough that doctors measure serum cholesterol and tell patients with high values to avoid butter and fatty meat. They also should emphasize prevention by targeting the general public.”
This means more seminars, in villages by the sea. The second annual meeting, Keys reports, was held in Pioppi, a village on the Mediterranean coast, “about four kilometers from our home in Italy.” Sponsored by the International Society and Federation of Cardiology, these retreats have attracted “some 800 doctors from 30 cities in 22 countries.” Oh, what sacrifices are made in the name of science!
And what does this college of cardiologists eat when convened on their Italian retreat? Do the learned doctors confine themselves to plain pasta and lean meat? Do they nibble on lemons and leaves in the land of spumone?
The greatest of the seven deadly sins is not gluttony but pride, pride so blinding that it presumes to inflict one’s own pathology of renunciation upon a whole population, starting with the children. “In these seminars,” says Keys, “we stress the Mediterranean type of diet and its helpful role in controlling the concentration of serum cholesterol and reducing the associated risk of coronary heart disease… I believe it is important to bring the diet message to school children… Our challenge is to figure out how to make children tell their parents that they should eat as Mediterraneans do. At least, we should help children get rid of some nonsense ideas and convince them that meat and rich dairy products will not make the boys any stronger and the girls any prettier.”53