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Anticipating by 20 centuries the nostrums of today’s healthy-living gurus


How to Eat: An Ancient Guide for Healthy Living— A Buffet of Ancient Authors Selected, translated, and introduced by Claire Bubb


Published by Princeton University Press; 242 pages; $17.95 / £14.99 Reviewed by Stuart Walton


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amiliarity with culinary traditions other than one’s own has become such an ingrained assumption


among today’s gastronauts as to have acquired a competitive edge. “Where do you source your gochugaru?” “Frankly, that last jar of sidr from the Yemeni deli left a little to be desired.” “Then, horrors! I ran out of jaboticaba in the middle of bottling preserves for laying up. Thank goodness we still have some of last year’s jaboticaba wine to compensate.” Only a generation ago, hardly anybody in the UK would have known what ominous activity was meant by “pulled pork.” However, if the strangeness and thrill


of far-flung cuisines are wearing smooth with the tireless invention of novelty, what people ate in the past falls into a different category. Indeed, the farther back we are prepared to forage in history’s thickets, the likelier it is that we will find bemusement and fascination breaking upon us. The paleolithic diet, if anybody is still on it, is rather wanting in fascination, reminding the eater only that there was a time when raw food and drink were still awaiting the invention of forms of processing, such as meat cookery, to make them infinitely more appealing. By the time sustenance had become gastronomy, though, its numberless ramifications generated a significant and enduring aspect of cultural development. Claire Bubb, a classicist at New York


University, has put together a spirited collection of gastronomic writing from Greek and Roman antiquity, all of which is linked by its concern for the well-being of diners in the ancient world. Following Bubb’s excellent introduction, the medical writers Galen, Dioscorides, and Celsus are all here, as is Diocles of Carystus, whose treatise on healthy


52 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 87 | 2025


living survives in tantalizing fragments. We dip into Cato’s agricultural manual, the Hippocratic regimen, and the voluminous compendium that was the Latin cookbook of Apicius, and we peruse passages from the correspondence of the dyspeptic Roman Stoic Seneca. Throughout the long historical eras covered by this collection, there was a general presumption that plain and simple eating was best, a predilection that endures into the present day. Indeed, Greco-Roman antiquity is the locus classicus of what we now know as the Mediterranean diet, its banausic simplicity the antidote to the centuries of otiose refinement that resulted in the haute cuisine of France. And yet, Apicius is no stranger to ceremonial lily-gilding. Bubb reproduces a recipe for a layered casserole of stuffed sausage, chicken livers, flaked haddock, marine nettles, oysters, and young cheese, along with


any combinations of mallow, beets, leeks, boiled brains, and halved hard-boiled eggs, all sprinkled with pine nuts. Pour in a green sauce of lovage, celery seed, silphium, and pepper. Simmer until it is cooked. Then pour in a savory custard of whisked milk and egg. Cook further to set, then garnish with sea urchins. Before we worry ourselves over whether the leftovers will freeze, it is worth pointing out that you can no longer get silphium. Native to what is now Libya, this pungently garlicky member of the fennel family was once imported in virtually industrial quantities for the larders of Imperial Rome, where it was progressively eaten to extinction. Silphium’s reputation as one of the ancient aphrodisiacs doubtless also played a role in its botanical doom. What emerges strongly from the writings of the Greeks and Romans curated by Bubb is the urge to systematize. The Athenian period in particular was the great system-building epoch in western intellectual history, in which almost everything—from the physical properties of substances, to the varieties of human emotion—was subjected to classifying thought, most heroically in the writings of Aristotle. Food and the responses it provoked in the body—the maladies, as much as the sought-after harmony of the organism, emphasized by thinkers in the humoral tradition—were no exception. The relative sternness of much of the advice in How to Eat anticipates by 20 centuries and more the nostrums of today’s healthy-living gurus. For many a reader, the chief interest of these judiciously chosen extracts lies in the arrant nonsense that many of them purvey. Bubb has creditably resisted the trend to daub the ancient authorities in a uniform coat of historical whitewash, but there is in any case something more compelling in learning that dried figs cause head lice than there is in finding out that Galen already knew that cabbage was good for you. The notion entertained by many people that pots of unattended basil were capable of engendering live scorpions is given fairly short shrift by


Photography courtesy of Princeton University Press


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