We were savoring an especially nice lunch of rice and curry and I thought about how well we eat. Hardly anything in the way of processed food makes it into our regular diets. We eat lots of fresh and cooked vegetables.
From this idea came thoughts of how others eat. I was not thinking primarily of our neighbours or even those in other countries. I was struck with the desire to see how others ate at different times in history. After all, food is something we have in common with all of humanity, past and present.
I've always tried to consider history as the study of the lives of ordinary people and the push and pull of events on them. Memorizing simple dates doesn't help anyone understand how things all fit together. Yet, absent from my historical perspective, excepting perhaps England's King Henry VIII, was a focus on what they must have eaten. Wouldn't sitting down at a meal with ordinary folks from a different era be fun as well as revealing?
I had to scramble to find this picture to upload on Flickr. I never really got the photos from the second half of the 2008 trip online! I just assume the folks in ancient Pompeii must have had a very good diet. They were well-to-do, surrounded by excellent soil, and had a good climate. Goods crossing the Mediterranean were close at hand as well. I think it would have been a fine place to stop in and have dinner with an average citizen 1,950 years ago.
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