HOW TO EAT
An Ancient Guide for Healthy Living
Selected and translated by Clair Bubb
Princeton
reviewed by Alan Dent
The relationship between food and health is an ancient preoccupation but if
you’re looking for advice about to how to control your type-two diabetes,
avoid heart disease or lose weight, you’d be well advised no to follow
what’s in this book. It’s interest is not as a contemporary advice manual
but in what it tells us about its authors and their epochs. Chief among
them, naturally, is Hippocrates who is credited with the birth of medicine
and whose rational oath is still operative. He advises diets according to
season: eat as few vegetables as possible in winter as this will keep the
body dry and warm, in summer on the other hand vegetables are fine,
especially stewed, as soft food will render the body cool. We can laugh at
his advice today, as people may laugh at ours in 2,000 years ((if we last
that long), but he is on the right track. Having no microscope, he was
unable to identify the micro components of foodstuffs, but he recognised
that relationship between food and health and groped for reasonable
conclusions. Diet, he counsels, should be adjusted to age and body type as
well as season, but to this he adds that walking, briskly in the cold, more
sedately in the heat, is an aid to good health. Diet and exercise, just what
the medics prescribe today. His belief that infants should be served their
wine diluted might not go down too well in a culture which understands the
operation of alcohol on the body and the danger of addiction from early
consumption and his discrimination between foods good for men and women
might be seen as sexist, though there is some sense in his view that
pregnant women should take their wine as children should. If running makes
you sore, switch to wrestling. Here he seems not to distinguish between men
and women. No doubt wrestling is good for fitness, but his paucity of
alternatives must strike us as regrettable.
If you follow Diocles, soon after getting out of bed you’ll be using olive
oil; not for cooking but rubbing over your body. In summer it should be
diluted, in winter used straight. A brisk walk before a meal provokes
appetite but after eating a walk should be sedate. Next might come attending
to a bit of business and subsequently, a massage, once again with plenty of
oil or grease. People of his era must have been accustomed to being almost
permanently oily. The massage over, lunch. You can see who the advice
applied to and your bos might ntot be too happy if you spent your morning
walking and being oiled, though it beats most modern employment. Drink white
barley mixed with wine, eat stewed cucumber, this will keep your weight down
during the summer. Stewed cucumber is a little hard to imagine. After lunch,
a nap, followed by a bit of gentle housework or business, a stroll, the gym.
You can imagine what the advocates of economic growth might make of that as
a daily routine for the workers. Everyone, Diocles prescribes, should drink
as much as they like. Units per week? Bah, spoilsports. Sex should not be
engaged in too much at once. It is good for the cold, moist, melancholic and
flatulent but not for the narrow-chested or those without much flesh around
the hips. Too bad for them.
Celsus thinks laziness weakness the body but exertion firms it up and keeps
you young. He doesn’t include enforced exertion in menial work, but rather
the pleasant sort engaged in by free will. Sex during the day is bad for you
and if you ache afterwards, you’re overdoing it. He believes academic types
are less robust (it might be interesting to do a survey) and such people
should live in a house full of light. Whether the strong should inhabit
gloomy places he doesn’t say. If you’re healthy, your urine will be pale in
the morning and darker later. The best start to a meal is pickled fish. He
disdains “culinary concoctions” because they provoke over-eating and are
hard to digest. Quite what this means it’s hard to know. Be familiar with
your own body, it will have a weak point and that is what you should pay
attention to. Sex should be avoided in the summer. Think what that would do
to the tourist trade.
Galen believes basil is unwholesome, bad for the digesting, but he rejects
the myth that if you grind it and leave it in a bowl for a few days it will
spontaneously produce scorpions. Dioscorides also takes against the herb: it
will ruin your eyesight. Seneca would have nothing to do with mushrooms
which he believed were not a food but a mere relish. Lettuce, Galen
observed, is bad for the blood, even boiled. Cabbage, on the other hand, is
the supreme vegetable, according to Cato. Eat it for breakfast. Dioscorides
thought Arugula an aphrodisiac. Hippocrates thought onions good for vision
but detrimental for the rest of the body. The humble lentil is recommended
by Plutarch, who argues that less expensive things are healthier, not quite
the message promulgated by our supermarkets. Galen, however, judges that
lentils cause cancer and elephantitis. Still, Pliny the Elder believed they
make you good-tempered.
Much of this contradictory advice is amusing, but the value of the book is
its revelation that the ancients were as interested in the relationship
between food, lifestyle and health as we are. We have science at our
disposal, they were groping in the dark. Here and there they hit on what
today we would recognise as scientifically well-founded, but often they
relied on intuition, which has no power to comprehend digestion or
metabolism. Few of us would think much of a meal of boiled lettuce, but this
book reminds us we should eat wisely, and enjoy it.