A delicious feast of ancient Greek and Roman writings on living well by eating well
Today, we're stuffed with dietary recommendations from every direction. Social media, advertising, food packaging, diet books, doctors-all have advice on what, how much, and when to eat. This would have been no surprise to ancient Greeks and Romans. Their doctors were intensely interested in food, offered highly prescriptive dietary advice, and developed detailed systems to categorize foods and their health effects. How to Eat is a delectable anthology of Greco-Roman writings on how to eat, exercise, sleep, bathe, and manage your sex life for optimal health. It also gathers ancient opinions on specific foods of all sorts, from how to deploy onions to cure baldness and cabbage to get sober to whether lentils are healthy and why arugula increases your sex drive.
With lively new translations by Claire Bubb, and the original Greek and Latin texts on facing pages, How to Eat features voices from medicine, philosophy, natural history, agriculture, and cooking, including Hippocrates, Pliny the Elder, Galen, Seneca, Plutarch, and Cato.
While medicine and science have obviously changed enormously since the classical world, and some Greco-Roman beliefs about diet now appear hilariously off the mark, How to Eat reveals that much of their advice still resonates-and all of it is fascinating. Claire Bubb is assistant professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. She is the author of Dissection in Classical Antiquity. "How to Eat distills practical advice from the greatest thinkers of antiquity. It's like having Hippocrates, Seneca, and Plutarch on speed dial ready to offer guidance on everything from seasonal eating to self-care. Scholarly yet accessible and highly informative, How to Eat is masterfully translated and sure to inspire your menu for years to come."-Francine Segan, author of The Philosopher's Kitchen: Recipes from Ancient Greece and Rome for the Modern Cook
"Clear and engaging while remaining faithful to the original languages, Bubb offers a delectable course of translated selections from the ancient world that are bound to resonate with modern readers, who will discover many points of connection and divergence between ancient and current approaches to health and diet."-John F. Donahue, author of Food and Drink in Antiquity "An entertaining and insightful survey of the ways in which conventional dietary wisdom in every age is a combination of the perennial and the faddish, the sensible and the ludicrous."---Julian Baggini, Wall Street Journal "A delightful as well as a fascinating read, made all the more enjoyable by the clarity of the translation."---Peter Jones, Classics for All "Timely and fascinating."---John Godwin, The Journal of Classics Teaching
