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.
