Overview

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 categorise 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.

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Reviews

""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

""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

Author Information

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.

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