Greece Food Quotes

When we came and rented the North Perth home, my father had a little ice chest, and on top of the ice chest was a radio. And we were sitting at our lunch time on Sunday eating dinner after church, and my Mum says, ‘Look where we’ve ended up. We’ve got a table cloth on our table, we’ve got food on our plate, and we’re listening to music.’ That was a big thing for my mother. - Mrs Helen Doropoulos, Greece

In ancient Greece, the word for "cook," "butcher," and "priest" was the same -- mageiros -- and the word shares an etymological root with "magic.

Become a parent. Lose your autonomy, but gain the wondrous superpower of The Magic Kiss that instantly dries tears and makes the pain of boo-boos disappear.

Every cuisine has its characteristic 'flavor principle,' Rozin contends, whether it is tomato-lemon-oregano in Greece; lime-chili in Mexico; onion-lard-paprika in Hungary, or, in Samin's Moroccan dish, cumin-coriander-cinnamon-ginger-onion-fruit. (And in America? Well, we do have Heinz ketchup, a flavor principle in a bottle that kids, or their parents, use to domesticate every imaginable kind of food. We also now have the familiar salty-umami taste of fast food, which I would guess is based on salt, soy oil, and MSG.

Imagine you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to look — it looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under pleasant conditions — good weather, good hotel room, good food, good guide — be a bore? Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in downtown Athens, binoculars propped up on sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the portico. Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon? Explain.

You know better than anyone that nothing lasts. Nothing good. Nothing bad. Everything lives. Everything dies. Sometimes cities just fall into the sea. It's not a tragedy, that's just the way it is. People look around them and see the world and say this is how the world is supposed to be. Then they fight to keep it that way. They believe that this is what was intended - whether by design or cosmic accident - and that everything exists in a tenuous balance that must be preserved. But the balance is bullshit. The only thing constant in this world is the speed at which things change. Rain falls, waters rise, shorelines erode. What is one day magnificent seaside property in ancient Greece is the next resting thirty feet below the surface. Islands rise from the sea and continents crack and part ways forever. What was once a verdant forest teeming with life is now resting one thousand feet beneath a sheet of ice in Antarctica; what was once a glorious church now rests at the bottom of a dammed-up lake in Kansas. The job of nature is to march on and keep things going; ours is to look around, appreciate it, and wonder what's next?

Do you know the reason why poetry and philosophy are nothing but dead-letter nowadays? It is because they have severed themselves from life. In Greece, ideas went hand-in-hand with life; so that the artist's life was already a poetic realisation, the philosopher's life a putting into action of his philosophy; in this way, as both philosophy and poetry took part in life, instead of remaining unacquainted with each other, philosophy provided food for poetry, and poetry gave expression to philosophy - and the result was admirably persuasive. Nowadays beauty no longer acts; action no longer desires to be beautiful; and wisdom works in a sphere apart.

HAPPENING APART FROM WHAT’S HAPPENING AROUND IT There is a vividness to eleven years of love because it is over. A clarity of Greece now because I live in Manhattan or New England. If what is happening is part of what’s going on around what’s occurring, it is impossible to know what is truly happening. If love is part of the passion, part of the fine food or the villa on the Mediterranean, it is not clear what the love is. When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, “What is the sound of the waterfall?” “Silence,” he finally told me. The stillness I did not notice until the sound of water falling made apparent the silence I had been hearing long before. I ask myself what is the sound of women? What is the word for that still thing I have hunted inside them for so long? Deep inside the avalanche of joy, the thing deeper in the dark, and deeper still in the bed where we are lost. Deeper, deeper down where a woman’s heart is holding its breath, where something very far away in that body is becoming something we don’t have a name for.

These men have never sought popular approval, nor numbers of followers. They are indifferent to these things, for they know how few there are in each generation who are ready for the truth, or who would recognize it if it were presented to them. They reserve the "strong meat for men," while others furnish the "milk for babes." They reserve their pearls of wisdom for the few elect, who recognize their value and who wear them in their crowns, instead of casting them before the materialistic vulgar swine, who would trample them in the mud and mix them with their disgusting mental food.

As we have seen, by the time it ended, nearly 4 million Bengalis starved to death in the 1943 famine. Nothing can excuse the odious behaviour of Winston Churchill, who deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere. ‘The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious’ than that of ‘sturdy Greeks’, he argued.

The eventual failure of the palace economies had a devastating effect on the large part of the Mycenaean population that depended on this system for its subsistence. Peasant farmers, who knew how to grow their own food, had a chance to go on supporting themselves even when the redistributive system for foodstuffs and goods broke down, if they were not killed in the violent disruptions. The inhabitants of the palaces, however, who depended on others to provide them food, starved when the system disappeared.

Death and the Turtle" I watched the turtle dwindle day by day, Get more remote, lie limp upon my hand; When offered food he turned his head away; The emerald shell grew soft. Quite near the end Those withdrawn paws stretched out to grasp His long head in a poignant dying gesture. It was so strangely like a human clasp, My heart cracked for the brother creature. I buried him, wrapped in a lettuce leaf, The vivid eye sunk inward, a dull stone. So this was it, the universal grief: Each bears his own end knit up in the bone. Where are the dead? we ask, as we hurtle Toward the dark, part of this strange creation, One with each limpet, leaf, and smallest turtle--- Cry out for life, cry out in desperation! Who will remember you when I have gone, My darling ones, or who remember me? Only in our wild hearts the dead live on. Yet these frail engines bound to mystery Break the harsh turn of all creation's wheel, for we remember China, Greece, and Rome, Our mothers and our fathers, and we steal From death itself its rich store, and bring it home.

Having a body, we have seen, does not entail knowing a body. Whereas a cow automatically eats whatever grasses supply needed nutrients, people must determine for themselves what to put into their bodies, with the result that there is room to make mistakes. Mistakes arise, in part, from ignorance. Yet ignorance is not the only problem produced by this arrangement. The fact that we are not compelled by our bodies' precise needs—understood as particular kinds of food and drink, rather than food and drink tout court—allows the formation of desires that have little or nothing to do with the needs on which bodily health depends.

But the Hermetists claim that the Master or advanced student is able, to a great degree, to escape tile swing toward Pain, by the process of Neutralization before mentioned. By rising on to the higher plane of the Ego, much of the experience that comes to those dwelling on the lower plane is avoided and escaped. The Law of Compensation plays an important part in the lives of men and women. It will be noticed that one generally "pays the price" of anything he possesses or lacks. If he has one thing, he lacks another the balance is struck. No one can "keep his penny and have the bit of cake" at the same time. Everything has its pleasant and unpleasant sides. The things that one gains are always paid for by the things that one loses. The rich possess much that the poor lack, while the poor often possess things that are beyond the reach of the rich. The millionaire may have the inclination toward feasting, and the wealth wherewith to secure all the dainties and luxuries of the table while he lacks the appetite to enjoy the same; he envies the appetite and digestion of the laborer, who lacks the wealth and inclinations of the millionaire, and who gets more pleasure from his plain food than the millionaire could obtain even if his appetite were not jaded, nor his digestion ruined, for the wants, habits and inclinations differ. And so it is through life. The Law of Compensation is ever in operation, striving to balance and counterbalance, and always succeeding in time, even though several lives may be required for the return swing of the Pendulum of Rhythm.

This worship of the sacred fire did not belong exclusively to the populations of Greece and Italy. We find it in the East. The Laws of Manu as they have come to us show us the religion of Brahma completely established, and even verging towards its decline; but they have preserved vestiges and remains of a religion still more ancient—that of the sacred fire—which the worship of Brahma had reduced to a secondary rank, but could not destroy. The Brahmin has his fire to keep night and day; every morning and every evening he feeds it with wood; but, as with the Greeks, this must be the wood of certain trees. As the Greeks and Italians offer it wine, the Hindu pours upon it a fermented liquor which he calls soma. Meals, too, are religious acts, and the rites are scrupulously described in the Laws of Manu. They address prayers to the fire, as in Greece; they offer it the first fruits of rice, butter, and honey. We read that “the Brahmin should not eat the rice of the new harvest without having offered the first fruits of it to the hearth-fire; for the sacred fire is greedy of grain, and when it is not honored it will devour the existence of the negligent Brahmin.” The Hindus, like the Greeks and the Romans, pictured the gods to themselves as greedy not only of honors and respect, but of food and drink. Man believed himself compelled to satisfy their hunger and thirst if he wished to avoid their wrath.

For the Fertile Crescent, the answer is clear. Once it had lost the head start that it had enjoyed thanks to its locally available concentration of domesticable wild plants and animals, the Fertile Crescent possessed no further compelling geographic advantages. The disappearance of that head start can be traced in detail, as the westward shift in powerful empires. After the rise of Fertile Crescent states in the fourth millennium B.C., the center of power initially remained in the Fertile Crescent, rotating between empires such as those of Babylon, the Hittites, Assyria, and Persia. With the Greek conquest of all advanced societies from Greece east to India under Alexander the Great in the late fourth century B.C., power finally made its first shift irrevocably westward. It shifted farther west with Rome’s conquest of Greece in the second century B.C., and after the fall of the Roman Empire it eventually moved again, to western and northern Europe. The major factor behind these shifts becomes obvious as soon as one compares the modern Fertile Crescent with ancient descriptions of it. Today, the expressions “Fertile Crescent” and “world leader in food production” are absurd. Large areas of the former Fertile Crescent are now desert, semidesert, steppe, or heavily eroded or salinized terrain unsuited for agriculture. Today’s ephemeral wealth of some of the region’s nations, based on the single nonrenewable resource of oil, conceals the region’s long-standing fundamental poverty and difficulty in feeding itself.

But the bed I made up for myself was sufficiently uncomfortable to give me a wakeful night, and I thought a good deal of what the unlucky Dutchman had told me.I was not so much puzzled by Blanche Stroeve’s action, for I saw in that merely the result of a physical appeal. I do not suppose she had ever really cared for her husband, and what I had taken for love was no more than the feminine response to caresses and comfort which in the minds of most women passes for it. It is a passive feeling capable of being roused for any object, as the vine can grow on any tree; and the wisdom of the world recognizes its strength when it urges a girl to marry the man who wants her with the assurance that love will follow. It is an emotion made up of the satisfaction in security, pride of property, the pleasure of being desired, the gratification of a household, and it is only by an amiable vanity that women ascribe to its spiritual value. It is an emotion which is defenceless against passion. I suspected that Blanche Stroeve's violent dislike of Strickland had in it from the beginning a vague element of sexual attraction. Who am I that I should seek to unravel the mysterious intricacies of sex? Perhaps Stroeve's passion excited without satisfying that part of her nature, and she hated Strickland because she felt in him the power to give her what she needed.I think she was quite sincere when she struggled against her husband's desire to bring him into the studio; I think she was frightened of him, though she knew not why; and I remembered how she had foreseen disaster. I think in some curious way the horror which she felt for him was a transference of the horror which she felt for herself because he so strangely troubled her. His appearance was wild and uncouth; there was aloofiness in his eyes and sensuality in his mouth; he was big and strong; he gave the impression of untamed passion; and perhaps she felt in him, too, that sinister element which had made me think of those wild beings of the world's early history when matter, retaining its early connection with the earth, seemed to possess yet a spirit of its own. lf he affected her at all. it was inevitable that she should love or hate him. She hated him. And then I fancy that the daily intimacy with the sick man moved her strangely. She raised his head to give him food, and it was heavy against her hand; when she had fed him she wiped his sensual mouth and his red beard.She washed his limbs; they were covered with thick hair; and when she dried his hands, even in his weakness they were strong and sinewy. His fingers were long; they were the capable, fashioning fingers of the artist; and I know not what troubling thoughts they excited in her. He slept very quietly, without movement, so that he might have been dead, and he was like some wild creature of the woods, resting after a long chase; and she wondered what fancies passed through his dreams. Did he dream of the nymph flying through the woods of Greece with the satyr in hot pursuit? She fled, swift of foot and desperate, but he gained on her step by step, till she felt his hot breath on her neck; and still she fled silently. and silently he pursued, and when at last he seized her was it terror that thrilled her heart or was it ecstasy? Blanche Stroeve was in the cruel grip of appetite. Perhaps she hated Strickland still, but she hungered for him, and everything that had made up her life till then became of no account. She ceased to be a woman, complex, kind, and petulant, considerate and thoughtless; she was a Maenad. She was desire.

We will only understand the Torah if we recall that every other religion in the ancient world worshiped nature. That is where they found God, or more precisely, the gods: in the sun, the moon, the stars, the storm, the rain that fed the earth and the earth that gave forth food. Even in the 21st century, people for whom science has taken the place of religion still worship nature. For them we are physical beings. For them there is no such thing as a soul, merely electrical impulses in the brain. For them there is no real freedom: we are what we are because of genetic and epigenetic causes over which we have no real control. Freewill, they say, is an illusion. Human life, they believe, is not sacred, nor are we different in kind from other animals. Nature is all there is. Such was the view of Lucretius in ancient Rome and Epicurus in pre-Christian Greece, and it is the view of scientific atheists today. The faith of Abraham and his descendants is different. God, we believe, is beyond nature, because He created nature. And because He made us in His image, there is something in us that is beyond nature also. We are free. We are creative. We can conceive of possibilities that have not yet existed, and act so as to make them real. We can adapt to our environment, but we can also adapt our environment to us. Like every other animal we have desires, but unlike any other animal we are capable of standing outside our desires and choosing which to satisfy and which not. We can distinguish between what is and what ought to be. We can ask the question “Why?

The blue skies and the blue waters. The scent of wild herbs on the breeze. The dancing and the delicious food. The friendly people. There are a million reasons to visit Greece.

In the early centuries Rome’s dead had been cremated; now, usually, they were buried, though some obstinate conservatives preferred combustion. In either case, the remains were placed in a tomb that became an altar of worship upon which pious descendants periodically placed some flowers and a little food. Here, as in Greece and the Far East, the stability of morals and society was secured by the worship of ancestors and by the belief that somewhere their spirits survived and watched. If they were very great and good, the dead, in Hellenized Roman mythology, passed to the Elysian Fields, or the Islands of the Blessed; nearly all, however, descended into the earth, to the shadowy realm of Orcus and Pluto. Pluto, the Roman form of the Greek god Hades, was armed with a mallet to stun the dead; Orcus (our ogre) was the monster who then devoured the corpse. Because Pluto was the most exalted of the underground deities, and because the earth was the ultimate source of wealth and often the repository of accumulated food and goods, he was worshiped also as the god of riches and plutocrats; and his wife Proserpina—the strayed daughter of Ceres—became the goddess of the germinating corn. Sometimes the Roman Hell was conceived as a place of punishment;72 in most cases it was pictured as the abode of half-formless shades that had been men, not distinguished from one another by reward or punishment, but all equally suffering eternal darkness and final anonymity. There at last, said Lucian, one would find democracy.73

People who have seen the latest Greek plan said Athens was proposing new savings in the pension system — the biggest sticking point — which will amount to about 0.4 per cent of gross domestic product this year and just over 1 per cent next year. But this is short of the 1 per cent savings this year and next that Greece’s creditors had demanded. It also relies on higher employer contributions which, alongside proposed tax changes targeting corporate profits, could crimp economic growth, some creditor officials fear. The two sides also remain at loggerheads over rates of valued added tax on electricity and processed food. According to officials who attended the eurogroup meeting, Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund chief, was particularly tough.

SB: I think this is the recognition that something profound has taken place. There has been a new birth of consciousness.   RG: A new birth of consciousness, yes, because human consciousness is born in violence, through violence.   SB: Thus Joseph can say, "You meant it for ill, but God meant it for good."[36]   RG: “God meant it for good.” So in other words, you have the two religions that are, in a way, signified by the story of Joseph. In the end what Joseph says is that shift, that shift which must be represented in the First Testament. That's why the First Testament is so powerful, because it constantly demonstrates that shift in its greatest stories. I think you said something very profound in the Joseph story, "You meant it for ill, but God turned it to good." In other words, all your violence leads you to a higher stage of humanity. So in a way that would also be one of the reasons why even if the Joseph story is a late story in terms of literary production, it is placed very early in the Bible, because it announces what the Bible is about.   SB: The other thing about these stories is that you'll notice they give hope because none of the people in the Bible are perfect. If they were perfect we couldn't identify with them.   RG: For certain they're all human, because you feel it in the Joseph story too, when they find Joseph dressed as the most important guy at the funeral. Their temptation must be to turn him into a god there, to see him as a god. Not only is he the viceroy, but he also has food, which they don't have. So he's like a transcendental Joseph, but since we’re in the Jewish world here they don't divinize their brother.   SB: No idols.   RG: No idols, that's right.   SB: This could not have been told in Greece. RG: This could not have been told in Greece. That's for sure.   SB:

We now know that the greatest concentration of "abnormal" lactose absorbers lives in Europe north of the Alps. Over 95 percent of the Dutch, Danes, Swedes, and other Scandinavians have enough lactase enzyme to digest very large quantities of lactose throughout their lives. South of the Alps, high to inter­ mediate levels prevail, falling to intermediate and low levels in Spain, Italy and Greece and among Jews and city-dwelling Arabs in the Middle East. Intermediate to high levels of absorbers occur again in northern India, while high levels of absorbers occur in isolated enclaves such as the Bedouin nomads of Arabia and cer­ tain pastoral groups in northern Nigeria and East Africa. Mammals obviously have to be able to drink milk in infancy,

Agriculture is twenty percent of GDP. The most important crop is wheat. We are almost self-sufficient, overall almost eighty percent self-sufficient, in food.” In addition, he says, the country’s external debt of $7 billion is only ten percent of GDP, a proportion Greece, Spain, and Italy could envy. With foreign reserves of $17 billion, the country, in his view, could go on importing for another ten months. Syria is receiving assistance from Russia, Iran, and Iraq, which helps further to ease the burden. In any case, as in Iraq from 1990 to 2003, the sanctions are affecting the populace more than the regime. Further harming the people and the economy is the endemic corruption of some within the regime, who have treated the state as their personal business enterprise to be looted at will.

He snatches for his sword to slash his throat. It is only when his hand comes up empty that he remembers: he gave the sword to me. Then Antilochus is seizing his wrists, and the men are all talking. All he can see is the bloodstained cloth. With a roar he throws Antilochus from him, knocks down Menelaus. He falls on the body. The knowledge rushes up in him, choking off breath. A scream comes, tearing its way out. And then another, then another. He seizes his hair in his hands and yanks it from his head. Golden strands fall on the bloody corpse. Patroclus, he says, Patroclus, Patroclus. Over and over until it is sound only. Somewhere Odysseus is kneeling, urging food and drink. A fierce red rage comes, and he almost kills him there. But he would have to let go of me. He cannot. He holds me so tightly I can feel the faint beat of his chest, like the wings of a moth. An echo, the last bit of spirit still tethered to my body. A torment.

Render us rich and flourishing,” says an Orphic hymn; “make us also wise and chaste.” Thus the hearth-fire is a sort of a moral being; it shines, and warms, and cooks the sacred food, but at the same time it thinks, and has a conscience; it knows men’s duties, and sees that they are fulfilled. One might call it human, for it has the double nature of man; physically, it blazes up, it moves, it lives, it procures abundance, it prepares the repast, it nourishes the body; morally, it has sentiments and affections, it gives man purity, it enjoins the beautiful and the good, it nourishes the soul. One might say that it supports human life in the double series of its manifestations. It is at the same time the source of wealth, of health, of virtue. It is truly the god of human nature. Later, when this worship had been assigned to a second place by Brahma or by Zeus, there still remained in the hearth-fire whatever of divine was most accessible to man. It became his mediator with the gods of physical nature; it undertook to carry to heaven the prayer and the offering of man, and to bring the divine favors back to him. Still later, when they made the great Vesta of this myth of the sacred fire, Vesta was the virgin goddess. She represented in the world neither fecundity nor power; she was order, but not rigorous, abstract, mathematical order, the imperious and unchangeable law, ἀνάγκη [“necessity”], which was early perceived in physical nature. She was moral order. They imagined her as a sort of universal soul, which regulated the different movements of worlds, as the human soul keeps order in the human system. Thus are we permitted to look into the way of thinking of primitive generations. The principle of this worship is outside of physical nature, and is found in this little mysterious world, this microcosm—man.

GEOGRAPHICALLY INDICATED CHEESES There are more than 150 cheeses protected with GIs in the European, but the highest profile ones are Asiago, fontina, Gorgonzola, Grana Padano, Mozzarella di Bufala Campana, Parmigiano-Reggiano and Pecorino Romano (all from Italy); Comté, Roquefort, Munster, and Reblochon (France); feta (Greece); Gruyère (Switzerland); Stilton (United Kingdom); and manchego (Spain). Try to remember this short list and if you are buying any one of these cheeses, the real thing will only come from the respective nation. Feta, Muenster, and Gruyère are especially frequently copied elsewhere.

In Xenophon's summary of the allegory [Prodicus' "Choice of Heracles'' ] the young Heracles has sat down at a crossroads, not knowing which path to follow through life. As he sits deliberating, two women appear to him. Their physical appearance is a study in contrasts, and they are clearly villainness and heroine. Evil (Kakia) is overfed, plump, rouged, and all powdered up. She wears revealing clothes and is vain, viewing herself in a mirror and turning around to see if she is being admired. Virtue (Arete), on the other hand, wears simple white; her only adornments are purity, modesty, and temperance. These apparitions proceed to give speeches in praise of the life that they can give Heracles. Evil speaks first-an ominous choice, since in such debates, the first speaker typically loses. She offers Heracles a life of free, effortless pleasure. There will be no delights that he will not taste, no difficulties that he will not avoid. He need never worry about wars and affairs. All he need trouble himself about will be what food or drink to take; what to look at, hear, smell or touch for his pleasure; what partner he might enjoy, how he might sleep softest, and how he can obtain all these with the least toil (aponOtata). If ever there are shortages, he will not suffer ponos or hardship either in body or soul. Rather "you will enjoy those things that others work to produce, and you will not hold back from profiting everywhere." Evil tells Heracles her name, but adds confidentially that to her friends she is known as Happiness (Eudaimonia). Very different is the tone and substance of Virtue's argument. For while Evil would have Heracles live for himself alone and treat others as means to his self-gratification, Virtue begins by saying that she knows Heracles' parents and nature: Heracles must live up to his Olympian heritage. Therefore she will not deceive him with "hymns to pleasure." Evil's enticements are in fact contrary to the divine ordering, "for the gods have given men nothing good without ponos and diligence." There follows a series of emphatic verbal nouns to hammer home this truth: if you want divine favor, you must worship the gods; if you want to be admired, you must do good works for your friends; if you want to be honored, you must benefit your city and Greece; if you want the earth to bear crops, you must cultivate the land. Flocks require tending, war demands practice. And if you want strength (Heracles' trademark), you must accustom your body to serve your will, and you must train "with ponoi and sweat:' At this point, Evil bursts in to deplore such a harsh lifestyle. She is immediately silenced, however, as Virtue argues that duality is essential to a sense of fulfillment and even to pleasure itself. For paradoxically, ponos (pain, struggle) makes pleasure pleasurable. Evil's vision of happiness is one of continual and languid orgy-food without hunger, drink without thirst, sex without desire, sleep without weariness. But as experience shows, continual partying soon loses its zest, even if one goes so far as to cool expensive drinks "with snow" in summertime. By contrast, Virtue's own followers have no real trouble in satisfying their desires. They do so not by committing violence against others or living off others' labor, but by simply "holding off until they actually do desire" food or drink. Hunger is the best sauce, and it is free. Furthermore, Virtue appeals to Heracles' native idealism. What hedonists have ever accomplished any "fine work" (ergon kalon)? None, for no beautiful or divine deed is ever done "without me [Virtue] ." Therefore, wherever there are energetic, effective people, Virtue is present: she is a helper to craftsmen, a guard of the household, a partner in peacetime ponoi, an ally for the works (erga) of war, the best support of friendship. To choose Evil would be shameful and not even extremely pleasurable, while with Virtue one will lead the most varied and honorable life.

Another scene from universal myth unfolds -- here powerfully reminiscent of the Underworld quests of Orpheus for Eurydice and of Demeter for Persephone. The ancient Japanese recension of this mysteriously global story is given in the Kojiki and the Nihongi, where we read that Izanagi, mourning for his dead wife, followed after her to the Land of Yomi in an attempt to bring her back to the world of the living: 'Izanagi-no-Mikoto went after Izanami-no-Mikoto and entered the Land of Yomi ... So when from the palace she raised the door and came out to meet him, Izanagi spoke saying; 'My lovely younger sister! The lands that I and thou made are not yet finished making; so come back!' Izanami is honoured by Izanagi's attention and minded to return. But there is one problem. She has already eaten food prepared in the Land of Yomi and this binds her to the place, just as the consumption of a single pomegranate seed binds Persephone to hell in the Greek myth. Is it an accident that ancient Indian myth also contains the same idea? In the Katha Upanishad a human, Nachiketas, succeeds in visiting the underworld realm of Yama, the Hindu god of Death (and, yes, scholars have noted and commented upon the weird resonance between the names and functions of Yama and Yomi). It is precisely to avoid detention in the realm of Yama that Nachiketas is warned: 'Three nights within Yama's mansion stay / But taste not, though a guest, his food.' So there's a common idea here -- in Japan, in Greece, in India -- about not eating food in the Underworld if you want to leave. Such similarities can result from common invention of the same motif -- in other words, coincidence. They can result from the influence of one of the ancient cultures upon the other two, i.e. cultural diffusion. Or they can result from an influence that has somehow percolated down to all three, and perhaps to other cultures, stemming from an as yet unidentified common source.

These apparent paradoxes would be vexing, except that an alternative explanation for the relative absence of heart disease on Crete had always been at hand: the near-complete absence of sugar in the Cretan diet. As Allbaugh described, the Cretans “do not serve desserts—except for fresh fruit in season. . . . Cake is seldom served, and pie almost never.” The consumption of “sweets” in the Seven Countries study, as you might remember, correlated more closely with heart disease rates than did any other kind of food: they were abundant in Finland and the Netherlands, where heart disease rates were highest, while study leaders observed that “hardly any pastries were eaten in Yugoslavia, Greece, and Japan,” where heart disease rates were low. And these observations have held true over time. From 1960 to 1990 in Spain, for example, the intake of sugar and other carbohydrates fell dramatically, right along with heart disease rates, as meat consumption rose. Italian sugar consumption, always very low, also dropped during those years.

Γιουβαρλάκια αυγολέμονο GIOUVARLAKIA A favorite amongst all kids, this dish exudes a flavor that will inevitably haunt us all our lives, as it reminds us of our childhood years and mama’s cooking. While there are many different versions of this food all over Greece, with tomatoes, vegetables, and greens, but this is my favorite. Τα γιουβαρλάκια με αυγολέμονο είναι ίσως το πιο μαμαδίστικο φαγητό. Εδώ θα βρείτε την πιο νόστιμη σπιτική συνταγή για γιουβαρλάκια, μαζί με όλα τα μυστικά και τις παραλλαγές της!

My tumultuous feelings were getting stronger and had to be evaded aggressively. One was especially tenacious: 'Would it really be so bad to leave Gregori?

The Crusades were a notorious waste of lives and reputations. However, economically and culturally they were an undeniable success. They opened up Latin Christendom to trade with the more affluent world of Byzantine Greece and Islam. New goods and products entered ports and cities. A new affluent lifestyle caught the imagination of Europe’s nobility. They began wearing silk gowns and perfume, eating food laced with Asian spices, playing chess and polo, listening to music played on lutes and rebecs, and reading new forms of poetry and literature—as well as taking regular baths, a custom borrowed from the East.

Greece was falling apart. The streets of Athens were crawling with cats and dogs that people had abandoned because they could no longer afford pet food. But our hosts were jubilant. Their family didn’t seem like a burden; it seemed like a party. The idea bloomed in my head that being ruled by something other than my own wishes and wanderlust might be a pleasure, a release.

Earthwatch Institute offers an opportunity to join research scientists around the globe, assisting with field studies and research. Most programs involve wildlife—for example, you can help track bottlenose dolphins off the Mediterranean coast of Greece (8 days, $2,350), or work with Kenya’s Samburu people to preserve the endangered Grevy’s zebra (13 days, $2,950)—but some are cultural: A program in Bordeaux, France, for instance, has volunteers working in vineyards helping to test and improve wine-growing practices (5 days, $3,395); accommodations are in a chalet and meals are prepared by a French chef. Prices do not include airfare, but can be considered tax-deductible contributions. Earthwatch Institute–U.S., 114 Western Ave., Boston, MA 02134, 800-776-0188 or 978-461-0081, www.earthwatch.org. For many volunteers, their favorite program is Sierran Footsteps. Volunteers spend four days with the Me-Wuk Indians in central California’s Stanislaus National Forest harvesting reeds and then making baskets. They also learn Indian legends and cook traditional foods. The project is designed to help keep these Indian traditions alive. It might sound like summer camp, but this program, and all the others, has a serious side.

Ancel Keys demonstrated that a diet low in saturated animal fat and processed food was associated with a low incidence of mortality from coronary heart disease and cancer. Beginning in the late 1950s, the study followed almost 13,000 men from seven different countries (Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Finland, United States, and Japan). Men living in the Mediterranean region had the lowest incidence of heart disease and the longest life expectancy. And Greek men had a 90% lower likelihood of premature death from heart attack compared to American men!

In each portside town, enticing aromas waft from every harborside taverna, mountaintop inn, and home. Not only do the Greeks appreciate good food, it is central to their culture. Produce markets spill over with fragrant local provender: grapes, cucumbers, lemons, and tomatoes, as well as sardines, shellfish, and lamb. Lunch--usually the largest meal of the day--begins after 2 P.M., and is followed by an ample siesta. The long work day resumes, and dinner begins after 9 P.M. It may last well into the night among friends: a glass of ouzo--accompanied by singing, guitar playing, and dancing--often ends the evening meal, postponing bedtime until the wee hours. Laughter and conversation flavor the food at every meal. The Mediterranean climate is conductive to year-round outdoor eating. In each home, a table on the patio or terrace takes pride of place. Many home cooks build outdoor ovens and prepare succulent roasted meats and flavorful, herb-scented potatoes that soak up the juice of the meat and the spritz of a lemon. Tavernas, shaded by grape arbors, are synonymous with Greece and its outdoor culinary culture. One of the greatest pleasures of the Greek Isles is enjoying a relaxing meal while breathing the fresh sea air and gazing out on spectacular vistas and blue waters.