How to Eat An Ancient Guide for Healthy Living

This is a new book. Condition: Brand New.

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.

Book details and technical specifications

Format: Hardback
ISBN13: 9780691256993
Published: January 2025

Number of pages: 296
Width: 114 mm
Height: 171 mm
Depth: not specified

Publisher: Princeton University Press