Sydney, The Roman emperor Julian called bread the food that “among us is thought to be the most nourishing”.
How events unfolded
it wasn’t universally appealing Although bread was fundamental to Julian’s Roman world. The Ethiopians, who lived on meat and milk, thought bread was terrible food that lacked nourishment. In his book On the Properties of Foodstuffs, he first discusses cereals and pulses, then plants, and finally animal foods and fish. Preparation mattered too. Galen learned the importance of processing wheat through an unpleasant personal experience. His examples reveal that what people ate depended heavily on where they lived and how much money they had. He begins one book with an account of Lusitania, in modern Spain.
Athenaeus wrote around 200 CE and imagined a long dinner party at which the guests discussed food, wine and dining customs. Because her household had run out of bread: The plant-rich diet could also reflect poverty rather than a healthy choice, during a country journey with some of his friends, a poor peasant woman served them boiled whole grains.
Wheat was, he says, the most widely used and “valuable” food. The best bread was “most leavened and very well kneaded” and baked “with moderate heat”. Galen calls oats “food for draught animals, not for men”, except when “the extreme of hunger” forced people to make bread from them. Seafood there, he says, “in point of abundance, excellence, and beauty, far exceeds that found in our sea”.
