Michael S. Fenster - ANCIENT EATS: Volume 1 - The Greeks & The Vikings

Ancient Eats (Volume I):

The Greeks & The Vikings

by Michael S. Fenster, MD

Copyright 2016 Michael S. Fenster, MD

ISBN 978-1-94019-292-5

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

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Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shatterd visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stampd on these lifeless things,

The hand that mockd them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains: round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Table of Contents

Ancient Classical Greece:
No Reservations Needed for the
Original Mediterranean Diet

Lessons from the Cupboards:
Ancient Classical Greece

Dedicated to The Queen of the Stones:

In all your journeys, through all the realms,

And through all the times,

You carry my heart with you.

Acknowledgements

There are always many people to thank and acknowledge in the production of a work such as this one. My wife, Jennifer, for unending patience and support. My dear friends and mentors Wendy, Tim, Andrew and Joy, for opening unseen doors and halls of mirrors. My Father, for pertinent insight and encouragement, and for reminding me that I declared this a calling at age 6. For my many buyu, in the United States and across the globe, who honor me with friendship and encouragement to pursue seemingly impossible dreams: Kevin, Mark, Phil, Morten, Roger, the many, many others, and especially my brother in the truest sense of the word, Wild Billyou know who you are, and thanks.

A special thanks to my many friends and supporters in the culinary world. Aine, Luca, Joumana and others too numerous to mention, thank you for your support and feedback. And to my departed friend Christo, never shall you be forgotten. A special thanks to Daniel Serra for reviewing the accuracy of the contents of the Viking chapter. Another special thanks to Mark Lithgow for sacrificing an entire evening to try help me understand the concept of zanshin I obviously still have a long way to go!

Finally, but certainly not least, thanks to my publisher, John, for endless deadline extensions to allow me the time to find the story. To my editor, Joe, thank you for patience, expert critique and commentary, as well as proper formatting! To Dean Reed Humphrey at The University of Montana, thank you for all your help and effort in providing an academic health and culinary platform for this voice to be heard. And thank you, dear reader, for caring enough to journey between the pages. To any left unmentioned, my apologies. Any errors or offenses in this work are mine, and mine alone.

Who wants to live forever?

Queen

CAPT. JACK SPARROW had it all. He stood before the mythic Fountain of Youth; he had the tears, the chalice and the arcane knowledge of the ritual. Yet, he chose not to chase immortality.

Better to not know which moment may be your last. Every morsel of your entire being alive to the infinite mystery of it all. Ive no say in it. Its a pirates life for me. Savvy?

Capt. Jack held in his hand the power and the prize so many have dreamed about possessing. In our ignorant youthand in our follywe have all at one time thought, sought, craved, or harbored a desire to access some secret knowledge or method to allow us to extend our years beyond what might be gifted to us in a more natural course. In youth we often lack wisdom, and like Eos asking Zeus to make Tithonus immortal, we forget to ask for eternal youth along with eternal life. In myth, Tithonus did indeed live forever:

But when the first strands of gray hair started growing

from his beautiful head and his noble chin,

then the Lady Eos stopped coming to his bed.

But she nourished him, keeping him in her palace,

with grain and ambrosia. And she gave him beautiful clothes.

But when hateful old age was pressing hard on him, with all its might,

and he couldnt move his limbs, much less lift them up,

then in her thmos she thought up this plan, a very good one indeed:

she put him in her chamber, and she closed the shining doors over him.

From there his voice pours outit seems never to endand he has no strength at all,

the kind he used to have in his limbs when they could still bend.

I would not choose that you [Anchises] be that way, amongst the immortal ones,

immortal and living for all days to come.

If you could only stay the way you are, in looks and constitution,

staying alive as my lawfully-wedded husband,

then akhos would not have to envelop me and my sturdy phrenes.

But now wretched old age will envelop you,

pitilessly, just as it catches up with every man.

It is baneful, it wears you down, and even the gods shrink back from it.

(Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite)

What we truly seek is not simply an endless quantity of years, but a quality of years infused with the vigor and health of youth. Our failed attempts to achieve quantity and quality in terms of years are on display in every supermarket tabloid; celebrities parade across the front pages with more overworked acreage than a dustbowl farmstead. Our current results are not just transient and feeble, they are pathetic.

But even the average Joe takes solace in more than mere schadenfreude. There is comfort in the belief that we currently live longer and are better off than at any other time in human history. And why should we not believe our own press?

All around us are the signs and symbols of the accomplishments of modern society: satellites orbit the earth broadcasting information invisible to the human eye, planes fly, trains and cars make travel to distant lands easier than at any other time in history, tall buildings gleam in the sunlight as clouds float below them. Diseases that killed in the past are routinely treated, food is produced on an industrial scale, the World Wide Web reaches across the globe to link Earths inhabitants in an international community as never before. We have achieved things that our forebears would have deemed impossible. We have achieved things they could not have conceived. Science and progress have grown at an exponential pace. But have we evolved? For all our technical wizardry, are we physically better off today than in ages gone by?

Are we healthier today?

That depends on our definition.

As a measure of one of the accomplishments of our contemporary civilization, we often point to our increased life expectancy. The current average life expectancy (ALE) is the longest it has ever been in human history. We use this measure as a surrogate marker for health, the hypothesis being that if we are living longer then we must certainly be healthier.

There is no doubt that more of us are living further into old age. But the doctrine that quantity equates with value is misguided. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, savvy? Just ask Lady Eos.