What Romans ate and how much they ate of it. Old and new research on eating habits and dietary proportions in classical antiquity (original) (raw)

Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis, 96, 2018, p. 1049-1092 What Romans ate and how much they ate of it. Old and new research on eating habits and dietary proportions in classical antiquity

Dimitri Van Limbergen

Introduction

Dietary patterns are notoriously variable. Ask any person in the world today about his or her daily consumption of carbohydrates or alcohol and chances are you will get a different answer every time, backed by either social, religious, moral, cultural or even medical arguments. Diets are also trendy. This means that your poll would have yielded different results one or two decades ago; as it is bound to deviate from answers ten years from now. And even with the increasing ‘ globalisation’, ‘ Americanisation’ or ‘ Mediterranisation’ of our diets, food choice often remains a regional matter. A person living along the European North Sea coast is still likely to have different eating habits than a person inhabiting the Apennine uplands of central Italy. It is easy to imagine how these rules apply even more to the Roman Empire, a highly stratified society in which diets are bound to have differed substantially in both quantity and kind according to its various segments. Prime determinants include status (e. g. poor vs. rich, slave vs. free, civilian vs. military), age or gender, but also eating routines linked to contrasting living conditions (e. g. urban vs. rural) or working circumstances (i. e. one particular professional sphere vs. another). Besides, premodern transport was slow. This made the link between the composition of a person’s diet and the region where he or she lived particularly strong. Inland and coastal lands, or lowland and highland areas spring to mind, but also other sub-regions within the Roman world with different environmental conditions. The Roman Empire was also an aggregation of territories with different historical-cultural bac kgrounds. In many cases, daily food consumption will thus have been a mix of old and new culinary traditions. In other words, there was no such thing as a single classical Roman diet. Reconstructing Roman eating rules on the basis of ancient texts has proven to be a strenuous endeavour. One obvious problem is the paucity of suitable evidence. Many written sources offer accounts of the foodstuffs that were available at the time, but few allow for actually translating the daily food intakes by the Romans into specific products and quantities. Another issue is the biased nature of these sources towards the eating rules of the wealthier classes, or the foods of military men and slaves. None of them are representative of the majority of the population in the Roman world. The texts that do mention specific amounts of food are difficult to interpret; that is, whether they list conventional per capita consumption figures, or rather