Selling History or Selling Out?

After a while it must get tedious: article after article proclaiming Greece to be the originator of this or that edible product – olive trees planted by goddesses, cheese made by a Cyclops, etc. Who cares who was first? It is what is best that counts.

Some people in the Greek food and drinks industry maintain that their peers rely too much on this historical cache. As one industry insider once put it to me: “If only the Greeks will value their heritage (I do not mean the GLORIOUS remote past) they may be able to sell their products, provided they are authentic.”

I agree about valuing heritage, but don’t believe that enough is actually being made about that glorious past. Sure, there are plenty of companies that name their products after ancient gods. And it is true that in Greek society at large some people tend to speak of major figures of the Greek golden age, like Alexander the Great and Pericles, as if they were direct and not so distant relations.

But the more I dig into the origins of common "processed" foods and drinks here, the more I discover that these origins date to far-off times. The Greeks may be aware of this, but I don’t believe they promote this fact correctly. To them these products are, have always been and will always be, worth about as much remark as the sun rising in the east every day. Point out to them that many of their ingredients have no name in Western (and, as far as I can tell, Eastern) tongues and they’ll just shrug.

I keep a list of such things. Transliterated, here are a few: Moosmulah (a fruit), Psiera (a fish), and Kafkalithres (an herb). If you can find any of these listed in a Greek/English dictionary, or explained in a book – and I’ve tried – the answer given is far from satisfactory. It took me two years to discover that Moosmulah,
for example, is some type of Medlar. If you don’t know what a Medlar is, you’re not alone.

That there are rare flora and fauna here is hardly undocumented. According to the Greek Ministry for the Environment,
there are over 900 species of fauna and over 5,500 different recorded species of flora in Greece. Approximately 1,000 of the species of flora are endemic to the land and over 700 of those may be found only in Greece. I find this intriguing.
I don’t believe in coincidence; I don’t believe that the ancients were less intelligent than we are. I believe that civilizations – and there were quite a few of them – grew and flourished in what is now called Greece precisely because of this biodiversity. The ancients knew far more about the medicinal properties of plants than we do today. This is why Hippocrates has never been translated in full. So it is natural that they would “process” their foods to make the most of these attributes.

These ancient foods are still eaten today. In fact, they make up the bulk of the Mediterranean Diet, though there have been a few additions, such as tomatoes. To repeat, there is little difference between what was eaten by folks in the Minoan civilization and what is eaten today in Greece. The ageless nature of Greece is one of its most charming peculiarities – they still speak much the same language that was used to write the New Testament. This, laughably, is called Modern Greek, to distinguish it from the Classical Greek of Homer.

Much has been written about the Mediterranean Diet. Efforts have been made to break it down to its component parts, so it may more easily be adapted to other cultures’ food preferences. However, I have a feeling the ancients knew something we don’t. Maybe the Mediterranean Diet owes at least some of its magic to the biodiversity that engendered it. Maybe it cannot be duplicated. If that is the case, than Greek food and beverage companies might want to spend more time promoting the ancient pedigree of their products and less time promoting ancient gods.