Using Olives in your Diet

Today, you can go to the store in order to buy olives. You can get them in all different shapes, sizes, colors, or even with pimentos in them. A lot of people wonder how this food became such an important part of Greek culture and large part of their diet. Ancient Greeks used olives as their main source of fat instead of meat from animal because they thought it was an unhealthy way of getting fat, since the barbarians ate that way. Actuality, the barbarians ate meat and their products such as milk and cheese because they were nomadic and had no way of growing olive trees or preparing them.

In Greece, preserving olives was possible because there was salt everywhere. Since Ancient Greece was a huge island basically, salt was easily accessible and it allowed them to preserve olives very easily. In order to preserve the olives, the ancient Greeks gather them while they were not ripe; in order to keep them in water that contains wood ash. The resulted olive oil was just used to help preserving the olives which were then kept in wine, vinegar, and salty water.

As already mentioned, olive oil was a great source of the Ancient people’s diet because it was their main source of fat. You might think that fish was the main diet, but it was very expensive so common people mainly just had olives. Since Ancient Greece was a socially unequal place, it was not as today when people eat a large variety of food no matter who they are.

If you ever dip bread in olive oil, you are carrying out the actions of an aristocratic meal. In ancient times, common Greeks mostly ate porridge and not bread for carbohydrates. Since bread was hard to be made, it was not a common food for those times. Today, olives can be eaten by anyone who has a few bucks and can walk or drive to a store.