Yesterday our Mediterranean Nutrition & Gastronomy students were lucky to receive a special visit. Dr. Montserrat Camps, professor of the University of Barcelona’s Facultat de Philologia, specialist in Food in Ancient Civilisations, gave us a very enlightening talk on Food in Antiquity. We learned about food in Ancient Greek mythology, as well as about some of the early Greek texts on food from Hippocrates (founding father of modern medicine), and Galen.
We were all very surprised to learn how truly modern some of their ideas were. Students were specially interested in some of the ideas professor Camps shared with us on vegetarianism. Who knew these things were already talked about so long ago? What a wonderful way to link our times to those of our ancient ancestors. Maybe some students will even venture to the faculty of Medicine campus, to try to be enlightened by the tree from Cos, island of Hippocrates, which supposedly helped him come up with some of his great ideas.
