The Mediterranean Sea has lapped up against the shores of great civilizations for several thousands of years. When Europe was deep in the dark ages, Fez (Morocco) was a center of theology, astronomy, medicine, and agriculture, including the science of irrigation. The Minoans were installing toilets on Crete and Santorin before the great dark expanse of Europe even saw the glimmer of an idea. In Egypt, they had built a great library in Alexandria, which chronicled advancements in science and the arts, and it was sacked and burned by the European brigands, and all of the knowledge was lost except in the minds of the common people who passed it down to their children. This knowledge was distilled into basic information about food and exercise.

Over time the whole Mediterranean basin has become renown for a simple fact; that few people from this area of the world have experienced heart disease. The statistics are rather remarkable. The brigands are now tourists and they still sack and burn but leave money and then go back to their evil consumption of animal fats and television. The Mediterraneans live a far more simple but healthy life, and that is our story.

"In Greece, on the island of Paros, you could smell the rosemary growing wild on the side of the road.

It was intoxicating. And the food was like that too, because it came straight from the countryside, which was just outside of the city.

It felt as if you were inhaling the food, because the ingredients were all around you. The scent of herbs were in the food and also in the air, and in the morning the bowl of yogurt in the street cafe was brimming with pears that had been harvested from the orchards in the center of the island."

--a traveler to Naxos, 1985

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