What the Ancient Greeks Knew About Eating Well
By Rena Mihalopoulos | 22 May 2026
I've been thinking lately about how much the ancient Greeks had to say about food — not just what to eat, but how and why. For a civilisation that gave us democracy, geometry, and the Olympics, they were also surprisingly opinionated about the table. And the more I cook from the Greek tradition, the more I think they were onto something.
This isn't a history lecture, I promise. It's more of a love letter to the idea that eating well has always been about more than fuel — and that some of the wisest things ever said about food were said a very long time ago, in a language that still echoes in every Greek kitchen.
Socrates: eat to live, don't live to eat
Socrates is perhaps the least likely food philosopher — he was famously indifferent to comfort and luxury. But that's exactly what makes his thinking so interesting. He believed that the best seasoning for any meal was hunger, and that people who ate simply and mindfully were healthier and happier than those who chased elaborate pleasures.
"Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live." It's a line that's been attributed to him for centuries, and whether he said it exactly or not, it captures something real about the Greek attitude to food: it should nourish you, bring people together, and not become an end in itself.
There's something quietly radical about that idea in a world of food trends and endless content. Cook something simple. Sit down. Eat it with people you love.
Plato: the symposium and the art of the shared table
Plato, Socrates' most famous student, left us one of the most beautiful meditations on what happens when people gather to eat and drink together. His dialogue The Symposium — which literally means "drinking together" in Greek — is set at a dinner party in Athens, where a group of philosophers take turns speaking about the nature of love.
What's striking is that the food and wine are almost beside the point. What matters is the conversation, the connection, the willingness to be present with one another. Plato understood that the table is a stage for something larger than the meal itself — it's where ideas are exchanged, friendships are deepened, and the best of human life happens.
He also wrote in The Republic about the importance of simple, wholesome food for a well-ordered life — bread, olives, cheese, figs, and legumes. Not so different from what you'd find on a Greek table today. There's a reason the Mediterranean diet has endured: it was never really a diet. It was just the way people lived.
Hippocrates: let food be thy medicine
"Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." You've probably seen this on a wellness brand somewhere, but Hippocrates — the father of modern medicine, born on the Greek island of Kos around 460 BC — really did believe it. He was one of the first thinkers to argue that diet, not just divine intervention, was central to health.
He wrote about the importance of olive oil, fresh vegetables, legumes, and moderate eating — a description that maps almost perfectly onto what we now call the Mediterranean diet. He was also a fan of honey, garlic, and barley, all of which appear regularly in traditional Greek cooking.
What strikes me about this is how little has changed. The foods that Greek grandmothers have been cooking for generations — the lentil soups, the horta (wild greens), the olive oil drizzled over everything — are the same foods that modern nutritionists keep rediscovering. Sometimes the oldest knowledge is the best knowledge.
Epicurus: pleasure, but not excess
Epicurus gets a bad reputation. His name gave us the word "epicurean," which we now associate with luxury and indulgence — but the real Epicurus was almost the opposite. He lived simply, grew vegetables in his garden, and believed that the greatest pleasures were modest ones: good bread, a cup of water, the company of friends.
"Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship." He wasn't talking about food specifically, but he might as well have been. The Greek table has always been about exactly this — gathering people together, sharing what you have, making something ordinary feel like a celebration.
I think about this every time I make a big pot of something — a bean soup, a slow-cooked lamb, a tray of spanakopita — and watch it disappear around a table of people talking over each other. That's the Epicurean ideal, right there.
Aristotle: the golden mean
Aristotle's concept of the "golden mean" — the idea that virtue lies between two extremes — applies beautifully to cooking. Not too rich, not too plain. Not too much, not too little. Seasoned well, but not overseasoned. It's the philosophy behind so much of Greek home cooking, even if nobody's thinking about Aristotle when they're squeezing lemon over a piece of grilled fish.
Greek cuisine is not a cuisine of excess. It's a cuisine of balance — bright acidity from lemon, richness from olive oil, freshness from herbs, depth from slow cooking. Every element earns its place. That restraint, that sense of proportion, is something I've tried to carry through every recipe in Greek Cooking in an Australian Kitchen.
Archestratos: the world's first food writer
If the philosophers gave us the why of eating well, Archestratos gave us the what and the where. A Greek poet from Sicily in the 4th century BC, he wrote a remarkable work called Hedypatheia — which translates roughly as "The Life of Luxury" or "Good Living" — a poem that travelled the Mediterranean documenting the best local ingredients and dishes of his time.
He is, by most accounts, the world's first food writer. And he was gloriously opinionated. He had strong views on which fish were worth eating and where to find them, how bread should be baked, and which regions produced the finest ingredients. He believed that good cooking started with good produce, and that the best thing you could do with a truly fresh, high-quality ingredient was to keep it simple.
"The best relish," he wrote, "is hunger" — an idea that would have pleased Socrates enormously. But Archestratos also understood pleasure in a way the philosophers sometimes didn't. He wanted people to seek out the best, to travel for it, to pay attention to it. Food, for him, was worth taking seriously.
Reading about him always makes me smile, because his instincts feel so familiar. The Greek cook's instinct to find the freshest fish at the market, to use the olive oil from a trusted grove, to let good ingredients speak for themselves — that's Archestratos, alive and well in kitchens more than two thousand years later.
What this means in your kitchen
You don't need to have read Socrates, Plato, or Archestratos to cook Greek food well. But I do think there's something worth holding onto in this tradition — the idea that food is connected to how we live, how we treat our bodies, and how we show up for the people around us.
Cook from scratch when you can. Use good olive oil. Seek out the best ingredients you can find. Eat with others. Don't overcomplicate it. Season with care and taste as you go. These aren't just cooking tips — they're a philosophy that's been tested for a few thousand years and still holds up.
If you'd like to cook your way through that philosophy, there are 124 recipes waiting for you in Greek Cooking in an Australian Kitchen — from simple weeknight dips and salads to the kind of slow-cooked dishes that fill a house with the best possible smell. I hope they bring a little of that ancient wisdom to your table. 🫒