
Food, for the Greeks, had all sorts of religious and philosophical meaning. The Greeks, to begin with, never ate meat unless it had been sacrificed to a god, or had been hunted in the wild. They believed that it was wrong to kill and eat a tame, domesticated animal without sacrificing it to the gods. Even with vegetables, many Greeks believed that particular foods were cleaner or dirtier, or that certain gods liked certain foods better than others. The Pythagoreans, for example, would not eat beans. But even if you were not a Pythagorean, the Greeks tended to think of the god Dionysos whenever they drank wine (which was often), and to think of Demeter and Persephone whenever they ate bread.
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