Once upon a time (indeed, as recently as the mid-1960s), Cretans lived by the seasons: tomatoes and eggplant in summer, cabbage and leeks in winter, artichokes in spring, chestnuts in autumn. Since refrigerators did not exist, locals pickled and preserved vegetables, smoked and salted fish and meat. It never occurred to them to demand strawberries at Christmas or pumpkin in July.

If nature did not impose strict enough dietary rules, the Orthodox Church certainly did. Devout Christians observed three major fasting periods - for forty days before Easter, forty days before Christmas, and two weeks before the Dormition of the Virgin Mary on August 15th. They also avoided meat, dairy products, eggs and fish every Wednesday and Friday throughout the year. To compensate, the calendar was punctuated with a great number of feast days. But for the poor, meat was a luxury indulged in no more than five or six times a year. Even prosperous town dwellers rarely ate meat more than twice a week.

Exercise helped, of course. With few roads and fewer wheeled vehicles on pre-war Crete, the islanders were inevitably great walkers. Besides tilling the fields or following their flocks, men and women, often barefoot, would routinely trudge alongside their mules or donkeys to the nearest town, to sell or barter their hard-earned crops.

Four years of German Occupation during World War II upset the age-old balance between fasting and feasting. Most Cretans were forced to subsist on the bare minimum: products made from wheat, barley, and flour, wild greens, pulses, olive oil, a little goat's or sheep's cheese. Local wine and tsikoudia (distilled spirit) made this meagre diet a little more palatable.