Greece, I believe, is the only country in Europe to give its civil servants paid leave of absence in November, so that they may return to their villages to help harvest the olives: A perfect example of how much the produce of the land and traditional eating habits still affect modern life. At least four out of ten baby-boomers that live in the big cities -- Athens and Thessaloniki -- come originally from agricultural areas. They have moved to the cities during the last forty years, bringing with them the cooking and culinary habits as practiced in the villages by their mothers and grandmothers. The majority of the people who live and work in the densely populated capital of Greece continues to maintain homes and close ties with their places of birth. They visit them on long weekends, summer holidays, as well as every Christmas and Easter.

Surely, one of the most important reasons that drive all the new inhabitants of the major urban centers back to the land is the pure and unadulterated taste of food in their village homes. It evokes a different time in their lives, happier and more human. The foods Greeks dream of are not elaborate and complicated, but based on the humble but delicious regional produce: Seasonal vegetables, leafy greens �growing wild, or cultivated� grains, mainly in the form of homemade bread, fruity olive oil, home cured olives, beans and other legumes, local cheeses, yogurt, occasionally fresh or cured fish, and sometimes meat, are the basis of everyday Greek Cooking. Bread used to be the basic staple food, as it was in ancient and Byzantine times. Although now people can afford a great variety of foods, Greeks still consume enormous quantities of bread. Every meal ends with seasonal fruits, while sweets are part of the festive table, which almost always involves meat, lamb in most occasions.

Olive oil, the primary fat used in Greek cooking, is basic to every Greek�s life and identity. �A stubborn and rebellious wife, who refused to submit to her husband and go to bed with him, was rubbed with olive oil for seven days. On the eighth day --according to Greek folk tales-- she became sweet tempered and loving, ready to let her husband make love to her...� This is the most exotic of the sixty or so folk remedies in which olive oil plays the leading role. Most of these remedies, with roots in antiquity, are still practiced in rural Greece. For Greeks olive oil is not just the main fat used in cooking. It is also tied to every ritual, both folk and religious, that marks the crucial events in the cycle of life. Priests anoint with olive oil the infants at Christening, and again with olive oil, mixed with wine, the bodies of the deceased are embalmed prior to burial. Most Greek families either produce the olive oil they consume �about 40 pounds per person each year� or they buy it from friends who have a surplus.