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Eat like the ancient Romans

That was exactly the mission of class 6a! In the last weeks we have learned a lot about "Ancient Rome and its Empire" in history class. To round off the topic practically, we ate like the ancient Romans on Monday, November 14, 2022. But what, and especially how, did the ancient Romans actually eat?

They did not eat meals sitting on chairs as we do today, but preferred to eat lying down on beds. For the rich Romans, the food was prepared by slaves (slaves).

While the poor Romans always ate only cereal porridge and bread for breakfast (Breakfast), lunch (Lunch) and dinner (Dinner), the rich Romans had a much more varied diet. For breakfast they had bread, fruits and milk. Lunch consisted, for example, of bread, nuts, figs, olives, cheese and eggs (eggs). For dinner, a real feast was served, consisting of an appetizer with bread, lentils, cucumber, lettuce, olives, mushrooms, eggs and onions, a main course with pork, sausage, goose and hare. The poor Romans could only dream of such a meal.

For us as a class it was clear that we wanted to eat like the rich Romans and we voted together who should bring which ingredients to our feast. We had fruits (Fruits) like pomegranate (Pomgranate), apples (Apples), apricots (Apricots) figs (Figs), olives, grapes and various salads. The meat was from guinea fowl, quail and pheasant. The homemade bread, our homemade apple juice and grape juice were also not to be missed.  

Now it was only a matter of preparing our feast. For this purpose, we were able to use our school kitchen with dining room on this day. We divided into small groups. One group was responsible for baking bread. The others prepared the meat and the salads and set up the dining room like in ancient Rome. When everything was ready, we could eat our deliciously prepared meal together. We all enjoyed it very much and were all stuffed afterwards.  

It was a nice experience and the selection of fruits, vegetables and meat shows that the rich Romans already had a very balanced and varied diet. The poor Romans, on the other hand, had a very one-sided diet. It can be assumed that because of their healthy diet, the rich Romans got sick less and had a much longer life expectancy than the poor Romans.

Maike - Class 6a

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