Unfortunately the late May Kea Artisanal group didn’t have the chance to taste our tomatoes. We had a prolonged spring with lots of rain, so until mid-June our tomatoes were tiny and green. Some of them, especially the Black Tula, were not quite ready even for our late June visitors, and the Yellow Pear, which we planted later, have no ripe fruits yet. We love our tomatoes, grown naturally, just with manure.

  Slide Show: TOMATOES revisited!

Manure is a scarce commodity on Kea, and everyone in our neighborhood is well informed of our purchase moves, keeping track of when we bought and from whom --as one neighbor wisely puts it “you can’t hide from God or from your neighbor.” This year, we had to import a huge truckload from the mainland.

The eighth stage of drunkenness according to the ancient comic poet Eubulus “is the policeman’s, the ninth belongs to vomiting, and the tenth to madness and hurling of furniture,” the very stately professor, Oswyn Murray, informed the lecture hall in his brilliant paper at the closing plenary session of this year’s Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.

  Slide Show: CELEBRATING in Oxford!

During the mostly sunny weekend gathering of 230 scholars and food-lovers from England, the US, and all over the world a fair amount of wine—from Italy, Spain, Germany and Greece— was consumed, but of course participants never approached even the fourth stage of inebriation that “belongs to insults,” but there were hints of the fifth “that [belongs] to uproar.”

SLOW Fish Genoa 2011

From fishwitches, sandwiches made with bread from Triora--the Ligurian village famous for its Medieval witches—to jellied cubes of green tea with strawberries and head-on prawns, this year’s Slow Fish international gathering had it all: a multi ethnic sea fare complete with wines to taste and enjoy, but also plenty of food for thought regarding the grim future of fishing as we know it.

  Slide Show: SLOW Fish Genoa 2011

The biennial Genoa Slow Fish is a manageable fair, not overwhelming as the Salone del Gusto, he alternating huge biennial Slow Food Torino gathering. Its message was very clear: ‘If we want to continue eating fish tomorrow, we must take action today.”

Wild fennel: Greeks call it maratho; Italians refer to it as finocchio selvatico; and it grows all over the Greek islands and the mainland. Marathon, the area south of Athens where in 490 BC Greeks won the famous, decisive battle against the invading Persian army, probably acquired its name because of its abundant fennel fields. A young soldier, Pheidippides, ran the 42 kilometers from Marathon to Athens to announce the triumphant victory, thus inspiring the eponymous run.

The 19th-century British poet Robert Browning tapped the myth and, of course, its fennel fields, in his ode to the young runner: "Fight I shall, with our foremost, wherever this fennel may grow," Pheidippides proclaimed. Little did he know the run from Marathon to Athens would be his last, as "Like wine thro' clay, / Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died, the bliss!"