When, in the fifties, Ansel Keys and his colleagues studied the eating habits, the state of health, and life expectancy of various peoples in seven countries, they decided that the inhabitants of Crete were faring best of all. Paximadia (barley rusks) in those days were the staple food of the Cretans.

But when their traditional eating habits became the model for the now famed Mediterranean diet, the barley biscuits were translated into "whole wheat bread" for the unaccustomed and refined Northern Europeans and Americans. Barley flour has now completely disappeared from the shelves of the supermarkets in the big cities, and one can only find it in health food stores or at wholesale distributors of animal fodder. But οn Kea as οn other islands we can get a pound or two from the local bakeries which still bake the traditional hard and dark paximadia.