Why do the Cretans live so long?

In some long-term studies, the Cretan population has been proven to have a lower incidence of heart disease and cancers than in other developed countries. The Cretan people also live longer and, as a visit to any mountain village graveyard will demonstrate, the magical century is still a commonplace life span. Both their excellent health and longevity have been attributed to their diet, a variation on the now famous "Mediterranean diet". ECA's Cretan correspondent Derek Pearce has sought out a leading local chef and taverna owner and asked him for his views on the extended lease on life that Cretans seem to have been granted. Good food, good company and a healthy relationship to eating would all seem to him to be linked. For readers, chilled by another grey British winter, and already thinking about visiting Crete in the summer of 2004, this looks like good news. Take this as both an invitation and a suggestion…

The grapes are in. The proto raki is ready. The olives are clearly visible on the trees, their leaves showing silver in the autumn breezes. Georgi Nikolarakis leans back on his chair and smiles, his eyes light up. Here is a man about to mount a hobby horse. The Cretans like little better than holding forth: unless it is eating. Of course this inevitably means that they have learned to combine the two. Given that the topic here is food then we have a pretty perfect discourse coming.

Georgi, an avuncular man with a full beard and a weather-beaten complexion, opened his taverna back before Georgioupolis was a tourist destination, when only independent travellers and beleaguered hippies turned up at this end of the 11-mile beach that is the Gulf of Almyros.

"Why," I have asked him, "do Cretans live so long?"

"Maybe they do and maybe they don't. The last generation lived longer than my generation and as for the kids today… Who knows: they eat so much rubbish! When I was a child, my mother would give me stakka for my breakfast: spread on a slice of black bread. Only rich people had white bread.” (Stakka is the solidified cream from sheep’s milk and is something like condensed milk but stronger in flavour. All brown breads in Crete are called black.) “If I was lucky, I'd have honey spread on top. My aunty used to live in Xania (the nearest city) and sometimes she would bring white bread for us. It was a special treat but Mikhaili's mother, Mikhaili from Creta Corner, used to bake a bread from rye that had lots of hard bits in it and all the kids would smell it from far away and come and beg for it. Bread is at the centre of every Cretan meal. Bread and olives. And salad. Fresh salad from the garden."

The garden in a Cretan village home is always given over to herbs, vegetables, fruits and salad crops. The flowers are grown in tubs, pots and even old tins. The soil is reserved for things you can eat, including chickens and maybe even a pig. The flowers are extraordinarily well cared for, dazzlingly beautiful and ingeniously grown, but the garden is strictly reserved for edibles.

Georgi continues: "The workers in the villages often started the day with no more than a hunk of bread, some olives and a glass of malotiras (mountain tea). And then they would go off to work with maybe a piece of cheese and another hunk of bread in their pockets. You remember Manolis? Manolis the drinker. He was a big drinker. He was always in Tito's drinking wine, but he always had bread and some cheese in his pocket that he would eat while he was drinking. When he was eighty something, he was knocked down by a car. They said he was drunk, but when wasn't he? When he died they cut him up and the doctors said he had the liver of an eighteen year old. Even my granny who was 106 and a teetotaler had a glass of wine with her breakfast: fresh juices and a glass of wine. She married my grandfather when he was 82 and she was 28 and they had five children - all healthy. The stakka is good for potency. So are artichokes; you just pull off the spiky leaves and eat the artichoke raw with lemon and salt. They turn your lips and tongue brown and they make you windy but they are good for the heart and for potency."

What about meat? Does meat play a big part in Cretan diet? Lamb is eaten everywhere in tavernas but what of the village people? Do they eat much meat?

"Mountain people have always eaten meat once a week and fish once a week. And snails, which are good for cancer – it's the calcium. Do snails count as meat? Most families would have a cow or two and some chickens and maybe a pig. And when you kill an animal you eat everything. You don't waste anything and you don't feed bits of the dead animal to the other animals like they did in England. Look what that got them. Now, with the Common Market, it's become more difficult. Rules about who can kill animals make it difficult. I would never eat the liver and spleen from a butcher's shop animal. I don't know what it's been eating. When your neighbour killed a pig or goat, you knew it was clean. It was the same with the chickens. Why are chickens in supermarkets all the same size? Why am I not allowed to buy eggs from my neighbour? I know his chickens are happy and properly free range. It makes me angry, you know, when English people say Greek food is greasy. Look at all the dead animal fat they put into their gravy for the Sunday roast. Here in Crete we have the best olive oil in the whole world and that's what we cook with."

So what do they eat when they are not eating meat? The Italians have their pasta, the Indians their rice, and the Irish have their potatoes. What are the staples of the Cretan diet?

"We still have seasonal eating here you see. Soups and pulses in the winter and fruits and vegetables in the summer. When things are in season you eat them. People forget how many soups we eat. In the winter we have bean soups (such as fassoulatha made with harricot beans), chick-pea soups, lentil soup (fakes), potato and leek soup. In summer, we might have tomato or chicken with rice and lemon, which is not so heavy. Once, some years ago, there was a monk here in the taverna from a Russian monastery. He had pure white hair and a big white beard like your Santa Claus. He was over a hundred and was on his first holiday. He had a translator with him. He asked for soup and I told him we didn't have soup that day. ‘Nonsense,’ he said, ‘do you have onions? Courgettes? Potatoes? Garlic?’ Of course, I had all of them. ‘Well then,’ he announced, ‘you have soup. Twenty minutes is all it takes!’ And so he had his soup and I ate with him and we drank a little raki together. He was a really interesting man. He had lived most of his life in a monastery but he knew about life."

This fascination with other peoples' lives and this willingness to sit and eat and drink with them while they tell their tales and put the world to rights is another central rite of the Cretan eating experience and one that Georgi is sure contributes to the well being and long life of the Cretans. A good meal with Cretans will take hours and sometimes drifts into the early hours without you noticing.

"It's not good for you, you know, all this sitting for five minutes in front of the television and wolfing food down. How can you enjoy it? If you do one thing then do it properly. If you are going to eat you sit down together and you eat what you need and you drink a little wine and you talk and then you have company and you feel good and if you feel good you live longer and you enjoy your life. Even the old people here feel useful and wanted. They have stories and they have wisdom. They know all of the herbs and fruits and potions that keep you healthy. They are always welcome to eat with you. They don't rush off for antibiotics when they don't feel so good. They'll make some tea with special herbs, maybe chamomile or wild marjoram or oregano or dikti, or they'll take some fish soup, or perhaps have a massage with the lamp oil or proto-raki. Petrol is best for the massage but it is dangerous...”

As if to demonstrate, and in that magical mode of serendipity that seems to go with the languorous life in Crete, there is a shout from outside the taverna. Georgi's dad Pavlos has just walked maybe six or seven kilometers down the mountain, from his home in Mathes, and he asks if Georgi wants bread from the baker. Pavlos will buy a two-kilo loaf and walk back home. Pavlos is 86. Of course, his friend Spiros could have got the bread. He cycles up and down to Mathes every day on an old sit-up beg bicycle with Sturmey Archer gears, but Pavlos doesn't like to take advantage. "He's an old man after all," Pavlos says. Spiros is 88. At this point, we finish our chat because Georgi is going to get some food for Pavlos to take back with him. A yiouvetsi (lamb cooked with Greek noodles), some lentil soup and a bowl of xorta, another of the magic ingredients of the Cretan diet. Xorta is a dish prepared from mountain greens and often cooked with three types of wild plant that grow freely on the mountainside. Amid the olive groves, it is served with olive oil, lemon and oftentimes potatoes. "Since my mother died," says Georgi, "my father doesn't bother cooking much for himself. I don't know what we'll do when he gets old."

Georgi is not yet connected to the internet but his taverna can be located on the junction of the national road and the Georgioupolis turn off (see http://www.id-ds.com/PlanetD&G/GeorgiMap.html). Derek Pearce and Gill Leonard, who took the photograph, downshifted from the UK IT industry in 2002 and now live full time in Crete. They undertake occasional IT assignments but chiefly raise lavender and organic olives. They can reached at wedesign@id-ds.com.