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To judge from the evidence on the supermarket conveyor belt, the three of us eat three very different diets.

The Carnivore Diet. Mainly meat.

The Junk Food Diet. Mainly snacks.

The Plant Diet. Mainly greenstuffs.

With grim humor, though, I note that each of us has a bunch of bananas in his/her pile.

Bananas: the great leveler.

I won't go into how, historically, bananas became such an American icon. It's an ugly story.

I will say that it has long twisted my nuts that bananas—a monoculture grown somewhere far away and shipped North courtesy of the carbon economy—are cheaper here in Minnesota than apples, grown locally.

I'm sorry, that's just plain wrong.

When you eat bananas—even those organic, free-range, fair trade bananas that you feel so virtuous about buying at Trader Joe's—you're basically eating petroleum.

Yum, yum.

If the current dock workers' strike goes on for very long, banana prices will skyrocket.

Good.

Food is such an important facet of human culture and a great way to connect with others. It's also a fabulous way to make a long-ago culture feel more real.

I've shared about Minoan food and cooking before, here and here. Today, I'm going to go all "ancient food blogger" on you with an actual recipe.

February on the wane. Snow lies deep, but underneath, the rich earth waits.

It's a month yet until Equinox and calendar Spring: still plenty of time to stoke up the oven and savor the dark, warming foods of Winter.

Think of it as sympathetic magic. The lentils' pebbly texture and loamy, over-seasoned umami pair beautifully with the mashed potatoes' creamy blandness.

Beneath the snow, the rich, dark earth awaits.

Boss Warlock's 'Spring's a-Comin', But She Ain't Here Yet' Lentil Shepherd's Pie

Last time, we looked at what kinds of vegetables the Minoans grew in their gardens. But they needed to season those veggies so they were especially tasty to eat, right? So what kinds of herbs and other seasonings did they use?

The first and most obvious one is salt. Like other island-dwelling people, the Minoans used sea salt. It's easy to make - just collect up some sea water and evaporate the liquid, using heat from the Sun or from fire. The Minoans were surely doing this all the way back in the Neolithic, though most of the evidence for it comes from later on.

Some aspects of Minoan civilization feel very modern: big cities with paved roads, aqueducts, and enclosed sewer systems. But there were no supermarkets back in the Bronze Age, no international shipping of out-of-season produce.

I've written before about Minoan cooking methods and typical foods. I've even shared a grocery list of sorts, a compilation of all the foods we have evidence for - foods the Minoans cooked and ate.

If the witch-hunters are to be believed (!), when we're not eating babies at our Sabbats, we're busy relishing food that's half-rotten and stinks instead.

Just goes to show that even witch-hunters can get something right every now and then.

Even the part about the babies.

Boss Warlock's Really Stinky Half-Moon Baby Turnip Kimchi

1 lb. baby turnips

4½ teaspoons salt

2-3 teaspoons crushed red pepper

10-12 minced scallions

10-12 cloves garlic, minced

1 teaspoon sugar

CW: Meat eating and animal slaughter/sacrifice

Animals show up a lot in Minoan art and in religious iconography from ancient Crete. In MMP we tend to pay special attention to the ones associated with deities - the Horned Ones, for instance, the deities connected with cattle, goats, and deer.

It's clear from the archaeological record that, in addition to revering these animals as earthly reflections of certain deities, the Minoans also slaughtered them and ate their meat on a regular basis. Animals that were ritually sacrificed were also eaten, probably by temple clergy.