In early seventeenth-century Rome, the per capita consumption of meat rose to nearly a pound per day. This enormous consumption was not just about luxury, but also spoke to the ways in which the papacy sought to remake its city and the bodies of its citizens in the wake of the Reformation. For a brief few decades, to eat like a Roman meant either tacit or explicit acceptance on a range of ideas related to digestion, spirituality, the authority of medicine, and what it meant to live a "healthy" lifestyle. Through a survey of dietary advice, medical manuals, cook books, and autopsies performed on people considered to be both poor and healthy eaters, this paper will seek to explore the range of ideas related to this new dietary regime. Recent scholarship, including in particular work by Emma Spary and Karl Appuhn, has demonstrated that discourses on food reveal a great deal about how contemporary societies understood medical expertise, the body, digestion, and man's interaction with his environment. This paper will seek to uncover such discourses and will demonstrate that the biggest battles in religion, politics, and even in medicine where waged with the most quotidian of objects: food.
