What Did People Eat and Drink in Roman Palestine?

Unfortunately behind the BAS paywall. BAR is notoriously liberal, but it’s articles like this that keep me as a subscriber. We are very prone to read our Bible from our own perspective and articles like this help us grasp how the people of the Bible lived (and would have thought about what they were hearing and reading from Jesus and the apostles)

Grape juice, of course!

I am a subscriber--what's the date on this one?

Regarding the claims, OK, poor people at mostly bread & water and might have been able to scrounge up a bit of fruit or vegetables occasionally. No surprise there, or that a woman whose husband was about to divorce her might keep her in poverty. For that matter, Ruth was pretty much reduced to the same, and if I think further, probably some other examples--say the woman who baked a cake for (?) Elijah with her last bit of flour, no?

But the flip side is that one of the blessings for obedience to Israel is that they would have full wine-vats, no? So we might infer that under the admittedly imperfect dispensation would have, often, enough land to have a vineyard (and vitis vinifera often has some reasonably big crops per acre on marginal land, for reference), but under Roman rule, no such equity in land ownership existed.

One side note from a dietetics perspective; bread completes baking at > 180F, and about the same applies for roasted grain or porridge. Vitamin C is destroyed at 170F, which means that if the poor did not get some vegetables or fruit in their diet, they would die of scurvy in a few weeks. So the poor would have had to get some sources for fruit and vegetables out of season, or they would die. One might quibble over whether it would be wine or vinegar, but fermentation was the obvious way the ancients knew to preserve that fruit.

Here is the link to the recent summary:

What Did People Eat and Drink in Roman Palestine? - Biblical Archaeology Society

The issue referenced is Mar/Apr 2019