Before we head New York City, there was Pompeii. You might know it as the longest ongoing

archaeological dig site in the world, but in its heyday it was cosmopolitan, international,

exciting. You went there to have a lot of fun. From what scholars

can tell, it seems that life there was good. Pompeii was just one jewel in the crown of the Roman

Empire, and as such, benefited from all the spoils of conquest. It had just about everything,

entertainment, restaurants, public baths, temples, brothels, you name it.

There were beautifully manicured gardens, kept animals, the climate was temperate, and agriculture was

abundant. Pompeii's 11,000-person population was small by today's standards for what we might

call a city. But for a little

perspective, scholars believe that only about a hundred people lived in the Roman Empire's Lundinium,

London's forerunner, around the same time. Compared to many other places, Pompey was a city.

But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. Mount Vesuvius

had created the physical geography of Pompeii with an eruption, and would put an end to all of it

with just one more. In 79 AD, she did just that. In the aftermath, Pompeii probably looked

like something between a lunar landscape and a nuclear

fallout zone. The city would fade from memory, becoming something of myth and legend,

until it was accidentally found again 15 centuries later.

And while Pompeii had become best known for how its story ended,

archaeologists have busied themselves with trying to understand the

city before the eruption, and one of the ways we've gone about this has been through discovering

how the city ate. Just a few years ago, a team from Ohio was digging around in the remains of

fast food stalls. They found evidence of a standard Mediterranean diet, legumes, olive pits, nuts, seeds,

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