The Mediterranean diet in general was pretty heavy on all kinds of vegetables. Given the overall unsuitability of the entire region for cattle-raising and the desert-like ecological poverty of the sea itself (save for a few locales which were then duly famous for their frutti di mare), this is only to be expected. Northerners long wondered at the leanness of even the aristocracy's meals - "an Italian feast barely amounts to French appetizers" or something along those lines, wrote one Renaissance traveller.