About the Project

Before It Was a Diet began with a visual contradiction.

In El Olivar, an urban park in Lima, paths curve through old olive trees that remain aligned in straight rows. The park is modern. The geometry is agricultural.

El Olivar, San Isidro, Lima (portrait) · Carlo Brescia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Those lines recalled another landscape: Jaén, in Andalucía, where olive trees extend across hills in an immense matrix.

The resemblance raised a historical question.

Spain carried the olive tree to Peru nearly five centuries ago. The tree survived. It adapted. It became economically productive and entered Peruvian food culture.

But Peru did not become culturally Mediterranean.

Why?

The investigation follows the olive through Andalucía, the Spanish imperial system, Lima, pre-existing Peruvian irrigation, land and labor, trade, preservation, taste, and the transformation of productive groves into urban landscapes.

Then the question reverses.

In the twentieth century, researchers observed patterns of diet and health in parts of the Mediterranean. Those observations were measured, compared, and eventually translated into a model that could travel far beyond the places that produced them.

The Mediterranean diet has substantial scientific value. The question under this book is different: What happens when a way of life becomes advice?

This website is where the research remains visible: sources, maps, archival finds, field reporting, photographs, corrections, and unresolved questions.

The book is where those materials become narrative.

Publishing September 2027 from Ten & Walker Press.

Oscar Trelles is a Peruvian American author based in Andalucía.

He is the author of The Human OS Manual.

Before It Was a Diet grew from a recognition between two landscapes he knew personally: the old olive grove of El Olivar in Lima and the vast olive landscapes of southern Spain.

Following that resemblance backward led through cuttings, ships, irrigation, land, labor, kitchens, and, much later, the measurements that produced the Mediterranean diet.

He is currently researching and writing Before It Was a Diet, forthcoming in September 2027 from Ten & Walker Press.