Since it is such a hardy and proliferate plant, it is cheap to harvest and accessible to even the poorest of families. The slave labourers who built Giza's Great Pyramid were given a diet of garlic, onions, and radishes not just because it was comparatively inexpensive but to stop the spread of disease among the cramped and dirty workers as well. Garlic also symbolises poverty in the historical novel by Mo Yan, The Garlic Ballads, in which an over-supply in the Chinese garlic market of the 1980s is the precursor to a peasant uprising. Gao Yang, whose eyebrows sloped downwards at the ends, was squatting alongside a table, holding a bowl of garlic broth and fighting back the waves of nausea rising from his stomach. Though in part descended from the vegetable's seemingly ignoble history, Chinese diet uses garlic for seasoning in many of its dishes.
Aged garlic is also useful as a food preservative.
Yet another aspect of garlic's unassuming culinary standing owes to its prominence in non-conventional medicines. Thankfully, the recent interest in these so-called folk remedies has brought attention to alternative treatments and health. Gabriel Garc a M rquez 's sensuous Love in the Time of Cholera is set in the steamy regions of early twentieth-century Colombia. True enough, the good doctor is blessed with long life only to die after a fall from a ladder. While Doctor Urbino took his garlic with bread, Garc a M rquez doesn't mention what he did to combat the dreaded garlic breath.