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Where, When did the Kitchen Evolve? Your daily dose, Food for Thought!?
AD 41
Caligula is assassinated by one of his own guards. The unstable Roman emperor thought it fun to behead people during a meal. Banquets for the Roman gentry can be bloody affairs. A cook who dishes up underdone meat will be stripped and beaten.
AD 43
The Roman emperor Claudius invades Britain. He likes to feast on stuffed kidneys and guinea fowl in a hazelnut crust and fish sauce.
AD 50
The Romans are using rice pottage as a medicine to settle upset stomachs. They regard rice as an expensive import to be used mainly for medical purposes.
AD 60
The Roman emperor Nero has leek soup served to him every day, as he believes the leek makes his speech honeyed and thus gives him a clear and sonorous voice for delivering his orations. Due to his inordinate appetite for leeks some people have nicknamed him " Porrophagus " (porrum being leek in Latin)
It does seem like this question might only be in jest, at first reading -- maybe a bored History or Latin student? But something tells me this question is prompted by a much wiser mind.
People have been using foods to heal -- in addition to herbs and other plants for cures -- since time began. What I think we're seeing here, with the Romans, is their catching up with the Indians to the north, and their many astute uses of foods used not only to heal, but in one's diet in general to keep one in certain ranges of spiritually attuned states of well being. In the vedic arts and sciences, and particularly vedic medicine, eating certain foods gave you clarity to details, or then a softened disregard to harsh words -- all kinds of states and needs, in addition to being healed or staying well.
Back in the 1980s, I began using a book, The Encyclopedia of Nutritional Healing, of which a new edition is printed every few year. I know I got a few editions here on Amazon.com. You look under an illness -- alphabetically -- in this book, and you get a listing of herbs, vitamins and supplements, and even foods that are good in treating that ailment. It has always served me well, this guide.
Now, in the 21st century, taking supplements and vitamins has moved along quite a way from just 15 yrs ago when we would often hear that we were still peeing out 3/4 of the hundreds of dollars we paid for our vitamins .... such a costly waste. Finally, what are touted now are either supplements that are liquid, or that cater to one kind of vitamin form, like enzymes, or greenfoods, or liquid mineral infusions, or D3 up to 5,000 mls at a time. In place of eating, say, Omega 3,6, 9, etc, we are shown we should directly grind flaxseeds up and put into our oatmeal for omega oil treatment -- with the food, rather than the a pill. And now have come all the "SUPERFOODS." Blueberries, blackberries, green tea, white tea, red wine -- and would ya believe it??? DARK CHOCOLATE! Never thought I'd see the day when my "favorite food" would also the "best food for ya!!!"
We all know, now, in the west, that olive oil and fresh garlic are spozed to be really really good for us. And onions, of course!!! So you're Roman eating leaks was definitely onto something!!!! Rice is also about the easiest grain to digest so is often chosen for babies and people not real well.
An even newer feature of "eating healthy" we've discovered -- at least in the west, which I'm willing to bet people in the east already knew -- is the fact that eating LOCAL FOODS and being LOCAVORES is also another way of insuring healthier food. So while the Romans had the ability to travel long distances to find rare delicacies for eating and good health, it's not necessarily a plus when they eat foods and plants from only far away. Raw, unboiled and unpreserved honey raised withing 100 miles of where you live is supposed to have intensive medicinal properties that raw honey from afar would not contain at all.
So while I have nothing personally against the Romans from here, today, I look at them back after 1000 AD and often think, as an American, that my country is on the way out, as Rome went out, when it became nothing more than a military machine, which is seems more and more is what the U.S. has become. Too bad we can't be peaceful -- or that there aren't foods to make us so. Do you think if we got all the greedy Oil Company barons and politicians who do their will to become a vegan like me, we'd find world peace around the corner?
Thanks again for a wonderful question, and sorry I could not spend more time and find more citations for you. 
Peace ....