Oldways, the healthy food think tank, is not new — not in any sense of the word. It was founded in the 1980s by Dun Gifford, a Boston restaurateur and healthy-living advocate and food activist.

Another way that Oldways is not new is that, as its name suggests, the group promotes diets based on the ancient styles of eating. According to the Oldways website, the group’s mission is to “promote healthy eating, encourage sustainable food choices, and preserve traditional foodways.” The genesis of Oldways came to Gifford during a trip abroad:

The idea for Oldways came about during Gifford’s 1987 visits to China and Italy where traditional food patterns were still very much alive and expressed a vibrant harmony among earth, body and spirit. Gifford’s vision for Oldways was an organization that would look backwards for the harmonious balances of good nutrition, pleasurable traditional foods, and respect for the earth that could help modern humans live healthier, happier, and longer lives, today and in the future.

Oldways may not be new, but in an era in which the First Lady plants a garden that will provide wholesome food for the White House, it may be something even better: Basic.

Basic means simple. It also means inexpensive. There are no gimmicks here — nothing users must buy in order to learn how to eat healthy. Dun Gifford, the founder, has written a cookbook, The Oldways Table, with Sara Baer-Sinnot, but it is by no means the only book available for guidance on adopting a Mediterranean-style diet. (The Sonoma Diet, by Connie Guttersen, comes to mind.)

The Oldways website offers for free just about everything a novice would need to get started — a full description of the Mediterranean diet, for example — and, for more experienced hands, there is plenty of new information on the latest thinking about healthy eating, with topics like healthy pasta meals, managing sweetness, coffee and health and a position statement by the group on raw milk cheese. (They’re in favor of it when has been allowed to age long enough to kill bacteria.)

Also very helpful are charts showing food pyramids, including the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid (shown above), the Asian Diet Pyramid, the Latin American Diet Pyramid and the Vegetarian Diet Pyramid. There are also pyramid charts for children for the Asian, Latin American and vegetarian diets.