What local dishes should I try in Greece, and where should I look for them?

The Mediterranean diet was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List in 2010 and extended in 2013 to cover a wider group of states including Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Croatia, Morocco and Portugal. What the listing describes is not a menu but a practice — the sourcing, seasonality and shared eating that go with olive oil, bread, legumes, vegetables, fish and cheese. In Greece that translates into the thing travelers most often miss: the vegetable dishes and pulses are not side orders, they are the center of the daily table, and the grilled meat is the exception.

The legal side is the European Commission's register of protected designations of origin and protected geographical indications, which carries Greek entries including feta, Kalamata table olives, the mastic of Chios and a range of regional cheeses and olive oils. Feta's designation is the one with the widest consequence: the name is reserved, so a white brined cheese made outside the registered Greek areas and to a different specification cannot legally be sold as feta in the EU. Ordering it by name in Greece is ordering the designated product.

Where to look follows the geography rather than the guidebooks. Olive oil and table olives come from the Peloponnese and Crete, mastic from Chios, cheeses from specific mainland and island areas named in their own specifications. On a large working island the inland villages, not the harbor front, are where the production is.

Greece's food year is organized around the Orthodox calendar, and that affects what is on the table as much as what is open. Public institutions close for Greek Orthodox Easter Sunday, 1 May, 1 January and Christmas — the Acropolis Museum, for instance, shuts on all of those and runs shortened hours on Good Friday, Easter Saturday, and 24 and 31 December. The Orthodox Lenten period preceding Easter is also when the vegetable and pulse cooking that the UNESCO listing describes is at its most prominent on ordinary menus.

• Cheese — Ask for feta by name; the designation is reserved to registered Greek production.
• Oil and olives — Buy in the Peloponnese or on Crete, where the registered groves are.
• Lent — Travel in the weeks before Orthodox Easter for the vegetable and pulse cooking at its fullest.

Orthodox Easter moves from year to year and rarely coincides with Western Easter, so a date that looks like an ordinary spring Sunday can close museums and kitchens alike. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists Greece among destinations under its Global Measles notice, a Level 1 practice-usual-precautions notice, which is a vaccination question to settle before departure. And a protected designation certifies origin and specification only — it narrows the field rather than choosing between two producers who both hold it.

The Greece when-to-visit answer in this group gives the Acropolis Museum's seasonal hours, late Friday openings and free-admission dates; the Greece places-and-experiences answer suggests Meteora and Naxos as the two detours worth making.