To your 2):
it doesn't surprise you garlic is posed as model of deliciousness, is it? in good measure, he said.

There is a beatiful Polish expression, my favorite, that translates roughly "what's too much isn't healthy" (I'm ashamed of my Polish spelling and won't attempt it) - where is Michael Farris when you need him?

It's mentioned in this wonderful poem by Catullus (which I don't have time to translate; I swiped the text from the Latin Library)

QVAERIS, quot mihi basiationes
tuae, Lesbia, sint satis superque.
quam magnus numerus Libyssae harenae
lasarpiciferis iacet Cyrenis
oraclum Iouis inter aestuosi
et Batti ueteris sacrum sepulcrum;
aut quam sidera multa, cum tacet nox,
furtiuos hominum uident amores:
tam te basia multa basiare
uesano satis et super Catullo est,
quae nec pernumerare curiosi
possint nec mala fascinare lingua.

Kenneth Quinn's note in my edition reads: "lasarpiciferis: ...'rich in silphium'; if the plant , the main export of Cyrene was asafoetida (the attribution is doubtful) then perhaps C. devised his learned polysyllable as an ironic corrective to the literary associations of the name Cyrene. Silphium was employed in medicine, apparently for a variety of purposes...There is a magnificent 6th century Laconian cup thought to show King Arkesilas of Cyrene supervising the weighing of silphium..."

two quick comments.
first, asafoetida is alive and well and available at my local Fiesta supermarket. I tried to get some in Australia when I was in charge of the Classical Society's yearly Roman feast, but it was highly seasonal there and we were having the feast at the wrong time of year.

It could be a different species from the one the Romans had. They had different lettuce, for example (with soporific qualities, hence Ovid's warning in the Ars Amatoria not to have lettuce soup on your date). There are others too, I looked into this as part of that Roman feast thing (got to read Apicius and all sorts of good stuff).

re 2, the Romans had all sorts of weird things, like garum (fish sauce) in peach flans.

As far as the Romans were concerned, asafoetida was a variety of silfium/laserpicium, albeit an inferior Persian variety. Modern scholars usually distinguish the two.

The etymology of asa foetida is unclear. It's bleedin' obvious what foetida means, but asa is obscure. One theory is that it's a corruption of laser. Another theory is that it comes from a neo-Persian word for resin, which momentarily escapes me.

Apropos of nothing, I suppose more people have heard of Bishkek/Pishpek now.

"where is Michael Farris when you need him?"

uhh being useless as usual? The phrase sort of rang a bell, but I couldn't remember exactly and the couple of people I remembered to ask today were no help either. But .... Google never lets me down (I want to get drunk and throw my arm around google and shout "here's to the best damned search engine in the worrrlll!")

Without too much trouble I found ....

"Co za dużo to nie zdrowo"

Almost. *Za nadto instead of *Za duzo, or that's how I remember.

Thank you very, very much.
Now if only my boss understood Polish..

"It could be a different species from the one the Romans had."

That's my assumption, it was a related but different species and probably had a different taste, just as Italian basil tastes very different from Thai basil.