To cook like a Greek, you don't have to think like a Greek. You only need to pretend you are in Greece!
Imagine... you are outside of a grocery store looking at a huge variety of fresh vegetables in the middle of the summer, thinking of what to prepare for lunch. What do you do? You buy tomatoes and cucumber to make a Greek Salad!
Any vegetable can turn into a salad. The default option is what is in abundance, meaning lower price. The climate leads the way of what will grow in your garden. Greece is a lucky country: the soil is very enriched and lots of vegetables can grow in abundance. Hence why, all greek recipes have vegetables (think of Frikase, and the amount of lettuce you use is crazy!). That was in the past though - for years and years, and it shaped people's thinking, and acting. What do we cook? The stuff we have in our garden.
Nowadays, we are thinking differently. And in a way, it's not bad. We are lucky to have supermakrets importing most of the stuff we like. Regardless of what grows in our garden.