Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

Seven Deadly Sins: Gluttony

Forgive Candy_1us, for we have sinned. When someone brings donuts into the office in the morning, we take more than one. We never eat just one slice of pizza and sometimes, when we think no one is looking, we eat peanut butter right out of the jar. And now, the scariest of all holidays is approaching, Halloween. Temptation lurks behind every corner and we simply aren’t prepared for piles of: Snickers, Mars bars, Hershey’s chocolate, Tootsie Pops, gobstoppers, Jolly ranchers, and jelly beans…it’s a dangerous candy-filled world out there. To guide us through our guilt-ridden gluttonous ways we look to Francine Prose, author of Gluttony part of the Seven Deadly Sins series. Below is an an exceprt from the introduction to her book.

Several years ago, I was invited to a midtown Manhattan restaurant for a lunch that was part of an ongoing series of gatherings hosted by two women who were writing a book about women’s attitudes toward their bodies, eating, diet, weight loss, and so forth. The lunches were designed to enable the writers to talk to groups of women, to hear what women were saying about what they ate and what they didn’t eat and how they felt about it—and to pick up clever dieting tips that readers might find useful.

Perhaps a dozen women attended. Some were plump, some were thin, all were attractive and appealing, none was anywhere near obese. But many of them described their relationship with food as a ferocious, lifelong battle for power and control. The lines were drawn, the stakes were clear. In one corner was the women’s resolve, their fragile self-regard, their sense of how they wanted to look and feel, how they wanted the world to see them; in the other corner was the refrigerator and a gallon of chocolate ice cream.

One woman described how triumphant she felt when she succeeded in getting her carton of takeout dinner from the store all the way to her house without wolfing it down in the car on the drive home. Another passed along the helpful calorie-counting traveler’s trick of calling ahead and asking the hotel at which she would be staying to please empty the mini-bar before she even checked in.

Unsurprisingly, the actual ordering of the lunch was fraught with watchfulness, self-consciousness, and more than a little tension. Decisions were made, minds were changed, requests rethought and altered. How much courage it took simply to ask for the crème brûlee. I can’t remember precisely what I ate—it seems to me that everyone started with the salad—but what I do recall is suppressing an impulse to order two desserts just to see what would happen.

It’s hard to imagine a similar event occurring in any century besides our own. It seems so quintessentially modern, so current and of the moment. What would Thomas Aquinas or Saint Augustine have made of that lunch, or, for that matter, of a world in which women called ahead with directives concerning the mini-bar contents?

And yet, had the event taken place a thousand years in the past—let’s say, at an early church council or synod—it would more likely have been recognized for what it really was, as something more substantial than a casual chat about body image and diet. Because in fact, it was a sort of metaphysical discussion, a forum on matters of the body and the spirit. For what were these women talking about except sin and virtue, abstinence, self-control, and the daunting challenge of overcoming the fierce temptations of gluttony? Of all the seven deadly sins, gluttony has had perhaps the most intriguing and paradoxical history. The ways in which the sin has been viewed have evolved in accordance with the changing obsessions of society and culture. From the early Middle Ages until the early Renaissance, centuries during which mass consciousness was formed and dominated by the tenets of Christianity, the principal danger of gluttony was thought to reside in its nature as a form of idolatry, the most literal sort of navel gazing, of worshiping the belly as a God: a cult with rituals and demands that would inevitably divert and distract the faithful from true, authentic religion.

As the Renaissance and later the Industrial Revolution and eighteenth-century rationalism refocused the popular imagination from heaven to earth and adjusted the goals of labor to include the rewards of this world as well as those of the next, gluttony lost some of its stigma and eventually became almost a badge of pride. Substance, weight, and the ability to afford the most lavish pleasures of the table became visible signs of vitality, prosperity, and of the worldly success to which both the captains and the humble foot soldiers of industry were encouraged to aspire. At the same time, growing concerns (fostered by early writers on health and science) with health and longevity and with keeping the body in some sort of harmonious balance led to an increased interest in diet, moderation, and nutrition. In the past few decades, as changing notions of physical attractiveness and desirability required that women (and to a somewhat lesser extent, men) be trim and thin, the dictates of beauty culture made gluttony appear as yet another sort of threat.

Most recently, our fixation on health, our quasi-obscene fascination with illness and death, and our fond, impossible hope that diet and exercise will enable us to live forever have demonized eating in general and overeating in particular. Health consciousness and a culture fixated on death have transformed gluttony from a sin that leads to other sins into an illness that leads to other illnesses.

These days, few people seriously consider the idea that eating too much or enjoying one’s food is a crime against God, a profound moral failure for which we will be promptly dispatched to hell. It’s doubtful that even the most devoutly religious are likely to confess and seek absolution for looking forward to breakfast, or having taken pleasure in the delights of last night’s dinner.

Yet even as gluttony has (at least in the popular imagination) ceased to be a spiritual transgression, food, the regulation of eating, and the related subjects of dieting, obesity, nutrition, etc., have become major cultural preoccupations. A casual survey of the selfhelp section of the local bookstore will make it clear how large a place gluttony (in its new, deconsecrated form) now occupies in our collective consciousness. For every volume offering advice about the contemporary equivalents of the other sins (sexual addiction, anger management, and so forth) there are dozens of books designed to help the hapless or self-loathing glutton (itself a notably unfashionable term) to repent and reform.

Meanwhile, the punishments suffered by the modern glutton are at once more complex and subtle than eternal damnation. Now that gluttony has become an affront to prevailing standards of beauty and health rather than an offense against God, the wages of sin have changed and now involve a version of hell on earth: the pity, contempt, and distaste of one’s fellow mortals. What makes the glutton’s penance all the more public and cruel is that gluttony is the only sin whose effects (in the absence of that rare and fortunate metabolism that permits the fruits of sin to remain hidden) are visible, written on the body. Unlike, say, the slothful, who can, if they wish, manage to appear alert and awake, the modern glutton pays for—and displays—transgression by violating the esthetic norms of a society that places an extreme and even potentially dangerous emphasis on fitness and thinness. In some cases, the punishment for the sin can be nearly as extreme as any suffered by those condemned to eternal damnation. Not long ago, a popular singer arranged to have her stomach stapled—a radical cure for gluttony—in an operation that was broadcast over the internet and could be watched as a kind of punitive mass entertainment.

To trace the evolution of gluttony is to consider where we have come from, where we have arrived, and where we may be heading. For if, as they say, we are what we eat, then how we feel about eating—and eating too much—reveals our deepest beliefs about who we are, what we will become, and about the connections and conflicts between the needs of the body and the hungers of the spirit.

Recent Comments

There are currently no comments.