dieting and gluttony (5a) Os Guiness on gluttony

Here, as promised, is one of the things I've read about food, gluttony, dieting and self-control recently.

This one's by Os Guiness, insightful and challenging as always. He argues that the modern obsession with food and dieting is actually gluttony, a gluttony of delicacy rather than a gluttony of excess.

Have a read and tell me what you think:

Gluttony ... is often treated as the least serious of the seven sins. Just as avarice idolizes possessions and lust sex, so gluttony idolizes food. It lifts it out of its place and distorts both food and eating. Thus, unlike a gourmet who enjoys and appreciates food, a traditional glutton enjoys eating, almost regardless of its taste, beauty, or the company shared. Whereas the gourmet savours, the traditional glutton devours. Gluttons "make pigs of themselves" by reducing all food to the level of slop. ...

Yet [we don't take] ... traditional gluttony seriously ... [because of] our modern self-congratulation on our disapproval of obesity and our newfound dedication to health, fitness, and dieting. Our gods, it seems, are not our bellies but our flat abdominal muscles ...

[G]luttony is often treated as a relatively harmless overindulgence in whatever we long for. Ironically, the word "sinful" is playfully applied to eating dessert more readily than to any other behaviour or attitude in contemporary English. ...

But both the origins and consequences of gluttony are more serious than that. Dedicated to the gratification of appetite, gluttony grows from and leads to a terrible emptiness that--no matter how much we stuff ourselves--is never satisfied. People overeat to compensate for emotional emptiness, but the overeating never compensates. The belly is stuffed, but the heart is hollow. Like all addictions, gluttony deceives. ...

In the medieval view, there were five ways of sinning by gluttony--eating and drinking too soon, too expensively, too much too eagerly, and with too much fuss. ... Thus ... modern gluttony ... can also be traced in the fanatical modern devotion to dieting, health foods, and drug taking. In a society in which cookbooks outsell the Bible by something like ten to one, food and diets have been given a time and place that are gluttonous. ...

The gluttony of excess is tied to a culture of scarcity just as the gluttony of delicacy is tied to a culture of abundance ... The reason is that in a culture of scarcity food was for most people the only accessible luxury ... For most of the West, the shift from scarcity to abundance happened in the nineteenth century. It was paralleled by an accompanying shift from the gluttony of excess to the gluttony of delicacy. As modern people, we may not admire indulgence and obesity, but we have a thousand polite words to cover our fussing over food. ...

Where food was once simply a matter of human sustenance, enjoyment, and sharing, it is now laden with myriad forms of "food guilt." How was it produced (on pesticide-ridden factory farms by exploited factory farmhands)? How is it marketed (in non-biodegradable garbage-creating containers)? What will be its consequences (depleted resources/increased heart attacks/thickened midriffs and hips)? ...

One writer notes, "It's not unusual at all to hear a woman wail, 'I was so bad today,' only to follow this dramatic statement with a seemingly tame admission like 'I ate two doughnuts and a bag of Cheetos." The traditional moral categories of "good" and "bad" are applied less often to "what comes out of" a person, as in words or deeds, than to "what goes in." ...

Though the modern tragedy of eating disorders is utterly distinct from the gluttony of delicacy, there is a link. The myth of the "perfectly thin female" that feeds the gluttony of delicacy is one factor ... in eating disorders, which are today nearly epidemic on college campuses. ... The approximate recovery time for anorexia sufferers is seven years, and the death rate twenty percent--the highest of any mental disorder. ...

The tragedy of such illnesses is perhaps the predictable outcome of a culture preoccupied with external image--and food as a means of controlling it. ... Obsession with various forms of non-eating is trendy, but just as gluttonous as obsession with eating--especially to Christian believers whose anticipated joy in a heavenly banquet will surely be oblivious to whether the bread has butter or margarine on it and the milk is 98 percent fat-free.

Since this book is hard to find, I've given you a good long quote. The highlights are mine. It's from Steering through chaos pp. 211-215.