Fasting and Feasting

Food and time are closely bound up. The modern, secular and superficially-multicultural western world tends to offer eaters a seemingly endless choice of foods all the time, limited only by our economic power and culinary stamina. Yet we still have some ways to use food as a marker of feasts and celebrations. Cakes and favourite dishes for birthdays, foods connected with feasts such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, are the remnants of older and more complex patterns of consumption that have marked our sense of self and of community.

There is a loss, of culture and enjoyment and more, that comes with the limitless offerings of the global supermarket. The politics and the economics are worrisome, if perhaps better dealt with elsewhere. But all of us know, if we stop to think about it, that even taste itself suffers when the relentless pressures of year-round demand, and the resulting technologies of production, give rise to pale imitations of real, seasonal, produce. So too we lose our ability to use food, not merely as "fodder" or as a sort of self-sufficient aesthetic exercise, but to express and enrich what we value most through care and celebration.

The idea of eating seasonally, if and when we can, doesn't need much by way of advocacy. Things taste better that way, and we can perhaps get a clearer sense of the relationship between what we eat and the realities of local production. Eating thoughtfully and eating well go hand in hand. Yet we also need to think about what not to eat, and when.

A lot of people - not all religious by any means - roll their eyes at the presence in supermarkets of Hot Cross ("Easter") buns and the accompanying candy eggs even in January, when cut-price Christmas decorations are still sitting forlornly in their bins. Ironically it will be hard to find the same items a week or two after Easter Day, even though the Christian holiday of Easter lasts fifty days beginning at Easter, not ending with it. A similar and even better-known story of anticipation and consumption can of course be told of Christmas.

What is most striking about this is not the consumption per se but the loss of the rhythm of consumption and non-consumption that makes these foods meaningful or appealling at all. We actually need patterns of abstinence even to allow the celebrations and treats to make sense, let alone to achieve anything more for ourselves by them. It is not just that we over-indulge; sometimes in the process we actually short-change ourselves regarding the delights of feasting, through this constant but monotonous fulfilment of immediate desires.

In the days and weeks ahead I am planning to post recipes here connected with the Christian fasting season of Lent, which begins for some on Wednesday. These foods include fascinating and delicious things - not always the epitome of self-denial, I will admit. They will, however, not contain meat. Some will avoid other ingredients such as dairy products and olive oil which are excluded in ancient (and some continuing) Christian traditions for this season.

The motivations for these patterns of non-consumption - fasting, as it is known - have been quite varied within religious traditions, let alone across them. Some practice it for spiritual or physical benefits, others to discipline themselves or even to mourn their failings. What these all have in common is the use of ascetic practice - non-consumption - to establish a contrast with the celebrations that are the counterpoint to fasting. Fasting and feasting need each other to make sense.