The news that Rishi Sunak likes to begin his week with a 36-hour fast was genuinely alarming to me, a woman raised to believe that without breakfast, no important task is achievable. As a student, I religiously ate a large banana before every paper of my finals; as a journalist, I won’t write a piece, or even head out to do an interview, without having first had a slice of toast. Such an attachment to regular meals is, admittedly, connected in part to the fact that I am – let us use the chic French word – a migraineur. Headaches are more likely when my blood sugar is low. Mostly, though, it’s because I listened to mother. How can a person think clearly, let alone run a country, on an empty stomach?
Obviously, this makes me deeply unfashionable. Thanks to the likes of Professor Tim Spector, the epidemiologist and ubiquitous developer of the Zoe app, delaying breakfast to the point where it’s almost lunch is all the rage (the number of hours a person fasts overnight is thought to play a role in maintaining a healthy weight, for which reason 11am is now decreed banana-time). But practice and theory are not, for me, the same thing. Even as I cleave to my Sunday morning bacon and eggs, I find myself more and more fascinated by the relationship between elective hunger and a certain kind of (non-religious) holiness. It seems to me to speak to our times like almost nothing else.
In his new book, The Fast, the American writer John Oakes calls this relationship “the presence of an absence”, which sounds a bit woo at first. But he knows what he’s talking about. The Fast looks not only at the physiological effects of going without food (Oakes describes a seven-day fast he tried aged 60, having found himself – ugh – in need of a “personal exorcism”), but also at its long history. It’s a story that goes all the way back to the ancient world, and all the way forwards to Wallis Simpson (“a woman can never be too rich or too thin”), and what you come to realise by reading it is that elective hunger is often just a proxy, a rumbling we may choose to induce when other things (control, love, even God) elude us. I’ve worried away at this a lot since and, on balance, I think this notion both increases my suspicion of the present fad for fasting, and makes me feel more softly towards those drawn to try it. How painfully complicated we are, and how desperate to ease our longings.
But this is all getting a bit serious; I really don’t want to put you off your bagel, should you be eating one, and some of what I have learned is as wacky as it is serious. For instance, I’d always thought of Hildegard of Bingen – in as much as one thinks of Hildegard of Bingen at all – as primarily a composer. However, it turns out the Sibyl of the Rhine was a notably early (we’re talking 12th century) adopter of restricted eating, one whose regimes are still widely promoted on the internet, influencer-style. Her fasts were a bit like Sunak’s (“I do have the odd nut”). She didn’t starve herself completely. She ate a lot of spelt, and washed it down with fennel tea.
Part of fasting’s attraction, as Oakes points out, is that it is voluntary; when compelled, it loses its lustre. Apparently, there is an Irish biscuit that owes its origins to Cornelius “Connie” Lucey, the bishop of Cork between 1952 and 1980, who demanded that parishioners adhere to a strict Lenten fast of just one meal a day and two collations (snacks). Sharing his customers’ resentment at such severity, a local baker decided to circumvent the spirit of the ruling without breaking it altogether by producing giant biscuits which came to be known as Connie dodgers.
But the pious thrill of fasting, being so onerous to achieve, has also been experienced vicariously. The Victorians paid to attend fasting “spectacles”, long-running events performed by celebrated “hunger artists”. In 1890, one of these, an Italian called Giovanni Succi, achieved a fast of 45 days at a New York music hall, a feat he finally broke with a cup of cocoa, having first – more food for thought here, I think – made an advertising arrangement with its manufacturer.
@MsRachelCooke
