I have wanted to write a post about our culture's Epicureanism for quite a while, and unfortunately this article in The Atlantic is not only more thoroughly researched than I have the capacity or discipline to carry out, but also references Livy which immediately trumps any sort of allusion I intended to make. Fortunately, I still have half an original idea left to contribute that the writer, B.R. Myers, does not cover, so I shall proceed ahead, mooching off his thorough and no doubt slightly soul crushing work (the man has read multiple books with titles like Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life, multiple). Before I begin, I should say that I had no idea people took food so seriously, or, I should say, I knew plenty of people made far too much money off of food, and plenty of people took the consumption of food to be some kind of religion, but I suppose I never realized the depth of their shallowness and utter lack of irony, but a lack of irony seems to be one of the real hallmarks of whitepeople, so I should have known better. To be so sanctimonious about say, a steak, seems more than a bit misguided, but as Chesterton said, when people stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in organic offal.
Because the West has been fraught with ontological tension as soon as Athens found out about Jerusalem, or vice versa, a tension exists in the food world, and at its heart it is this: eating luxuriously until you want to vomit (and maybe do vomit) is good, but being fat is bad. Nothing in the modern world is worse than being fat. It is, far and away, our Cardinal Sin, worse than the only sexual taboo we have left, pederasty, simply because when you are fat, you are fat all the time, and pederasts cannot constantly molest children. Being overweight to most people goes far beyond any sort of venial, corporeal sin to a moral sin; the fact that a sin against the body can be raised to the level of a sin against the soul shows how superficial and bodily we moderns are (that it is a contradiction not believing in a soul, but still believing you can sin against it also should not fall on deaf ears). Our Gods are eating well, living well, and being healthy; no culture before ours placed as much emphasis on health as a end, not a means. The Romans no doubt valued health in its soldiers, but it was not so they would look good and live long, it was so they could more effectively kill barbarians (and often their fellow citizens). Medieval Christians valued health, but it was because man is made in God's image, and because they had an understanding that sins against the body, if left unattended, could become sins against the soul; the corrupt body had to be kept as clean as possible lest you corrupt the Holy Spirit residing within you. Gluttony was ranked a Catholic sin, but was by most enumerators the least severe of them, and was linked to a sin against the spirit, not just the body.
Moderns have no such problem making this distinction, and multi-million viewer television shows exist simply to exorcize people of their fatness. Millions of people every week tune into The Biggest Loser to watch people become morally better as they lose weight (it should duly be noted that a previous iteration of this show existed, Extreme Makeover, but people obviously found it distasteful that the participants should become more moral without having to work for them. Gastric bypass surgery was not sufficient penance). That they think these people are better after losing weight is a testament to modern superficiality.
If being fat is immoral, then what is viewed as the highest morality is not healthfulness, but some vague respect for food and Epicurean pleasures. Fat people are, to borrow from Woolf, out of proportion. That, and they do not eat at morally correct eating establishments. Fat people, or most Americans, eat at places like Applebees and The Olive Garden, while moral foodies eat their own chicken's eggs, or the eggs of chickens that were laid very close to them. To a certain foodie set, lying, stealing, and betraying those closest to one are hardly as bad as eating at the wrong restaurant. I am acquainted with a large enough set of people who would be wholly comfortable breaking bread with an adulterer, but would not sit down to eat with a person that consumes 'fast' food. These people do not see their moral bankruptcy, and in fact find themselves to be morally superior to others because they shop at a farmers market and eat organic. Myers links the foodies in with gluttony, but I do not think he has gotten the sin correct. To me, it is pride that the foodie is guilty of. Pride in their morals, self-satisfaction, and the inability to see beyond themselves. The foodie sees the whole world through the compass of food. Other places have no culture outside of food, and one can understand everything about a place through its food; it is an odd sort of revision of Marxism, where even economics takes a back seat to consumption. To the foodie, prayer before a meal is just time to sniff and salivate, and the idea of food having a spiritual aspect to it is transformed to vague, Pantheistic, Transcendental ideas about Nature and God, whatever the hell those mean. It is this, the moral superiority of the foodie that is most irksome and sinful.
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche distinguishes Epicurean and Stoic times, and links the Epicurean with extreme sensitivity and intellectual curiosity; basically himself with his delicate stomach and penchance for migraines. Watching Anthony Bourdain eat the eyeballs of cats, and whoever it is on Man vs. Food eat god knows what he eats, I do not see a good deal of sensitivity or intellectual curiosity.
