DO YOU FASTEN AFTER ASH WEDNESDAY?
Comrades,
Welcome to the desert of the real.
For the time being, my writing on here will be entirely free. If you have the means, and believe in paying for good writing, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
No, I never fasten – and for a simple reason. I am a workaholic and I do not want to spend time worrying about my eating habits. I do not fasten not because I like eating but because I don’t care about it – it’s an unpleasant duty to be done as quickly and painlessly as possible. This is why my favoured places for eating are small fast food corners in provincial gas stations in Island where defrozen pizzas or hamburgers are the top offer.
My dream of the ultimate food is: take totally different elements like chocolate cake, fresh fruit, pork chop with creamy sauce, etc., mix them into a monotonous paste, and then cut the paste into small pieces that you eat till you are full. In such a way, you can eat a universal meal that defies all categorization. (For this reason, I also hate meat where you can see directly that it was of an animal, like kidneys or tongue. Meat must be “abstract,” it has to look like it was made in a factory – I cannot even imagine eating something like the Scottish haggis - a sausage full of entrails - or a boiled goat’s head as they do it in Island.) As for the accompanying drink, a mixture of diet coke and expensive wine is my first choice, just to ruin the taste of the vine… no wonder my friends joke that if there will ever be a Hague tribunal of crimes against food, I will be the first one arrested and delivered to it!
I can eat exquisite food, but it must be in a company, so that the point is not to enjoy food but the accompanying conversation. To do it alone is like masturbating in public. This, however, does not mean that I do not follow certain rituals in eating. When I am alone, my favorite ritual is that of a 10-minutes lunch. I open a can of ordinary food (like beans with cheap sausages), spill it out into a casserole, and while the food is getting warm, I am already eating it with a spoon (I begin on the edges where it first warms). When I am finished, I quickly wash the casserole, so that the entire meal takes a maximum 10 minutes.
While abroad in a hotel, my ritual is to eat cheap and fast – I go to the nearest supermarket and buy the “lowest” local products – in the UK, it is pork pies or canned beef; in the US, it is spam or a can of chicken with corn. I always eat them cold.
What I hate most is the Politically Correct politicization of eating. Recently, in Germany, I got into a conflict with my friends who wanted to go to a Lebanese place – but I hate humus which reminds me of the food prepared by cows for their young offspring (they first make it warm and soft by munching it in their mouth and then they feed to their offspring). So I insisted on a traditional German plate with pork chops and onions, and I was treated by them almost like a neo-Nazi racist…
My secret pleasure is in violating rules. When in Israel, I like to go to an Italian place and order spaghetti carbonara which violate all kosher rules (they mix cream with meat which is pork ham, of course). In India, I got into trouble when I insisted that I want a mixed beef-pork stew, to embarrass both Hindus and Muslims in my company.
But a place that I really want to visit is an expensive restaurant in Paris where, so I was told, the waiter rejects your order if it is not a correct one. If you order a wrong wine with your main course, the waiter coldly informs you that he cannot serve you this combination, without indicating what would be the appropriate drink – you have to work hard to guess it…
This is why I do not fasten. Would you accept my invitation and eat with me?
Your opinions on food, like many of yours on politics, disgust me. This is why I am a subscriber.
Possibly the most extreme form of self-denying, self-negating self-deprivation is the Jain practice of Sallekhana. This ritualistic process of gradually withdrawing forms of nutrition from the practitioner's diet until he or she finally expires is an activity that involves the entire Jain community and can take a number of months to fully complete.
https://bigthink.com/thinking/extreme-asceticism-the-jains-who-starve-themselves-to-death/
Jains insist that Sallekhana is a practice of religious Enlightenment and that it is *not* a form of suicide.
For Jains, Sallekhana is a central part of their soteriological traditions. They stress that the essential salvific aspects emanate beyond the individual undergoing the ritual and are transmitted throughout both the entire Jain community and beyond this into the social world of which the Jains are a part. This salvific effect distinguishes the Sallekhana form of intense corporeal self-negation from acts of suicide. Suicide is illegal in India as is, for the moment., Jainist Sallekhana despite their efforts to fight this criminalization.
"It is argued that it is suicide since there is voluntary severance of life etc. No, it is not suicide, as there is no passion. Without attachment etc, there is no passion in this undertaking. A person who kills himself by means of poison, weapon, etc, swayed by attachment, aversion or infatuation, commits suicide. But he who practices holy death is free from desire, anger, and delusion. Hence it is not suicide"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallekhana#Legality_and_comparison_with_suicide
Did Simone Weil commit suicide? When Weil insisted that it was only ethical to eat as much as the average calorie allotment of the typical French adult during WWII even as her doctors told her that she would thereby fatally injure her health, how are we to understand her final days?
Though Weil experienced several intense mystical states in the course of her life, she was never comfortable converting to the official Catholic Church. Weil's mystical experiences were often associated with intense pain - migraines - and/or exhaustion - factory work. In her final days of ill health and self-imposed malnutrition, what final insights and visions did Weil hope to attain?