A Bit Much

Noi pointed out the other day that there're only three and a half months to go until Ramadhan. A few years ago the equivalent statement would have engendered in my breast a distinct sinking feeling and sense of mild anxiety. I would not have been looking forward to the experience. Now something like the reverse is true. It's not that I find fasting any easier than I did, say, fifteen years ago, or something that is outright enjoyable, but I do enjoy the sense of control it involves, however hard fought for.

I've been thinking quite a lot about food lately. I don't mean I've been obsessing about eating it; rather I've been considering my relationship to it, and how we deal with it on the communal level, in social terms. I think it's fairly obvious that in many parts of the developed world we're getting the relationship badly wrong and we know it, but don't know what to do about it. And the awful disparities between over-consumption on the part of those who have plenty to consume and under-nourishment for those not so fortunately placed are surely the most striking, almost unforgivable examples of the inequalities that might one day tear our planet apart, if our casual indifference to the destruction of the environment that nurtures us doesn't get there first.

An embarrassing, almost criminal wastefulness is built into the way we produce food and the way we distribute and consume it. Once you become aware of this it's hard to shake off the knowledge. You begin looking even at a simple dinner in a restaurant with a bleary eye.

What to do? Of course, I don't know, and neither do you, I suspect. But one thing I'm sure of: we should mourn for the loss of our consciousness of how to relate to food in a moral sense. The great religious traditions helped, to some degree, to foster an understanding of fruitful, healthy relations with the stuff. No one I can think of takes gluttony seriously as a sin any more, let alone a deadly sin. But to read a great theologian like Aquinas on the subject is to appreciate there are sane ways of relating to what we consume. To read al-Ghazzali on dining etiquette prompts insights into something far deeper than how we are filling our bellies. (And I'm pretty sure the other great religions have plenty to say that would provoke food for thought, on the matter. (Yes, pun intended.))

I hasten to assure you that I have nothing against food. I love it - especially as prepared by the Missus. In some ways it seems like an absolute good in itself. But those ways can be deceptive.