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By Root 1112 0

of us had joined them. Things were not so rigid in other households, I gathered through the years. Dinner at friends’ homes often meant takeout pizza or boxed macaroni and cheese mix at the “kids’ table” or in the playroom while the parents ate something else, somewhere else, at some other point, if they even ate at all. As late as high school I wasn’t allowed to leave the house at night until I had sat down at the table with the rest of my family, or at least was made to feel very guilty about not doing so. I envied my friends, who, if they were hungry after seeing a movie in a theater, grabbed a slice of pizza next door. One high school friend of mine, Misha, lived with his father in Maplewood’s modest downtown strip, and literally everything he ate came from the bagel place, the sushi place, the taco place, the Chinese place, and so on. He was particularly amused that I had to work my schedule around a family supper. Misha moved to town from New York City when we were in middle school.

In any case, I was deprived neither of eating out nor of eating in by the time I decided to draw the curtain on eating out in New York for a while. In fact, I was pretty spoiled when it came to food in general, and I am eternally grateful for it. But it was an episode during college that greatly inspired my decision to begin my not-eating-out experiment. When I was a junior at Emerson College in Boston, I took a class taught by a professor of media criticism and theory who saw a situation in the media similar to my food overload in New York. He thought, what a jungle out there—people are listening to music on their headphones while they shop in stores blaring music from loudspeakers; advertisements bark at drivers from billboards while they’re stuck in traffic jams between buses and trucks with advertisements on their sides; television news-casts are played in elevators and taxicabs; the radio plays from waterproof speakers in our showers. Basically, almost every activity of modern urban life is inundated with the media in almost every place imaginable.

Professor Thomas Cooper then introduced our class to his “media fast.” Crediting Thoreau’s wilderness retreat from society in Walden, he made us pledge to avoid any books, newspapers, films, television, recorded music, or radio for a period of two weeks. Alternatively, we could choose to fashion ourselves a “media diet” of limited media intake. During this time, we would keep a journal to record our observations. Professor Cooper himself had engaged in a lengthy “media fast” in the 1970s. With a mission to explore his topic thoroughly and publish his findings, Cooper visited several communities whose cultures discouraged or altogether restricted modern media: the Amish and other plain peoples of North America, and tribes in South America’s isolated mountainous regions. He lived with these people, ate with these people, and reflected on their cultures, taking pains to understand why people living in places where media was readily available, such as the Amish, chose to withdraw from it entirely. In the end, Professor Cooper came away with a greater understanding of not only these ways of life but also, oddly enough, the media.

At this time, in college, I was an avid film fanatic. I’d rent three or four movies a week from the library or local video store and would methodically watch all the films by my favorite auteurs. The media fast was a jarring bolt of abstinence from my film obsessions, but, like the rest of the class, I was fascinated by Professor Cooper’s example. At the end of the experiment, I handed in my spiral notebook of scribbled reflections, a requirement of the project (so as to avoid any possible contact with media I might have been tempted with if I were using a computer). I’ve forgotten most of my notes, the specific thoughts and discoveries I suppose I made during those weeks. But I never forgot the novel strategy.

Fasting has always been tied to spiritual or otherwise deeply mental engagement, whether it be a fast from food entirely or from certain types of foods.