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There are remarkable similarities between nineteenth-century guilt over sex and today’s worry over our body’s sexiness. The levels of anxiety are the same. Worry over sex and worry over being thin enough have both generated a galactic amount of newsprint, of talk, of regimentation, of ever-revised advice. Consider the stern conviction that if we could only fully invoke our willpower—if we could only resist the temptation to pleasure ourselves—we’d be happier. And what contribution to sexual or eating experience do all our anxieties about it actually make? Did all the talk get people to stop having sex? What contribution to the eating experience have all our anxieties about it actually made? We are still eating cheeseburgers. We make a deafening buzz about how we mustn’t do it, and then we go and do it more than anyone in history. Does that mean that, for all the talk, they were still having sex? Maybe a lot. Are we all just working ourselves up for the drama of it? The relationship we have to food is overwrought, too full of meaning. The whole subject is so heavy with cultural significance that it helps create both anorexia and obesity, while everyone in the middle frets and postures. And you thought ours was not an enchanted world! A witch puts a spell on a behavior, such that those who engage in it shrink to their bones or blow up like balloons. To break the spell, recall that there are vast worlds on the other sides of the body: the universe outside, and the mind within. Surely this slab of water and meat deserves less worry. Consider also this: When people counsel others or themselves with the credo “Food is not love,” I reply to the television (I hear it only on television): “Oh yeah, well, not all desire is loneliness.” The physiological effect of sitting down to a plate of something well made and delicious, savory or sweet, is a real pleasure in its own right, and some people like it more than others. Are the thin so jealous of the passions and pleasures of others that they cannot stop harping on longevity, though they can correlate it only with their refusals if they really search for it?

With the magic of grain, the enchanted world not only winds us up; it also sets us loose. Grain may be the site of important restrictive diets for happiness, but it is also such a strong symbol of happiness that if you want to bring gladness to a room, you need only present it. Sweetened, fluffy bread is our single strongest symbol of celebration. It is the only food that we regularly physically write on, and what we write on it is “Happy…”! The truest birthday cake is the one that parents give their children, thanking Demeter and celebrating that they got to keep their baby. Cake is also the central totem of our “big day,” the wedding. Bread is good; friendship is when we break bread together; survival is when you manage to earn your bread. Bread is happiness, and cake is even sweeter than that.

There have been many health-and-happiness crazes in history, but the nineteenth century’s fletcherizing is among the most intriguing, important in its own time, and useful to us for its temporal proximity and conceptual distance. Fletcherizing was the commitment to chew food so thoroughly that “the food swallowed itself.”5 Wonderfully, the American Horace Fletcher met English prime minister Gladstone in London, sometime midcentury, and Gladstone told him that people ought to give every mouthful of food thirty-two chews—one for each tooth. What was Gladstone up to? It is hard to say, but note that he was part of the generation of Englishmen that was romantic about effort. Upon his return to the States, Fletcher looked at his fellow Americans and declared them fat, dull, and miserable. He went beyond Gladstone’s thirty-two chews and advised that all food should be pulverized by chewing, and that whatever did not get swallowed in this process should be spat out. Indeed, it was said that Kellogg’s concentration on whole grain and enemas was a result of first having been a devotee of fletcherism and