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By Root 1081 0

”2 Fun as this is, the comment is rare among his writings. It was the medieval Christians who chose to paint Epicurus as a devotee of sumptuous feasts. They derided him because Epicureanism was one of Christianity’s few important rivals in the ancient and early medieval worlds. Epicurus mentioned the pleasures of sex, drink, and food in ways that let you know he appreciated them, but he qualified their role in happiness: “Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship. Before you eat or drink anything, consider carefully who you eat or drink with rather than what you eat or drink; not eating with a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf.”3 More conducive to happiness than fine dining or sex was thinking about what these things mean to us: “It is not continued drinking and revels, or the enjoyment of female society, or feasts of fish and other such things, as costly table supplies, that make life pleasant, but sober contemplation, which examines into the reasons for all choice and avoidance, and which puts to flight the vain opinions from which the greater part of the confusion arises which troubles the soul.”4

One of the greatest thinkers of the Islamic golden age, the doctor and philosopher al-Razi, suggested that to promote well-being one should follow a balanced diet based on what had become “the Epicurean school”: intelligent, secular pleasure. In Asia, the notion of yin and yang was very much about food and balances. Yin has a lot of sodium, yang has potassium, and you are supposed to eat a balanced meal through variation but mostly through eating things that are not too yin or too yang. The way to do that is to eat unrefined whole grain, grown as nearby as can be managed. Avoid extremely yang food, such as meat, poultry, salt, and ginseng. Extremely yin things should be avoided too: sugar, euphoric drugs, and high-proof alcohol.

Many of these calls for balance and moderation were later re-imagined as extreme convictions. Unlike philosophers, most of us enjoy having something new to believe in, and find cycles of excess and self-denial easier than constant moderation. Clearly, there are pleasures at the extremes. Happiness appears in magazines as rich food and bone-thin bodies. What I want to show is that we do this. We create this tension to pump up these experiences, to make either eating a cookie or not eating one into an event of importance. If we could see our happiness injunctions for the body from a little distance, I think we could do better. To do that, we need to take a look at the shape of historical advice on happiness and the body, its common links and anxieties. The details here are intended to demonstrate that plausible arguments can be made for all sorts of things, and to highlight the way that such arguments travel and grow. This is about the most important thing you can learn, because science still tells a lot of “just-so stories.” That is fine for science; that is how it progresses. But when it is telling us what to do, we want to have trained ourselves to recognize the difference between narrative and fact.

13

Eating

In the medieval West, on feast days, people gorged themselves in animalistic sensualism. In periods of fast they rejected food, sex, and physical effort as antithetical to holiness. Some monks and mystics renounced the pleasures of the body year-round, but for most folk, the common culture held that pleasures were good. The great Christian movements against the flesh date not from the Catholic medieval period, but from the period just after the Protestant Reformation. That is when we find sects of Christianity so hostile to the body that they refused meat and sexual intercourse. Some of them made no exception for procreative intercourse: they were trying to avoid producing more bodies, and they happily died out.

The origins of American vegetarianism can be found in William Cowherd’s New Church in Manchester, England, and his issue was primarily antisex. The Reverend William Metcalfe