FOOD AND RELIGION
become man, the bleeding and broken flesh of the crucified Jesus.
Eating God was therefore for many faithful an imitation of the cross.18
One scholar has recently made the interesting observation that with
the feast, the characteristic medieval meal whose aesthetic and social
components overshadowed the gastronomic one, “Visual effects were
more important to a medieval diner than taste and that vivid colors...
were often applied at the expense of flavor.”19 The existence of food
entertainment between meals, known as sotelties in English, and other
illusion food such as imitation meat during Lent, made people used to
the idea that what they ate was not what it seemed.20 In other words,
food that involved more than just the taste buds was a common expe-
rience not dissimilar to eating Christ in the form of the host. This
raises the question, however, of whether Communion was not one of
the reasons for the proliferation of illusion food.
But being a Christian in the Middle Ages implied more than going
to confession and receiving the host at least once a year, it also meant
observing regular fasts. The concept of voluntary fasting is an old one
and is present in many of the world’s religions. Since people in prein-
dustrial societies regularly experienced hunger and famine, and were
subjected much more than we are today to the rhythm of plenty and
scarcity, they often believed that by intentionally controlling their
hunger they could coerce the gods in some way to fulfill their hopes
and dreams. With food being the most basic of needs, and hunger
making itself felt only hours after the last meal, a wish by humans to
defy the needs of the body and thereby defy corporeal limits also plays
a role in ascetic behavior.21 In addition, communal fasting, as the flip
side of communal eating, had a similar effect of binding people to one
another in a group.
As has been noted earlier, compared to the strict dietary laws of the
Hebrews laid out in the first five books of the Bible, early Christian-
ity offered a remarkable degree of dietary freedom. And yet, by the
fifth century A.D. more and more rules for fasting and abstinence
were being instituted. Why? Around A.D. 200 Tertullian was one of
the first to link flesh with lust and carnal desire.22 In the fourth cen-
tury Saint Jerome maintained that a stomach filled with too much
food and wine leads to lechery, and in the sixth century Isidore of
Seville explained the connection between gluttony and lechery as a
consequence of the close proximity of the stomach and the sexual or-
gans in the body. Indulging in food, therefore, also incites lust.23 For
this reason fasting was seen as a way of both cleansing the body and
controlling sexuality.
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