Stand we ate “as God commands”, the nutritionists would be happy. Religions were also born to teach how to live, to give food, hygiene and common sense standards, which were the foundation and consequence of moral laws. The fact is that in the precepts we find those scientific recommendations which deep down try to distract us from the well-fed and seductive divinity of this era, the God of Consumption.
The Almighty of our times is not in heaven but on earth, he has descended into things, he is incarnated in food reduced to merchandise, in very tasty and cheap products, in sumptuous meals, in always full refrigerators. His altar is the “too much”, to which all moderation is sacrificedexcept realizing that one is no longer well eating badly.
Then we run for cover, with the good fortune of finding the comfort of serious experts or with the risk of running into the new priests of dieteticsonly intent on promoting themselves behind the guise of a nutritional faith.
Attention to nutrition, fasting, sharing and the condemnation of excess: these are not concepts of today, but run through the history of man and of religions (photo Getty Images).
To reflect on the table and its hidden religionsI recommend reading one of the sharpest essays that have come out in the last period, Eat as God commands (Einaudi), signed by the anthropologists Elisabetta Moro and Marino Niola, both professors at the University of Naples Suor Orsola Benincasa. Food, they say, is the fuel of history and the raw material of religion.
“Eating as God commands” by Elisabetta Moro and Marino Niola (Einaudi).
Today, however, «in the twilight of the gods, new totems and new taboos take shape, e diets are transformed into authentic food confessions that have something of the ancient heretical sectsbased on penance and abstinence. Belongings and obsessions. Observances and intolerances».
Rewinding the tape, however, page after page we discover how much wisdom there was in humanity’s spiritual past.
The call to temperance
«The idea that each of us should favor the harmony of our body is a legacy that comes to us from the classical world», write Moro and Niola. The Greek word diaita means lifestyle, which is the concept promoted by international health organizations.
In the centuries to come, it is St. Jerome who elaborates the rule of a moderate refectioi.e. a balanced diet, we would say in the Third Millennium, to indicate balance at the table, neither too much nor too little. «The good Christian eats everything», the authors continue. «His only precept is temperance, his true commandment is sharing, because the evangelical God only orders not to hoard all food resources. An excess of selfishness and greed would in fact end up starving others».
Sobriety today is sustainability
How true, if one thinks of the energy-intensive and wasteful West. The number of people suffering from hunger has risen to 828 million. A fact that clashes with the sin of waste: even a third of the food produced ends up in the bin.
«Dante throws the gluttonous into Hell because their voracity has an antisocial principle in it» reflect the anthropologists. In Catholicism, the food center of gravity shifts to the importance of virtues such as sobriety and moderation. Modern sustainability.
Seasonality for Islam and the Church
Precisely environmentalists would find an ecological root in the Koran: “He is the one who made gardens grow, vineyards with and without pergolas, and palm trees and cereals (…): eat their fruit when the season comes”.
Islam proposes seasonal food exactly as the fathers of the Church dounderline Moro and Niola, probably to highlight that God has cadenced the ripening of seeds and fruits along the calendar according to a divine and therefore just logic.
Demeter is the goddess of the harvest
An idea common to all Mediterranean peoples is the sacredness of bread. It is sanctioned in the book of Exodus: “Then the Lord said to Moses: behold, I am about to rain bread from heaven for you”. In the ancient world, the divinity of the harvest is Demeter, who will become Ceres in the Roman world, hence our term cereals. And cereals are the basis of the Mare Nostrum diet, the model praised by the scientific community and recognized in 2010 as a cultural heritage of humanity.
Carbohydrates, according to the guidelines, should provide between 45 and 65 percent of daily energy. One significant study among many, conducted on over 15,000 people over 25 years (published in The Lancet Public Health), shows that life expectancy is higher with cereals, vegetables, fruits and legumes.
For the Greeks, oil was an object of worship
Another pillar of the Mediterranean diet is oil, which for the Greeks was an object of worship, used to season, to anoint and to light up the night. Just think of the myth of the foundation of Athens with the challenge between the gods, orchestrated by Zeus. Poseidon strikes the ground with his trident and gives rise to a new creature never seen before, the horse, but it is Athena who wins hands down and obtains patronage over the city by making an olive tree sprout from the ground.
The veneration is perpetual. Romulus and Remus are born under an olive tree and Jewish tradition tells that the first seed of the plant falls from the earthly Paradise to land on Adam’s tomb, «a gift from God to the first man, as if to say that the history of this tree and that of humanity are the same thing», write the authors, who recall about Christianity: the sign of peace is the olive branch, brought to Noah at the end of the universal flood.
For their part, the scientists erect the oil as a potential viaticum for longevity. One of the latest pieces of evidence comes from a Harvard meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: to be praised is the abundance of unsaturated fats such as vitamin E.
Chocolate, food of the gods
Researchers also have a soft spot for cocoa. On the other hand, a single square of dark chocolate (at least 70 percent) contains as many polyphenols as a cup of green tea, i.e. a small mine of those substances whose antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties are celebrated.
«The Aztecs used cocoa berries as a currency that the god Quetzalcóatl himself would have given to menalso teaching them to cultivate it», reads the book Eat as God commands. «”Food of the gods”, the Amerindian peoples called it, neither more nor less than what its scientific name Theobroma cacao means, due to the great Swedish naturalist Linnaeus, who literally translates the indigenous expression».
In the seventeenth century questions were asked about the legitimacy of consuming chocolate during Lent and other lean periods. Very high exponents of the Church intervene in the controversy, such as Cardinal Francesco Maria Brancaccio, who ends up promoting the drink in a treatise: being liquid, it does not interrupt fasting.
Fasting comes from afar
It might be worth bearing in mind that abstinence is nothing new now that intermittent fasting is on the rise. In religions it is a means of elevating the soul. For Hindus, giving up food serves to purify the body. In the ninth lunar month of each year, the RamadanMuslims are required not to eat anything when the sun is shining.
“St. Ambrose preaches to give up eating because the faster’s saliva would even be able to poison the tempting serpent”, write Moro and Niola. In times closer to us, it is Benedict XVI who defines fasting a tool to mortify our selfishness and open our hearts to others.
Current regimens that invite opt-outs are receiving attention from the scientific community as models that could extend life. Whether this is the case remains to be established, human studies are still insufficient. Among other things, there are serious risks in fasting indiscriminately.
A soft form of food abstinence that healthy adults can practice is prolongation of nocturnal fasting. For example, dinner that ends no later than 9pm and an empty stomach for 12 hours, postponing breakfast until 9am.
Meat yes, but in moderation
During the Council of Trent, the Church establishes with the decree of 4 December 1563 a rigorous discipline of fasts, proclaiming days of abstinence from meat on Wednesdays, Fridays, Lent and all religious holidays. Today’s scientists push the limits further: white meat up to twice a week, red meat once.
looking back, the ancient Greeks ate meat almost exclusively on the occasion of sacrifices to the gods, while they prepared their daily life with cereals and vegetables. “Hesiod argues that in the mythical golden age people only ate legumes and fruit because no one thought about killing,” the anthropologists note.
Roman mythology also theorizes that in the golden age humans fed exclusively on the fruits of the earth, living in harmony with gods and animals. As for Buddha, he says: “He who eats meat kills the seed of great compassion.” The Koran, on the other hand, divides foods into two broad categories, those permitted and those prohibitedand the list of prohibited meats opens with pork.
Sharing is important
Religions and medicine find themselves in unanimous agreement on one theme: conviviality. Moro and Niola write: «Religions emphasize the importance of sharing, of food communion. Which for Christians has its model in the Last Supper, when Christ breaks the bread and shares the wine with the apostles, as if the shared food acquired an added value, a spiritual and social plus that nourishes both the soul and the flesh ».
Psychologists have been able to prove with their studies that we feel better when we dine with relatives, friends or acquaintances. it seems, a lunch with friends increases the release of endorphins, endogenous opioids that act like a small drug produced by the brain, which raise the pain perception threshold, remove tension, instill serenity. Here, sharing, sitting together: this is eating like God.
Eliana Liotta (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
Eliana Liotta is a journalist, writer and science popularizer. On iodonna.it and on the main platforms (Spreaker, Spotify, Apple Podcast and Google Podcast) you can find her podcast series The good that I want.
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