Ómós Digest #131: Why do we fast?

A deeper reflection. By Chris Kissane.

Hello all, 

I spent a wonderful time baking in Glasgow last week. I thought I’d learn about how to bake great bread and although my folding and shaping may have improved marginally, more significantly, I was taught what constitutes great bread (that’s an important subject for next week). However, during the early morning hours in transit to the bakery, I became increasingly aware of the city's impressive, albeit worn, Victorian architecture. Although today Glasgow is a city with a working-class reputation and a thriving cultural scene, I learned that in the 19th century, Glasgow ranked as one of the world’s most prosperous cities as a result of industrialisation, met with the caveat of simultaneously being occupied by a torrid degree of poverty, crime, and disease. Not for the first time, history revealed that the rich could live comfortably amongst the poor. With this awareness of such alarming apathy at the forefront of my thoughts, coupled with the atrocities currently taking place across the world, Chris’ article on fasting has never felt more relevant.

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le meas,

Cúán and the Ómós team.

Without eating, we cannot survive. This is one of our most fundamental biological realities and one that has placed food at the centre of our societies since their beginnings. Yet, for thousands of years, people have voluntarily gone long periods without eating, choosing to ignore their basic instincts in a distinctly human way. So this begs the question, why do we fast?

This weekend, over a billion Muslims will begin their annual fasting month of Ramadan to commemorate Muhammad’s first revelation, when God spoke to him while he was alone in a cave in the desert. Between sunrise and sunset, Muslims will consume nothing but water and break their fast together each evening with the Iftar meal. Many also abstain from smoking, sex and other pleasures, as the season also encourages reflection, peace and prayer.

At the same time, over a billion Christians are currently marking their own fasting season of Lent, when traditionally meat, dairy, eggs, sex and war were avoided in commemoration of the 40 days and nights in the desert that Christ spent resisting the temptations of Satan.

Such traditions exist all across the globe. Like Buddha surviving on a single grain of rice, Buddhists fast in search of spiritual clarity. The indigenous people of America and the ancient Israelites of the Bible fasted to seek the mercy and favour of their Gods. Jewish people today fast to atone for sin and to commemorate loss. Hindus fast every month to unite their body and soul, and to get closer to the divine, like Christian monks who sought to make room for the spiritual in a very physical world.

Like any system of prohibition, fasting has always been accompanied by avoidance and evasion. ‘Fasting girls’ who became celebrities for their long devotional fasts, were often revealed to be conning their followers by eating and drinking in secret. Monks in Munich brewed strong beer they called ‘liquid bread’ to get them through the six long weeks of Lent. A corrupt church sold indulgences to allow people to buy themselves out of their obligations to fast. While some Protestants would abandon fasting as a ‘Jewish superstition’ or a ‘Roman swindle’, others had to find ways to integrate it into their new religions to discourage greed and excess, or in the case of England, to encourage people to buy fish and support the country’s vital maritime interests.

Even if it is ancient and traditional, and often characterised by arcane rules and restrictions, fasting has always had a radical character. Medieval Christian women like Catherine of Siena and Clare of Assisi fasted to gain agency over their bodies and souls, and their own access to God in a world dominated by men. The ancient Irish and Indians would fast to shame those who had wronged them - a form of protest that has persisted into modern times. The force-feeding of English suffragettes, Gandhi's non-violent fasts, and the deaths of Irish republican hunger strikers Terence MacSwiney and Bobby Sands all captured global attention in the last century.

Portrait of Terence MacSwiney by Hugh C. Charde at IMMA, Dublin.

Today in the West, fasting often seems a lot less political. ‘Wellness’ culture has repackaged millennia-old ideas that fasting is beneficial for our bodies and a way of saving ourselves from our excesses. Advocates for intermittent fasting promise better health, mental clarity, and high performance: the British prime minister fasts for 36 hours a week, writer Jeanette Winterson calls a 10-day fast her ‘annual holiday’, and Silicon Valley has unsurprisingly taken the practice to worrying extremes. Compared to full-time denial, fasting diets like 5:2 and 8:16 may offer some a more attractive and achievable route to losing weight.

The evidence is mixed on the benefits of intermittent fasting, with some arguing it achieves nothing unless you eat overall, and other concerns that it affects women differently to men. In a time of excess consumption and obesity crisis, thinking about how and what we eat is certainly a good thing, as is people eating in a way that makes them feel healthier or more fulfilled day-to-day. 

Placing the focus of fasting on ourselves, however, we are perhaps losing sight of a key ingredient that has motivated fasting since its origins: solidarity. There is, at times, something uncomfortable about wellness discourse focusing on the ‘middle-class problem’ of choosing when to eat best without noting that so many cannot eat at all. When early Islamic scholars were asked why Allah wanted people to fast, they said it was ‘so that the rich may face hunger and not forget the hungry’. 

Today, hundreds of millions of people go to bed hungry every night, even in the richest countries on earth, where for many the problem is getting worse. Across the Islamic world, hunger will haunt this year’s Ramadan. One of the most rapid and extreme hunger crises of recent decades has been created by Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, while the threat of starvation stalks a long crescent from Mali to South Sudan, Yemen to Afghanistan - a problem made worse by both war and climate change.

The world’s reaction is marked by what Pope Francis called in his Lenten message, ‘the globalisation of indifference’. Action Against Hunger estimates that 65% of funding requests for the world’s worst hunger crises went unmet in 2023, a gap between funding and desperate need that is getting bigger despite widespread awareness of how bad the situations are.

If fasting does not provoke us to think about others, it runs the risk of becoming a display of thoughtless privilege. In the Bible, the ancient Israelites complain to God that ‘we have fasted but you have not noticed’. God is incensed: on the same days you fasted, he tells them, you exploited your workers, fought with each other and engaged in violence. The point of fasting was not to performatively put on a ‘sackcloth and ashes’, but ‘to lose the chains of injustice’ and ‘set the oppressed free’, ‘to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter’. 

Fasting for any reason offers us a chance to pause and reflect on our place in the world, and the many sides of our collective relationship with food. For whatever reason we fast this year, we should think about how lucky we are to be able to choose when to eat and to remember to fight for those who cannot.