I ate the orchestra
Misadventures in modern gluttony
Brendan Cathcart, Staff
Like the “William Tell Overture,” the word “gluttony” has been loaded with so much historical and pop-cultural baggage that it’s difficult to carry without grimacing ironically. It’s a cliché, an anachronism, a relic on par with the bones of a saint. But just because the old proscriptive interdict may have slipped beneath the unceasing waves of culture, does that also mean that the practice it described, the sin as some call it, has also lost its meaning?
In the lands of plenty, more people than ever are eating their faces off; if that weren’t true then it also wouldn’t be true that corporations like McDonalds are worth “twentyteen kabillions” of dollars. “For the first time,” Cathy Newman reports in an August 2004 National Geographic article “Why are we so fat?” that “there are as many overfed, overweight people in the world as those who are underfed and underweight.” If those little distended belly children on the World Vision commercials knew such an absurd fact they might just climb back out of their graves and scream their bewilderment into the darkness. Newman also notes that, last year, gastric bypass operations were performed on 103,200 desperate patients who were otherwise in the process of sealing off the escape exits and drowning inside themselves. Clearly then, people have not forgotten how to open their mouths as wide as they can possibly go.
The Encarta World English Dictionary defines gluttony as “the act or practice of eating to excess.” Not to be confused with the sort of celebratory act where a host stands at the head of a table, raises a glass, and says, “Let’s drink to the continued good health of so and so!” Excess, Encarta goes on to define, is a “behaviour or activity that goes beyond what is socially or morally acceptable, or beyond what is good for somebody’s health or well-being.” Such a cheerless definition should ostensibly deter such activity, but it doesn’t. In the CanWest News Service article “Gluttons for digestive punishment,” Meagan Fitzpatrick reports that 31 per cent of Canadians “make a conscious food or drink choice they know won’t agree with their body at least once a week. Eight per cent said they do it every single day.”
Four guys I went to junior high school with seemed to have figured something out that I didn’t understand about the subject yet. On one Friday night they had what could be called a negative competition, the winner really the loser by most standards of bodily well-being, but somehow to them, still the winner. Whichever one could get horrendous amounts of pizza to spontaneously reverse course mid-digestion, first, was the champion of the universe. Bonkers unfathomable but, nonetheless, when they told us about it on Monday morning their story of excess inspired some sort of awe and was unanimously voted into the canon. They were all smiles, too, no regrets.
Convinced that there must be something more to the experience that one billion Catholics consider to be one of the top seven worst things a person can do on earth, I decided to take matters into my own hands, and then cram them into my mouth. Since traditionally gluttony has been considered to be a transgression and today people already eat more than they could ever need on a regular basis, to make it worthwhile, I decided that I must transgress my own ethics. Some type of boundary needed to be put at stake, so I decided that on top of my favourite vegetable and bean dishes I would fill my gorge with animals, which had been off-limits for a few years already. I would be the Bacchic celebrant written about by Euripides, wrapped in a fawn-skin coat, reveling ecstatically in the mountains, where, “he hunts for blood, and rapturously eats the raw flesh of the slaughtered goat. Hurrying on to the Phrygian or Lydian mountain heights. Possessed, ecstatic, he leads their happy cries; the earth flows with milk, flows with wine, flows with nectar of bees . . . and amidst the frenzy of song he shouts like thunder, ‘On, on! Run, dance, delirious, possessed!’”
The night before the buffet table I had a nightmare that I was Prosperpine, kidnapped by Pluto and taken down into the underworld. Trapped in the shadowy realm I ran aimlessly past terrifying sights, the most disturbing being a young boy with no eyes, nose, or ears. His face was entirely taken up by a gaping mouth with an enormous tongue six inches wide and a foot long protruding out of it. I stopped to try to shove it back inside his mouth, but it wouldn’t go. Upon waking in the morning and feeling unsettled I looked up the story of Prosperpine in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and found Jupiter’s disturbing stipulation to Prosperpine’s mother Ceres, who was trying to get her daughter released from Tartarus. “Prosperpine may return to heaven,” declared Jupiter, “but on one definite condition, that no food has passed her lips in that other world.” OK, I thought, what exactly am I getting myself into?
