Originally a lecture in the New York Public Library's Seven Deadly Sins series, this erudite little meditation on appetite and religion matches ancient and medieval texts (Petronius, St. John Chrysostom) with up-to-date references to stomach stapling and Saveur. A confident satirist and stylist, Prose (Blue Angel, etc.) avows her bafflement at the idea of sinful eating and glosses the intervening early modern and postindustrial periods as too contentedly gluttonous—what else is capitalism but the desire for more?—to bother about. Instead she focuses on the morality of the Church, which condemned gluttony in its various forms as an offense against, or at least an obstacle to, godliness. This approach she contrasts with the current ambivalence about food consumption, which extols gastronomic luxury while condemning fat and self-indulgence. Desire for food (rather than the mere need of it) forges a link between body and spirit that seems both inevitable and dangerous: "the wages of sin have changed, and now involve a version of hell on earth: the pity, contempt and distaste of one's fellow mortals." Sauntering through various texts, Prose offers up a wonderful smorgasbord of factoids and aperçus, whose chief ingredient is irony. Thus, the religious culture that regards gluttony as a willful sin but must allow even sinners to eat; the medical culture that calls overeating a blameless compulsion, even as it exhorts us to eat sensible diets. She ends in the modern sphere, commenting astutely on the newest (and most ironic) equation of fat with money, whereby profit is derived from the accumulation and loss of other people's weight. A chapter on celebrations of gluttony, from Fielding to M.F.K. Fisher, closes this stimulating, pointedly dispassionate investigation of a decidedly emotional subject. (Nov.)
