Subsection 2 The quantity of food as a cause

Less harm comes from the substance and quality of food itself, or from poor cooking and preparation, than from its quantity, irregular times and places, eating at unsuitable hours, lack of moderation, and taking too much or too little. It is a true saying: “Gluttony kills more than the sword.” This gluttony kills more than the sword—this “all-devouring appetite and murderous gullet,” this all-devouring, murderous gut.

And Pliny’s saying is truer still: a simple diet is best; piling up different foods is harmful, and sauces are worse; many dishes bring many diseases. Avicenna declares that nothing is worse than eating many dishes or prolonging meals beyond the usual time. From this come our ailments; it is the source of all diseases arising from the conflict of thick humours.

From this, says Fernel, come undigested matter, wind, obstructions, corrupt humours, an excess of humours, a wasted constitution and slow digestion. “Hence sudden deaths, and old age dying without a will”—sudden death, and so forth, and what else besides!

As a lamp is choked with too much oil, or a small fire put out altogether by too much wood, so excessive eating stifles the body’s natural heat. “An insatiable belly is a deadly cesspool”: as one writer says, an insatiable paunch is a harmful sink and the source of every disease of body and mind.

Mercurialis regards it as a specific cause of this particular disease. Solenander, in consultation 5, section 3, illustrates Mercurialis’s point with the case of someone made melancholy “by ill-timed revels”—feasting at unsuitable hours. Crato confirms this in that often-cited consultation 21, book 2, naming excessive eating as a principal cause.

But why should I look further for evidence? Listen to Hippocrates himself, book 2, aphorism 10: the more impure bodies are nourished, the more they are harmed, because corrupt humours putrefy their nourishment.

Yet despite all the harm that plainly follows overeating and drunkenness, see how extravagantly and madly we indulge in them. Read what Johannes Stuckius has lately written on the subject in his great volume On the Banquets of the Ancients, and about our own age: “What monstrous dinners!”—prodigious suppers; “while inviting people to dinner, they carry them out to the grave.” What gluttons, Epicures, Apiciuses and Heliogabaluses our age supplies! Lucullus’s ghost still walks, and everyone longs to dine in the Apollo room; Aesop’s costly dish is served up every day.

“What costs more gives greater pleasure.”

The most expensive delicacies are best. It is commonplace to spend twenty or thirty pounds on one dish and some thousand crowns on a dinner. Mully-Hamet, king of Fez and Morocco, spent three pounds on the sauce for a capon. That is nothing in our day: we scorn everything cheap.

Some of us, as Seneca observes, loathe daylight itself because it is free, and resent the sun’s warmth and the cool breezes because we do not buy them. The air we breathe is so common that we think nothing of it: nothing pleases us unless it is expensive.

If we show ingenuity in anything, it is “for the gullet.” If we study at all, it is “with learned luxury,” to please the palate and satisfy the gut. A cook used to be a lowly servant, as Livy complains, but now he is an important man in demand. Cooking has become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen. “The belly is God.”

They carry their brains in their bellies and their guts in their heads, as Agrippa said in reproaching certain parasites of his day. They rush towards their own destruction like someone running onto a sword’s point: “they eat until they burst.” All day, all night, whatever the physician may say—though immediate danger and deadly diseases stand ready to seize them—they eat until they vomit. “They eat to vomit, and vomit to eat,” says Seneca;

as Dio relates of Vitellius, “he was thought to be nourished by the mere passage of food”: his food passed straight through and out. Or they eat until they burst. “They load their bellies with a slaughter of living creatures,” and scour the whole world like so many slaves, worshippers of the belly, and land serpents. “The whole world is too narrow for their stomachs”: the whole world cannot satisfy their appetite. Sea, land, rivers, lakes and all the rest cannot content their ravenous guts.

To complete the feast, what excessive drinking everywhere! “A drunken old woman dragged along a drunken old man.” How they flock to the tavern, as though “born to consume the fruits of the earth,” born for no purpose but eating and drinking, like Ofellius Bibulus, that famous Roman parasite, “who, while he lived, either drank or pissed.” So many casks for holding wine—indeed, worse than a cask, which spoils wines without being spoiled itself by them. Yet these are fine fellows!

Drunken Silenus was no finer. “What were once vices are now customs.” It is the fashion of our day, an honour. As Chrysostom comments in sermon 30 on Ephesians 5: “Now it has reached the point where refusing to get drunk is treated as effeminate, laughable cowardice.” Things have come to such a pass that anyone unwilling to drink is no gentleman: a milksop, an ill-bred oaf, unfit for any company.

The only true gallant is the man who knocks it back best. Staggering through the streets, reeling and raving no longer disgrace him: they add to his fame and renown. Compare what Epidicus said to his fellow servant Thesprio in the poet: “By Pollux, a disgraceful deed!” one protested; the other replied, “But others have done the same before; it will bring him honour.” It is no fault now: so many fine examples will support a man.

It is a credit to have a strong head and hold one’s liquor. The only contest is who can drink most and get his companion drunk soonest. It is our tradesmen’s “highest good,” their happiness, their life and soul. “They pursue it with such delight,” says Pliny, book 14, chapter 12, “that many recognise no other reward in life.” Their chief comfort is making merry together in an alehouse or tavern, as present-day Muscovites do in their mead inns, and Turks in their coffeehouses, which much resemble our taverns.

They will work hard all day to get drunk at night, and spend “a whole year’s labour,” as Saint Ambrose adds, on a drinking feast. They turn day into night, as Seneca reproaches some people of his time: “They reverse the duties of night and day.” When we get up, they usually go to bed, like people on the opposite side of the earth: