On recent mornings, running beside the New River in north London, I have been cheered by the sight of coots wrestling with sticks; magpies pairing up with coquettish hops; even our glamorously sinister cormorant is gliding along with a mate. It’s still cold, but the birds respond to lengthening days. The Old English word for spring was the same for lengthen, lencten, which came to be “Lent”.
Our predecessors would have approached Lent with mixed feelings, perhaps. A newborn generation of wild and farm animals had to come off the menu. Animals competed with humans for scarce resources, so we slaughtered and feasted on fresh meat in December, and eked out salted cheese and bacon in the tough months of the early year. Anything left over was used up before Lent: bacon and beef on “Collop Monday” (a collop is a steak or rasher); eggs and dairy on Shrove Tuesday. After that, game and livestock must be left in peace to suckle their young or hatch their eggs.
There were plenty of biblical fasts to take as models; if Christ resisted a diabolical temptation to eat, then Christians must too. However, through fluctuations and disagreements in what to abstain from, “fasting” came to mean both eating nothing and giving something up. Lent, a movable fast in the early Church, became fixed at 40 days around the 7th century. It lasted for more than a millennium by enabling agricultural and ecclesiastical demands to buttress each other; an early public/private partnership, offering spiritual purity to the individual and the communal joy of feasting – meat! – at Easter.
The Lenten fast was essential but not popular. The Reformation loosened its ideological hold, without escaping the pragmatic need. Proscriptions began to be cast in economic and political rather than religious terms. Elizabethans were ordered to avoid meat and eat fish to support the fishing industry and the navy. Those who had the means ate fresh salmon or eels, pike or porpoise, but most people resigned themselves to salt herrings and salt cod – often called stockfish and loathed for its toughness (one medieval recipe advises the cook to beat it for an hour).
If fish-eating was necessary, it was mistrusted – in the fervour of Protestantism – for its popishness, one reason our island still has such a peculiar distaste for fish. Fasting, like feasting, is a potent unifying force. Whereas displays of consumption demonstrate exactly who is in charge, fasting was a subversive way of strengthening the monastic bond that was a threat to the Reformation’s fledgling religious hierarchy. No wonder it was unpopular with the new Protestant boss.
Eventually, one of our “agricultural revolutions” (AKA, growing turnips) enabled us to keep more livestock alive over winter. The boom-and-bust cycle of eating fizzled out, ushering in an era of year-round opportunities to consume and make money from. Bernard Mandeville, the 18th-century political economist, suggested (perhaps satirically) that we are natural consumers whose private greed, driving the wheels of commerce, is a public good.
It has suited our capitalist, secular economy to relinquish the fasting, but keep the (vaguely Christian) feasting. Businesses can profit from Christmas and Easter feasts, from pancakes, hot cross buns and simnel cakes; nobody has a marketing budget for Lent. But many religious communities are bound together by their fasts as much as their feasts. There is also secular resistance to the commercial imperative to eat more. Georgina Hayden’s Nistisima, meaning “fasting food”, was a deserved bestseller in 2022. Veganuary, dry January, meat-free Mondays, intermittent fasting – all suggest we still have an appetite for less.
Is fasting for the self or something bigger? The earliest consumer boycott in England, begun in the 1790s, led around 300,000 families to give up “slave-grown” sugar from the Caribbean. I still hesitate before buying South African fruit, such was the strength of anti-apartheid boycotts before the 1990s. Giving something up is deeply personal; we do it to lengthen and improve our time on Earth. But fasting together, like feasting together, can strengthen us too.
[See also: Why we’re stuck in Ancient Rome]
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This article appears in the 26 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain in Trump’s World