It’s Tuesday afternoon and I feel like going to synagogue. I’m not sure what I’ll do when I get there – I mean, I can’t see myself praying, let alone acclaiming the scrolls – but it just seems like the right thing to do. Why? Because I’m fasting today and the last time I can remember going without food for 24 hours was when, in a sad little effort to fit in at school, I observed Yom Kippur.
You’ll forgive me if I wander digressively in this week’s column, won’t you? Lack of nourishment can do things to your head . . . Anyway, I always hated going to synagogue – almost as much as I loathed church. As a demi-Jew, I didn’t really fit in at my north London grammar, where roughly a third of the boys in my class were recent Hindu or Muslim immigrants, a third Jewish and a third Anglo-Catholic flotsam. My dad took us to church on the high days – and occasionally Sundays – but my Jewish mother wasn’t about to oblige; her Semitism extended as far as a salt-beef sandwich from Bloom’s in Golders Green and no further.
It was left to my Jewish friends to chivvy me along to shul. I was amused by the way the men talked right through the service and in such a toothsomely stereotypical fashion about the price of smoked salmon or property but I hated having to wear the paper kippa given to visiting males, the heft of which was undetectable on my bouffant early-Seventies hairdo. I kept having to reach up to check it was still there – although whether I feared social censure or the judgement of He who must not be named eludes me now.
It hadn’t occurred to me from that day to this to go wilfully without food. Why starve voluntarily when so many people – and increasing numbers right here in Blighty – simply don’t have any choice?
Then, last week, I was visiting my friend Farouk, whom I’ve known since school (he was part of the recent immigrant fraction, obviously) and who was recovering from a painful and traumatic back operation. He was fasting and started telling me all about how it promotes longevity by limiting the production of IGF1 (“insulin-like growth factor 1”), which is manufactured in excess quantities by older livers. Apparently there’s some tribe in Ecuador whose members have congenitally low levels of IGF1; they cane it all they want – drinking viciously strong aguardiente and smoking hand-rolled cigars the size of babies’ forearms – and still live to be 100. There’s a way to manufacture this desirable state of affairs: simply fast intermittently. Farouk recommended 24 hours a week or 72 in a month (in a single block) but the interweb seems to think five days’ normal eating and two of under 500 calories will do the trick.
I would have dismissed Farouk as a crank, were it not that he’s a consultant-level doctor and he’d read a heap of papers on the subject. Besides, he spoke to my condition: I’ve long maintained that the middle-aged don’t need to eat anything much at all, which is why most of the older people you see are wandering around wearing whole-body fat suits and why 12 per cent of the population of the People’s Republic of China has that popular disease, type 2 diabetes. I’m not about to advocate fasting as a way of “getting in touch” with sufferers of “innutrition” (see Real Meals passim for an explanation of this nauseating WHO euphemism). I tend to Thomas Hobbes’s view that charity exists almost solely to relieve its donors of the burden of their compassion.
However, I can heartily recommend not eating for this reason: it’s a brilliant tactical strike against the multinational fast-food racketeers and the monopolistic supermarkets. Just reflect on this – for every meal you don’t eat, you’ve taken a healthy bite out of their profits. Then there’s the rebellion against vapid conformity to the go-round of meals imposed on you by late capitalism; as Raoul Vaneigem so percipiently writes in The Revolution of Everyday Life: “The organisation of work and the organisation of leisure are the blades of the castrating shears whose job is to improve the race of fawning dogs.”
And what are mealtimes, if not the very organised intervals between those organisations? Yes, the eater is perforce a clockwatcher, always with an eye on the next time he can chow down; while the faster – paradoxically – is free from all earthly accounts of this nature. Maybe that’s why I feel like going to synagogue, even though, technically speaking, it’s only a couple of hours since I’ve been without my normal diet.
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