Author(s): Francine Prose

Cultural Studies

In America, notes acclaimed novelist Francine Prose, we are obsessed with food and diet. And what is this obsession with food except a struggle between sin and virtue, overeating and self-control - a struggle with the fierce temptations of gluttony. In "Gluttony", Francine Prose serves up a marvelous banquet of witty and engaging observations on this most delicious of deadly sins. She traces how our notions of gluttony have evolved along with our ideas about salvation and damnation, health and illness, life and death. Offering a lively smorgasbord that ranges from Augustine's "Confessions" and Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale", to Petronius "Satyricon" and Dante's "Inferno", she shows that gluttony was in medieval times a deeply spiritual matter, but today we have transformed gluttony from a sin into an illness - it is the horrors of cholesterol and the perils of red meat that we demonize. Indeed, the modern take on gluttony is that we overeat out of compulsion, self-destructiveness, or to avoid intimacy and social contact. But gluttony, Prose reminds us, is also an affirmation of pleasure and of passion. She ends the book with a discussion of M.F.K.