What a Bowl of Lentils Is For

Someone asked me recently whether Orthodox fasting is basically veganism, and I said no, and then could not immediately explain why. The food overlaps almost entirely. On a strict Wednesday my plate would satisfy the most rigorous vegan in the room. If you looked only at what is on the table you would not be able to tell the difference.

The difference is not on the table. It is that a vegan diet is a conclusion and a fast is an instrument.

Someone eats plants because of what they believe about animals, or the climate, or their arteries — and the eating is the end of the argument. The diet is the point; it is where the reasoning terminates. A fast does not terminate anywhere near the food. Nobody in the Orthodox tradition has ever claimed that beans are holier than lamb. The Church that fasts for roughly half the year also commands a roast at Pascha and a table at Nativity, and treats refusing the feast as a fault of the same family as breaking the fast. The food is not the moral object. It is the lever.

What the lever is for is harder to say without sounding pious. The short version is that a fast puts a small, constant, low-grade friction between you and something you want, at a moment when you can do nothing about it. Not a large heroic denial — a small one, thirty or forty times a week. You reach for something and it is not available. And in that half second, before the habit closes over, there is a gap. The gap is the whole thing.

Most of the time I fill the gap with irritation. Occasionally I remember to fill it with prayer, which is what it is for. But even the irritation is informative, because it turns out I am a person who becomes genuinely annoyed by the unavailability of butter, and that is worth knowing about myself. You do not learn that in a week when everything you want is within reach. Ascesis is not primarily about becoming stronger. It is about finding out, in a controlled way and at low stakes, exactly where you are weak — and the answers are unflattering and specific and much more useful than a general sense that one could be better.

Which is also why the food should be good. There is a strain of thinking that says fasting food ought to be miserable, that a bowl of lentils is meant to be endured, and that making it delicious somehow lets you off. I think this gets it backwards. If the meal is bad, the discipline collapses into a simple complaint about the meal, and all your attention goes to the food — which is precisely the failure state. Make it well and it stops being interesting. It nourishes you, it satisfies you, and then it gets out of the way, which is what food is supposed to do for someone trying to pray.

A good bowl of lentils — cumin bloomed properly, plenty of salt, enough lemon at the end to make it bright — is not a consolation prize for the meat you are not having. It is not "instead of" anything. It has fed working people across the Mediterranean and the Levant and the Caucasus for several thousand years, it will carry you through a day of labor, and it is genuinely excellent.

And then it leaves you alone. Which, during a fast, is the highest compliment a meal can be paid.