Eleven years ago, a startup promised to solve the problem of food. Soylent was a venture-capital-funded meal-replacement product composed of such ingredients as soy protein and maltodextrin; it could be consumed as a convenient shake, and it provided a way of getting calories into a body without all the bother of cooking, chewing, or tasting very much. It also inspired a certain amount of skepticism. One could be forgiven for wondering (and many did) whether the new product—a fortified beverage that you could drink instead of eating a meal—wasn’t basically SlimFast.
A crucial difference here was branding. SlimFast was understood as a diet drink for vain women with nothing better to do than worry about how they looked; Soylent, meanwhile, was a life hack for body-optimizing tech bros with more important things to think about than lunch. Its popularity offered an early inkling of a broader trend. In the late twenty-tens, men in Silicon Valley discovered the allure of not eating—and the combination of self-tracking apps and elaborate rules about when and what to consume produced habits otherwise associated with red-carpet crash dieting. Jack Dorsey, the monkish Twitter co-founder, tweeted, in 2019, that he’d “been playing with fasting for some time” and eating only one meal a day. As with Soylent, these practices had been removed from the embarrassing and inevitably gendered realm of body image and weight-loss culture; instead, they were steps on the path to an enlightened state of productivity. Intermittent fasting was of a piece with an interest in manful self-improvement via stoicism.
This vogue is the backdrop for John Oakes’s “The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without,” a recent addition to the library of research-fortified pop-sci self-help. Oakes does not dwell on fasting’s recently trendy iterations—his book discusses neither Dorsey nor the wellness doyenne Gwyneth Paltrow—but, still, he addresses an audience primed to see skipping meals as an interesting and even ennobling pursuit. Oakes’s own experience undertaking a weeklong fast gives a frame to the book. Bodily transformation is not his goal; “I don’t own a weight scale,” he volunteers at the beginning, insistent to the point of redundancy. Nor is he trying to biohack his way to productivity, exactly. What he is after instead is “a personal exorcism”—something that might provide a sense of “profound cleansing” and also “perhaps illusory control” over his body. A fast also promises, or so the reader suspects, some relief from boredom. Oakes’s experiment takes place in the draggy aftermath of COVID restrictions; he writes that he has been “sheltering in place” and mentions going to a movie theatre for the first time in more than a year. In fasting, “I simply wanted to shuck my then current mental state in favor of something else, anything else, even if only for a few days,” he writes. By his fast’s third day, the smell of a sliced cucumber is enough to excite him. By the fourth, he is fantasizing about diving into the “stormy sea green” of a salad’s leaves.
As Oakes makes abundantly clear, there is a long history of voluntarily forgoing food for reasons that have nothing to do with appearance. “The fast of Achilles after the death of his companion Patroclus is a furious sacrifice to the gods,” he writes. His survey includes hunger strikers, hucksters, and mystics; Confucius, Plato, St. Augustine, Franz Kafka, and Mark Twain all show up. The approach that he takes is so expansive as to encompass what he calls “fasting beyond food”—for example, he visits an anechoic chamber (where sound levels can be muted to negative thirteen decibels) and reflects on John Cage. In Oakes’s usage, “fasting” stands for gestures of deliberate negation and refusal more generally. A boycott, he proposes, is “a variant of fasting in that it requires specific, physical actions of self-restraint.” Lysistrata’s sex strike comes up, as does Bartleby, the Scrivener.
The biology of fasting is one part of the story that Oakes has to tell, and though he details the health risks of not eating, his interest gravitates toward possible salutary effects on perception and mental acuity. Recounting Cesar Chavez’s fasts as the leader of striking farmworkers, Oakes quotes Chavez’s description of a transformation that he finds takes place on a fast’s third or fourth day. “My mind clears; it is open to everything,” Chavez once told the writer Peter Matthiessen. “After a long conversation, for example, I could repeat word for word what had been said.” Regarding his own fast, Oakes writes, “sad to report, in my case, my memory never improved, but by about day three I did feel quite serene.” Each of the book’s chapters begins with a brief, diaristic account of his weeklong effort as it unfolds, with particular attention to his senses, energy, and focus. “In eating nothing, I feel more substantive than ever,” he writes on Day One. “I feel like someone gasping in amazement at the night sky: Everything seems new, unexplored.”
A fast, Oakes writes, is as much mental as physical: “There is no better way to explore the power of one’s mind than to deny the body’s imperative.” But the mind-body divide comes with historical baggage, as Emmeline Clein writes in “Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm,” another recent book about not eating:
Oakes touches on this aspect of the intellectual and spiritual lineage that he traces—he and Clein both discuss St. Jerome, for whom misogyny and asceticism were tightly intertwined. “Dead Weight,” though, considers what it’s like to be on the receiving end of that contempt, and to starve the body in response. The book is a personal testimony and cultural analysis on the subject of disordered eating. (It argues, for one thing, that such diagnoses as anorexia, bulimia, and binge-eating disorder often blur.) Clein first developed an eating disorder in middle school, and she connects her condition to a growing understanding of the long tradition holding women’s bodies as vessels for shame and blame. She describes preparing for her bat mitzvah and studying her Torah portion alongside Tumblr. “Judaism teaches that reading is devotion, study sacred,” she writes. “On the internet, girls told me the commandments they lived by.” Girlhood, in her telling, is “less a gender or an age and more an ethos or an ache”—and, in that spirit, her tendency is to refuse tidy binaries. For Oakes, “fasting signals precedence of mind over matter, demanding careful assessment of the most normal of acts.” For Clein, eating or not eating is hardly so simple; a disorder might begin with the desire for control over an unruly body, but “careful assessment” can give way to compulsion, and a certain irresistibly clear logic persists even in the grip of disease.
“The Fast” does not ignore disordered eating altogether. In Oakes’s wide-eyed inquiry, though, the specific tangle of pressures and pathology that bind food, weight, and gender is not a central concern. “Anorexia is an eating disorder that is difficult to cure and can be deadly,” he writes. “It hovers, or should hover, over every discussion of fasting.” This comes about twenty pages before the end of “The Fast,” near the beginning of a final chapter that quotes a handful of doctors and other authorities. “While we must be alert to its incidence, this disease should not keep us from exploring the gifts that fasting has to offer, in spiritual terms and very likely in physical ones as well,” Oakes concludes. He notes that “women in particular suffer from an unending avalanche of exhortations to be thin,” but finds such cultural explanations “too pat” and prefers to regard anorexia as “a complex, heritable phenotype.”
The messaging that Oakes dismisses is the terrain of Clein’s book. Her version of girlhood is an “ever-gnawing void [that] can make you want a body to match, one that looks as hungry as your heart is,” she writes, in the book’s prologue. “Sobbing and throbbing, a lot of the most beloved icons of girl culture are very, very sad, and very, very skinny.” Her book leans on a canon, too, albeit a narrower one. It includes “Gossip Girl,” “The O.C.,” “Girl, Interrupted,” Chris Kraus, Ottessa Moshfegh, and tabloid coverage of Nicole Richie, along with a parade of fictional and nonfictional eating-disorder narratives with titles like “Thin Girls,” “Empty,” “Famished,” “Thin,” and “Wasted.” (These latter works play an established role in the conditions’ annals: patients on the lookout for tips and techniques often treat them as guidebooks.)
Where Clein and Oak discuss the same authors and texts, she reads them differently. She embraces Simone Weil—“the philosopher, activist, and faster,” per Oakes—on a first-name basis, as “Simone the disgusting, the obscured, the anxious, the frustrating, the scream, the sob, the cycle, the infinite.” To Clein, Weil’s voice calls to mind those found on “pro-ana” (that is, pro-anorexia) blogs: “She insults herself for laziness and inertia, claiming to sully the earth with her misery, sounding for all intents and purposes like the self-recriminating online anorexics calling themselves lazy, worthless.” In a canny piece of media criticism, Clein raises an eyebrow at the extensive press coverage that vilified such blogs and their social-media successors. Were the teen-age girls posting photos of emaciated celebrities really more “pro-ana” than the magazines and brands that commissioned the photos in the first place? These girls “are simply reading the room they’ve been locked into,” she writes.
Not eating is an act of will: Oakes describes it as “a rejection of passivity” and “an affirmation of the right and ability to self-direction.” To some extent, he is defining his terms. Fasting, as he wishes to write about it, “must be voluntary” and not the result of a famine (or a mental-health condition). But a book about choosing not to eat necessarily raises the question of why anyone makes this choice. A body is where science, subjectivity, and the social world collide; what people do and don’t choose to do with their bodies can become a matter of fraught scrutiny. Such choices do not take place in a vacuum, nor are they always easily made and unmade. Oakes acknowledges that the lines between rational choice and compulsion are not always clear—one study he cites, small but suggestive, found that men and women who engaged in intermittent fasting scored higher than others on a diagnostic questionnaire for eating disorders. He seems to feel securely exempt from these ambiguities, though. “What a relief not to feel I need to devour the contents of the refrigerator, almost as though I’ve gained some perspective on eating,” Oakes writes, upon concluding his fast. “I realize that even now I eat out of habit: it is something I am supposed to do.” He anticipates fasting again in the future, having “reaffirmed that (1) [he] can comfortably last a week without eating, and (2) routine can be the enemy of rationality and self-control.” Clein, likewise, relates an early moment of triumph. “I watched my body shrink in the mirror, proud to discover how powerful my mind was,” she writes, of the period before she received her diagnosis.
The prose in “Dead Weight” can verge on bruise-purple, and a running economic analogy strains. (“Like capitalism, eating disorders evolve and adapt and refuse to be killed,” Clein writes at one point.) But Clein succeeds in delivering a persuasive answer to the essential question that both she and Oakes raise: Why? What inspires and sustains the choice not to eat, and how does it feel? The forces she describes—manifested at middle-school lunch tables and on TV screens, in hospital wards and online—come to life, in all their queasy and inexorable power. Her story may not be universal, but it has the virtue of addressing one reason that a great many people today believe they should choose not to eat: overwhelming medical and cultural pressure toward weight loss. Oakes grasps for heft on behalf of his subject (“the ultimate faster was King Lear, who cast off everything”), but a book about not eating that largely sidesteps this pressure feels a little weightless. ♦
