OVER-EATING.
THE world does not advance, morally, very fast, but one of the Seven Deadly Sins has, nevertheless, become so in- frequent, that men are a little puzzled to know what it precisely meant. Gluttons are so rare in Western Europe, that divines are sometimes perplexed to understand the rank in the scale of sin which old theologians, and especially the early Christian writers, assigned to gluttony, and are inclined to explain the word as covering any kind of inordinate interest in eating, or expendi- ture of energy upon it. It is very probable that the condemna- tion of gluttony did cover gourmandise—which may be carried to the point of distinct viciousness, the duties of life being postponed or sacrificed in the pursuit of a sensual enjoyment of a very inferior kind—and that the belief in the value of con- trolled asceticism, which can never be quite wanting to Christian philosophers, did something to influence their strong language ; but we suspect there was more than this,—that actual gluttony, in the ordinary sense, was once a common vice, and a much more injurious one than the West, which is intemperate as to alcohol, but temperate as to meat, is inclined to believe. The testimony of theologians, of historians, and of an immov- able tradition, embodied in most, if not all, European languages, proves that among our remote though civilised ancestors, it was a common thing for men to cultivate the appetite for quantities of food till it became diseased, and that they gorged them- selves with it habitually, till they became almost as in- capable of the business and duties of life as drunkards now do. They sought quantity, they ate for eating's sake until they could eat no more, and when they ceased, were as in- capable as many animals after a similar indulgence. (It is a popular mistake to suppose that only pigs are gluttons. Horses and cattle will kill themselves with certain kinds of food, and so will individual dogs, while all the wild carnivores are liable at times to eat themselves into temporary imbecility.) They could not work, they could not converse, and they could not think. They were full to bursting, and repeated the feeding until their lives became one long debauch, and their faculties died away as completely as if they had been drunkards, though, of course, the remedy, protracted fasting, was easier to apply. Many of the Roman nobles were gluttons as well as gourmands ; indeed, the accounts of their feasts indicate a deep delight in over- eating as well as epicurism, and it is probable that the vice existed in Syria, and amidst a generally abstemious population—a Jew to this day is rarely a drunkard, and an Arab never—may have seemed specially disgusting. Another bit of evidence is the continuance of the practice in the East. Men who eat enor- mously, who crave for huge quantities of food, and seek in over- eating a torpor which pleases them as much as the calm before stupefaction pleases the drunkard, or apathetic rest the opium- smoker, or kef the tobacco-smoker, are perfectly well-known types throughout India, where every district has its notorious glutton, in China, and among some African tribes. Indeed, Captain Col- vile, in his recent ride through Morocco, became convinced that even Moors, who are distinctly abstemious by habit, count in their ranks men to whom over-eating is so attractive that they renew the practices of Vitellins, which scandalised even Rome, and obtain by emetics the power of swallowing' two or three successive dinners straight on end. Wealthy negroes have been accused of a similar habit of over-eating, Red Indians are constantly guilty of gorging like snakes till they can hardly move, and we are not sure that gluttony in the old sense is wholly unknown even in this country. It is doubtful if the horrible exhibitions of eating-power some- times made in the country districts are not given by men to whom the excessive supply of food is an enjoyment, while experienced clergymen often doubt whether in one or two households in a village gluttony in the old sense is not chiefly restrained by poverty. They tell astounding stories of quan- tities consumed on special occasions, though they never indicate gluttony as a popular vice. The disposition appears, too, among children. There are few public schools without a gluttton or two, boys who can never be satiated with food, who will eat all day, even to severe illness ; and it is noteworthy that such boys are, with hardly an exception, of a hopelessly debased type. The tutor has more hope of anybody. In maturer years, if they reach them, they are restrained by the opinion, or rather etiquette, in favour of moderation, which, considering the decay of the vice, is so curiously strong ; but doctors could still, we imagine, relate very singular instances of addiction to food.
Gluttony, however, must be rare. We cannot remember, in an experience of some range and duration, ever to have met an educated man who was addicted to it in the sense in which it becomes a vice, though iu two cases we have known men with an appetite for food so abnormal as to be the subject of remark and the cause of nicknames. We question if during the last twenty years a sermon has been preached against it, and cer- tainly it has not become a subject for popular lecturing or Social-Science Congresses. There is a society for moat things, but no Society to regenerate mankind by eating once a day. The poor are very often abused, and sometimes very unjustly, for their passion for expensive food,—a bit of imitativeness sometimes, and sometimes, as in the fancy of Lancashire for ham, a bit of combined frugality and caste-feeling ; but they arc seldom denounced for the quantity they devour, and the consumption of the rich is noticed only by doctors. Theologians have given up the subject, or attend to it only to condemn gourmandise,—that is, over-attention to the quality of the food eaten, or excessive expense upon the table. Very little, indeed, is said even about these, not perhaps as much as might be said, for the taste for good food, though in itself sound and favourable both to longevity and high vitality, is often carried to a vicious excess ; and over-eating has tacitly been dropped out of the area of dominion conceded to the moralists. We should not wonder, however, if it were once more taken up by the Utilitarians, backed by a few of the Medical profession. Nothing consumes the general wealth of the world like the feeding of its populations, and it is by no means yet completely settled that the majority of men, once above the imperative restrictions of poverty, do not eat a good deal too much. An idea has been very generally spread that it is healthy to cat often, till certain classes, more especially servants, eat five times a day ; and the end of the medical aphorism, that those who eat often should eat little, is very often forgotten. The Lancet of September 4th, in a curiously cautious article, hints that the modern world eats too much in positive bulk of food—a statement certainly true of great bread-eaters, a distinct and well marked type— and thinks the modern regularity of meals has induced us to regard appetite as the guide rather than hunger, which is the true one. Regularity of meals developes appetite, not hunger. We rather question the previous proposition, as a very hungry man is apt, to eat too much ; but we believe that the extension of wealth, and the extreme public ignorance upon the subject, tend to foster a habit of taking too many meals. Men and women eat three in ten hours and a half, breakfast at 10 a.m., lunch at 1.30 p.m., and dinner at 7.30 p.m.,—a division of the twenty-four hours of the day which can hardly be healthy. It leaves thirteen hours and a half without food, while in the re- maining ten and a half there are three meals. It would be better, we imagine, for sedentary men to reduce theirs to two, taken at considerable intervals; or if that is too worrying, to confine the intercalary meal to the merest mouthful, taken with- out sitting down, and with no provision to tempt the appetite. Lunch for those who work with the brain is the destruction of laboriousness, and for those who work with the hands is the least useful of the meals. It is very doubtful whether the powerfully built races of Upper India, who eat only twice a day, at 10 a.m. and 10 p.m., are not in the right, exactly equal- ising, as they do, the periods of abstinence, though it is difficult to decide from the example of hereditary teetotal vegetarians, the bulk of whose food is out of all propor-
tion to its nourishment. The great evil to be removed is, however, not so much the midday meal, as the profound ignorance, even of educated men, as to the quantity of food in- dispensable to health, and the quantity most beneficial to it. On the first subject most men know nothing, or at best only the amount of a convict's ration, which is fixed at the standard found most conducive to severe labour in confinement, and is no rule for ordinary mankind. Cannot the Doctors tell us some handy rule of thumb about this. They have told us that the beneficial quantity of alcohol is the equivalent of a pint of ordinary claret a day, but what is the beneficial quantity of food? It must differ according to diet, physique, and occupa- tion, but still there must be some formula which will convey in intelligible fashion the average maximum required by men of different weights. We believe most men would be surprised to find how very low it is, and how very much they exceed it, especially in the consumption of meat. Vegetarianism, which some among us exalt as a panacea, has been tried for thousands of years, by millions of people, and has, on the whole, failed, the flesh-eating peoples out-fight- ing, out-working, and out-thinking the eaters of veget- ables only ; but between vegetarianism and the flesh-eating habits of well-to-do Englishmen, there is a wide distance. Mr. Banging, too, wrote wild exaggerations, but the way in which Englishmen of reasonable intellectual capacities will swallow crumb of bread, often not half baked, by the pound at a time, would account even for severer melancholy than that under which they labour. We want an intelligible rule, to be obeyed or disobeyed, but to be remembered.
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