Practice like a Stoic: 11, Moderate at mealtime

Use your behavior to change your emotional responses

Image from picryl.com, CC license.

[This series of posts is based on A Handbook for New Stoics—How to Thrive in a World out of Your Control, co-authored by yours truly and Greg Lopez. It is a collection of 52 exercises, which we propose reader try out one per week during a whole year, to actually live like a Stoic. In Europe/UK the book is published by Rider under the title Live Like A Stoic. Below is this week’s prompt and a brief explanation of the pertinent philosophical background. Check the book for details on how to practice the exercise, download the exercise forms from The Experiment’s website, and comment below on how things are going. Greg and/or I will try our best to help out! This week’s exercise is found at pp. 79-81 of the paperback edition.]

“Thus the oftener we are tempted by pleasure in eating, the more dangers there are involved. And indeed at each meal there is not one hazard for going wrong, but many. First of all, the man who eats more than he ought does wrong, and the man who eats in undue haste no less, and also the man who wallows in the pickles and sauces, and the man who prefers the sweeter foods to the more healthful ones, and the man who does not serve food of the same kind or amount to his guests as to himself. There is still another wrong in connection with eating, when we indulge in it at an unseasonable time, and although there is something else we ought to do, we put it aside in order to eat.” (Musonius Rufus, Lectures, 18.B4)

One of the four cardinal Stoic virtues is temperance, the ability to do things in just measure—not too much and not too little. There are many opportunities to practice temperance, but one of the most frequent is when eating. Two or three times a day, depending on your habits, you will be sitting at a table to eat, and you will be tempted to go wrong by eating too much, too quickly, too slowly, or by choosing unhealthy options, as Musonius lists. The Stoics aren’t trying to kill the joy of eating a good meal. That, for them, is a preferred indifferent. Rather, the idea is to stay on guard, since eating can lead us onto the unvirtuous path. Precisely because it is such a frequent and mundane activity, we tend not to pay attention to it. But we should be alert, both because of the intrinsic value we get from exercising moderation at lunch or dinner, and because paying attention helps strengthen our temperance muscle.

Let’s consider each item on Musonius’s list in turn: (1) Eating too much is bad for our health, as the ongoing obesity epidemic in wealthy nations demonstrates. (2) Eating in a hurry has also been shown by medical research to be bad for us, both in terms of our digestion and waistline. (3) Wallowing in “pickles and sauces” is a reference to indulging in eating habits that are not healthy, pursuing pleasure over nutrition (although the two, by the way, are not at all incompatible), which is the same problem presented by (4) eating foodstuff that is sweet rather than salutary. (5) Helping ourselves to better or larger portions than our guests is clearly rude, showing little concern for others and too much preoccupation with satisfying our own appetites. Finally, (6) eating at the wrong time, when we should be doing something else instead, gets in the way of our duties as members of the human polis. To Musonius’s list we could add also the twenty-first-century problem (7) of not being sufficiently concerned with our food’s provenance, in terms of three criteria: environmental impact, fair treatment of labor, and, if we are not vegetarian or vegan, suffering imposed on animals.

Isn’t this a bit too much, though? Why risk spoiling a perfectly ordinary and often enjoyable activity of everyday life by overcomplicating it? And yet, if we do not pay attention hic et nunc (to the here and now), when, exactly, are we going to start working on our virtue? As Epictetus, Musonius’s famous student, says: “When faced with anything painful or pleasurable, anything bringing glory or disrepute, realize that the crisis is now, that the Olympics have started, and waiting is no longer an option; that the chance for progress, to keep or lose, turns on the events of a single day.”

The goal is not to become obsessed with every detail of every meal, but rather to more carefully consider what you are doing, and whether you could be doing it better. Call it the Stoic version of mindfulness, as in being mindful of your decisions and actions, which are, after all, the only things you can truly control.