The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without
By John Oakes
Avid Reader Press/Simon and Schuster
210 pages
The true feast at the Thanksgiving table this week might consist of a single bite of, say, sweet potato, rather than a heaping plate of food.
That’s part of what I took away from reading John Oakes’ The Fast, a hearty meal-sized meditation and exploration of intentional eating breaks. The book is now out in paperback.
In his book, Oakes makes a convincing case for sometimes stepping back from daily indulgence to appreciate what we have, who we are, what we can become.
Oakes, publisher of The Evergreen Review, explores the potential of abstention — from food mostly, but also from other rituals — to refocus our attention on the value, the meaning, the purpose of our everyday actions. Rather than punishment or deprivation, a true productive fast, in Oakes’ telling, is a spiritual feast as much as a material fast, in that it elevates our consciousness and spirit.
In Fast, Oakes adopts an approach similar to that taken by Leon Wieseltier in his 1998 book Kaddish: He documents a personal experience and organizes the book around it, but he doesn’t write a memoir. Wieseltier sprinkled his personal daily experiences saying the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead for the 11 months following his father’s death amid a centuries-spanning, almost academic and literary survey of the prayer and related rituals. Similarly, Oakes tells the personal story of undertaking a seven-day fast in appetizer-sized portions: A page of text to introduce each of seven chapters that then explore different historical and philosophical threads of fasting, from the Greeks and religious spiritual seekers to British suffragists and Gandhian and Cesar Chavez-ian antiviolence protesters to diet faddists and anorexics and gut- and mind-cleansers. The device worked in terms of keeping me engaged, looking forward to finding out what happened next in his fast, while diving into the research about fasts in general.
Pretty much every religious group taps into fasting except the Sikhs and the Zoroastrians, Oakes reports. They do so in different ways, he posits: Traditionally Jews and Christians focus on self-denial, on punishment, on repentance, whereas Muslims approach Ramadan not with “fear and trembling” but with “joy, thankfulness, and quiet contemplation” — and that’s even before the nightly breakfast. Individuals in all traditions obviously vary in how we approach religious fasting: In my case, the annual Yom Kippur and Tisha b’Av fasts have evolved from deprivation to spiritual “feasts.”
Two threads emerge: The importance of agency, taking control of your own body by deciding what can or can’t go into it and why. And the revolutionary potential of … quiet.
Reading The Fast can feel like fasting, like a transcendent journey into quiet. As Oakes writes:
It is easy to place loudness on the side of rebels. Noise distracts and disrupts. But so can silence, and silence carries a mystery, power, and permanence that noise can never match, for all its physicality. Silence is not nothing. The universe may have started with a bang, but stillness is the real hard work of ongoing creation. It is also a threat to the establishment. …
By day three of his liquid-only fast, Oakes achieves a high often found partway through extended fasts. The cravings quiet. As in a positive drug experience, the senses are heightened. He can absorb the intensity of flavors, aromas, sights, find beauty that’s often lost in the rush of mindless daily encounters.
How effective is fasting as a political tool? That can be more complicated.
Oakes recounts how Palestinian prisoners undertake hunger strikes to call attention to arbitrary and cruel detention. On the one hand, the Israeli military makes a point of not acceding to demands; on the other hand it makes an effort to publicly spin the hunger strikes as unsuccessful, which suggests they worry about their impact, Oakes argues.
He recounts how a jihadist named Khader Adnan undertook his sixth water-only strike after his 13th arrest, in the Ramla maximum-security prison. He died while fasting in 2023.
Did that fast succeed? Oakes argues that it had value.
“His death led to international condemnation of his treatment, with Palestinian fighters erupting in outrage and the European Union calling for ‘a transparent investigation’ into his death,” Oakes writes.
Other fasts, like Gandhi’s and Chavez’s (against calls for violence within his own movement), changed minds. They changed history. During a conversation on the WNHH radio program “Dateline New Haven,” I asked Oakes how to assess protest fasts — especially in cases, unlike Adnan’s or Gandhi’s, where it’s unclear whether the protester even has a good point. When is a fast productive and righteous? Or, say, delusional or narcissistic?
It comes down to agency, Oakes responded. As well as power — he praised political fasts that emanate “from below.”
“If you’re put in jail, you can’t stop someone from throwing you in jail. But then you can refuse to eat, for example, and then the jailers can force you to eat, which, by the way, is an extremely dangerous process,” as demonstrated in particularly gruesome fashion at Guantanamo Bay, Oakes said.
“Fasting has this universal quality of conveying a sense of purity. Margaret Thatcher accused the IRA prisoners [who fasted] of narcissism, and said, ‘Let them die.’ … That kind of statement, it forces them to reveal this hardness and this cruelty and this basically inhumane stance.”
I asked Oakes what, and if, he plans to eat for Thanksgiving.
A vegetarian, he has sauerkraut, potato pierogies, and wild rice on the menu, he reported. “We’ll have lots to eat.”
Twice a year, meanwhile, he has continued to engage in week-long fasts.
Click on the video below to watch the full conversation with “Fast” author John Oakes on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”
