In an episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza tries to figure out a way where he can eat his favorite sandwich while he has sex. So he puts a “pastrami on rye with mustard” sandwich in the nightstand drawer, so that midway in the act with his girlfriend he can sneak a bite and thus enjoy his two favorite things simultaneously.

The last seventy years of American history could be dubbed the Age of Costanza, because the sitcom character articulates the twin falls of our food abundance that led to the euphemism that we call today the “sexual revolution,” a term we use to describe our era of broken homes, drug abuse, sex toys, birth control, permanent adolescence, and endless soul searching. Really, what is the show Seinfeld about if not living a life of permanent adolescence? Jerry’s apartment is stocked with children’s cereal, they never cook anything, they eat at the diner, and the four main characters are childless, aging New Yorkers where lust and entertainment consume their lives. It’s like a neverending sophomore year of high school. Jerry and the other three are all grains of wheat that never die, but let’s set that parable aside for now.

Here’s what’s interesting. George Costanza put food and sex together. Long ago, St. Benedict recognized the connection between food and sex as well, except St. Benedict realized that overstuffed bellies forget God and proceed directly to sin. His motto of Ora et labora (Pray and work) set the basic rule for life in the monastery, and when I read this a few years ago, something stood out to me because I had lived life in the Age of Costanza, in the age of “all-you-can-eat” buffets and ubiquitous porn. St. Benedict wrote:

Above all things, however, over-indulgence must be avoided and a monk must never be overtaken by indigestion; for there is nothing so opposed to the Christian character as over-indulgence, according to Our Lord’s words, “See to it that your hearts be not burdened with over-indulgence. (The Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 39)

As I’ve gone on at length in prior series about the decline and fall of how we read and understand the Bible, we have had a parallel decline in how we see and understand our food, of which I will go on at length about now. But I’m not going all Michael Pollan. I’m not going to ramble on about organic farming or paleo diets or whole foods or macros. I’m going to talk about food and sex as part of a spiritual reality.

George Costanza was so far gone that he doubled-down, thinking that more would be better and lift his spirits, but it’s a spiral to the bottom. His character was so blind, that while eating he also wanted sexual pleasure, and while making a great joke of his character’s entire selfish lifestyle, he sums up the entire post-World War II era of massive food production and sex as a “pleasure alone” obsession.

But St. Benedict figured out the problem. He put things together in the correct order. Food and sex go together, sort of like many of us 1990s bar patrons considered “beer and cigarettes” as a form of dark-side “bread and butter.” Recognizing this connection between the belly and lust, St. Benedict linked fasting in the Church to something higher than attaining six-pack abs. The modern saying of, “Abs are made in the kitchen” has the opposite purpose of the clean eating that happens in a monastery. A fasting monk very likely has six-pack abs, but no one will ever witness them, nor is is that the intention of the fast. For the monk with low body fat and sweet muscle definition, the goal is not vanity, or pride, or sensuality - it is humility. A monk that is successful in this would not even be aware that such a six-pack has been obtained, and would care even less if informed of such a useless, fleeting possession in this space-time called creation.

Most intermittent fasters today seek six-pack abs to have more sex, or be desired for sex, so like George Costanza, they are controlling their food, and really obsessing over food, in order to have more sex, or to be more desirable for sex. In other words, adultery of all varieties is the goal. I have never heard anyone proclaim, “I’m working on getting six-pack abs for God.” But a monk is doing exactly that without even knowing it. Removing the variable of sex from all equations allows for virtuous motives to flourish.

Here’s the dirty little secret about the obesity epidemic and the fitness-craze in America: they are the same thing. They are the same problem. They are both a kind of gluttony. Fitness goals dabble in lust and vanity and pride, whereas the simple overeater is just sitting in the hot-tub of sloth. Both of these problems can only occur in a time of excess food, where the overeater fails to stop eating, and the fitness crazed person has so much food that they can pick and choose to only eat what fits their “macros.”

Recently at the gym, I heard a man say, “I have a hard time eating 200 grams of protein a day.” I wanted to tell him: “That’s because no one in history has ever needed that much protein a day.” Ok, maybe Andre the Giant. But rather than start an awkward discussion, instead I just pondered my own motive for attending the gym, and wondered: was I truly there to preserve and sustain my body, or if I want to look good for other people, that I might be admired? Because even if sex isn’t the aim of exercise, to be desirable can be just as lusty, and Jesus was quite clear about how easy adultery is to commit. “But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Mt 5:28) This phrase I keep on echo in my head, because how many men today understand that adultery, a mortal sin, is always just a thought away. This is exactly where the spiritual combat must be fought, and fought, and it is a worthy fight to take up because once you can turn your eyes away from lust, real freedom begins, not to mention truly virtuous friendships.

The fitness dilemma, I won’t go too deep into it here, since I covered it in an earlier series. But I will leave it by echoing St. Augustine, who I feel suggested the best reason for exercise, which is to reasonably care for the body, for what God created is good, with the full awareness that we not only a body. As a member of the laptop class, in a sedentary age, we in the privileged information technology world are increasingly separated from manual labor: Thus heeding St. Augustine, I need to “care for the body as though I was going to live forever, and care for my soul as if I were going to die tomorrow.” Love God, love others, then love the self. JOY is spelled: Jesus, Others, You.

Back to the monks: a fasting monk aims toward chastity without a second thought of six-pack abdominal muscles. The fasting weightlifter aims toward adulation and maybe sex fantasies, or at the least, being desirable. No gym selfie has ever been posted on social media without the motive of getting laid or being coveted somewhere behind it. The monk aims toward God, and the other toward the self, or more particularly, the ego. The monk aims to tame the passions, while the other wants to inflame them by lighting a match and throwing gas on the tinder (and often using an app called Tinder). Much of the marketing will tell you that exercise is about body and mind, but will never mention the soul, making it yet another situation where we live out of wholeness, spiritually out of sync, in the amputated state of a body peeled apart from its soul.

We tend to admire the fit, just as we do the wealthy. But we look at thin, poor monks with a side-eye. Perhaps today we’d call those chasing virtue “try-hards” rather than “Jesus freaks.” But how you treat your food is really, really indicative of how you live your entire life. I say this as a sugar monster with the full realization that much of this post is about my own history of dating Sara Lee, Betty Crocker, and dear old Aunt Jemima (may she rest in peace). I really need to get started renouncing soul ties to these high-fructose ladies.

As a food monster, this has been one of the more eye-opening discoveries of my adult life. All of that Kool-Aid, it couldn’t have helped. When I think of the Kool-Aid man now, I can’t help but think of Bluto from Animal House, because like Bluto, Kool-Aid man barges into rooms and crashes through walls, overstuffed and ready to party. I was probably drinking Kool-Aid and watching Animal House at one point. I think I first saw the movie around age ten, which is one of the hundreds of movies that encouraged us all to drink the cultural Kool-Aid, and as I chugged sugar, Bluto chugged Jack Daniels and it was certainly cool. We all drank the Kool-Aid one way or another, since every 80’s and 90’s movie preached the Gospel of the self.

The Mountain Dew, the Lucky Charms, my beloved Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Jimmy John’s, and so much Taco Smell…is it any wonder that the era of “party ‘til you puke” was followed by the era of Spanx and Tinder and Drag Queen Story Hour? It is a literal echo of the Garden of Eden story, where immorality follows a bounty of food availability. The book of Proverbs specifically calls out the excess consumption of sugar as a danger!

If you have found honey, eat only enough for you,    lest you be sated with it and vomit it. (Proverbs 29:16)

Oh, we have found honey. We have found sugar. A book called Sweetness and Power covers the history of how Europeans took sugar by the sword, turning a luxury into a staple, and how it radically changed culture, diet, and even work. In other words, the Garden of Eden story, so concise in its telling in Genesis, has played out over the past 500 years in America since the fruit of the sugar-cane became an obsession. Somehow moving to “a land flowing with milk and honey” causes a falling away from God, in every case. The Biblical stories tell this repeatedly, as food abundance in Egypt leads to slavery, and food abundance in Canaan leads to worshipping other Gods. Without even knowing much about the Bible, we can see that Jesus was a thin man, who denied himself luxurious food, who didn’t workout for muscle mass, and didn’t desire sex, and didn’t sin. As always, he shows us how to live. Even when he feeds the masses bread, he doesn’t continue to do it daily, because he came to bring the living water and Bread of Life, which is the true food and drink that we seek.

St. Benedict knew this “sweetness and power” problem long before Columbus sailed. He has some outstanding insight about how the monks who could not maintain a fast were like fodder for the devil.

And oh, it hurts to read that because I know it to be true. It all makes sense. Peeling the onion of sin from a life results in many “Ah-ha!” moments, where we see through a glass darkly and then suddenly we see Jesus face to face and understand how and why the errors were made, but more importantly, how to remedy them through his healing atonement. Reading the early Church Fathers is always eye-opening, because we think of them as hicks and backwards, and then they prove in their wisdom that they knew the human heart better than billions of us do today.

So is it any wonder that the Fall in Genesis centers around food followed by sex? The fruit of the tree attracts, the rejection of God happens and the loss of innocence results. Taking the easy food, from the forbidden tree, leads to sin. When I think of the Green Revolution from the 1940s onward, which flooded cheap food to the wealthy West, and the undeniable moral decay of America that has followed, it’s difficult not to see the connection. In fact, of all the things that brought the West to a place of debauchery, I would not say it is the birth-control pill or no-fault divorce. No, I would say it is the combine harvester and nitrogen fertilizer.

Hear me out. I realize you’ve stopped reading after that last sentence, but hold on a moment.

The immense amount of cheap food that American ingenuity and efficiency has produced, and the sexual depravity that followed, does it not seem to follow, that this was the same course of tale told in the Garden of Eden? An abundance of food led to the elevation of our pride, bringing about the rejection of God, and soon after, the detonation of sin erupted like a bomb in our world? You don’t get to the sexual fall without going through a story of cheap, easy, and accessible food.

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