"You find fasting in every culture, across the millennia. We carry within us the ability to hold back. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Judeaism vary in specifics about fasting but the idea is the same. You step back from something that you normally enjoy - it doesn't have to be a luxury - and then you hold off partaking of it. That holding back is, for me, at the heart of fasting. It is such a powerful realization that this power of absence is real, that we can shape our world by stepping back, by refraining from doing things. Then, in the 20th century and earlier too this manifested itself politically in the form of boycotts and hunger strikes. In many ways fasting is close to meditation. You pull yourself out of the daily stream of things, you step aside, you contemplate how you have been living, and then you go back into it" 

- John Oakes, author, 'The Fast; The History, Science , Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without talks to Manjula Narayan about the spiritual aspects of fasting, its use as an effective form of protest by the disenfranchised, the great role it played in the independence struggles of Ireland and India, political prisoners fasting in imperial Russia, its darker side seen in anorexia nervosa, and how fasting can perhaps contribute to well-being and longevity in intensely consumerist societies.  

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