Nearly there. The 40 days of Lent are coming to a close with one so-called black fast day on Good Friday. That means fasting plus abstinence . . . so, less of everything and abstinence from meat, though there is scope for a hot cross bun.
Lent is the traditional fast time, way before contemporary innovations like Dry January, Veganuary and Meat-Free Mondays. It’s a time of year when nature is exuberantly vital, but when, in pre-modern times, there was relatively little food around, it was a time for ploughing and sowing. Spring is a better time of year than January for giving things up; the days are getting longer and warmer. Nature is on your side. Nowadays, most people just give up chocolate or sweets, or give more to the poor. But that’s Lent for sissies.
This, you might say, is the original Veg anuary. When Pope Gregory the Great decreed at the end of the sixth century that during Lent people should abstain from meat, milk, butter, eggs and cheese, he set the terms for Catholic practice for the next 14 hundred years. Naturally, this was amended to take account of local conditions; in Iona, under the Irish church, the monks were allowed bread, eggs and milk, but only after vespers, that is, for the evening meal. If they only knew, they were early practitioners of intermittent fasting.
The idea of Lent, of course, is to imitate the example of Christ who fasted for 40 days in the desert after which, as the Gospel writer Matthew observed simply, “he was hungry”. Actually that’s what the Irish word for Lent, Chargas, is about; it’s taken from Quadragesima, the 40 days. And formerly it wasn’t just about food: music and merrymaking were put on hold; so too was sex and violence. Once, Irish people would formally put their instruments away at the start of Lent. It must have given Easter, when all the self-denial ended, an explosive character.
Fish vs meat
If meat is off the menu for Lent, that leaves fish. And a whole repertoire of dishes came about because of the proscription on meat. One reason Spanish cooking features salt cod so often is because it was something you could eat on a fast day. There’s a whole repertoire of Middle Eastern dishes that are vegan and served up for people on a fast. If you ask for fast dishes in, say, Jerusalem, where I’ve just come back from, you’ll get dishes made with things other than meat or yoghurt: flatbreads, lentil soup, salads and dips made with tahini. Personally, if I never see hummus again until next year, it’ll be fine by me.
This year I tried to go the whole traditional hog as recommended by Pope Gregory. Naturally, my first impulse was to find the ways round it. If you include Sundays, Lent is more than 40 days – Sundays don’t count. Ditto feast days: St Patrick’s Day obviously, and then there’s Lady Day, the feast of the Annunciation.
Fish is Lenten, but expensive if, like me, you’re used to it fresh. I could handle 40 days of Dublin Bay prawns, sole, turbot and lobster, thank you. Otherwise, you’re left with the vegan option. In pre-modern times, that was pretty straightforward: dried peas and beans (flatulent and boring, but nourishing); potatoes, leeks, wild garlic and the rest.
Nowadays the plethora of vegan options should make things easier, but it only adds a complicating moral dimension to your diet. Soya can involve deforestation and it’s usually imported from a distance; avocado is grown in pesticide- and water-heavy monocultures; almonds (for milk) are also water-intensive. Oat milk seems unproblematic, but have you ever seen it disappear into a cup of tea? Carbs – pasta, rice, potatoes – are fine but mean that Lent does not entail weight-loss. On the bright side, alcoholic drink is almost perfectly vegetarian.
Hardcore fasters
But if western Christians get above themselves for giving things up in Lent, they come swiftly back to earth when they encounter the Orthodox tradition. I’ve been in Jerusalem, and the Orthodox there are hardcore fasters; they spend something like a third of the year fasting, one way and another. Monks eat plain vegetables, without oil to make it palatable. The laity have a vegan diet that doesn’t include fish, but for a treat they can have it for feast days. They let themselves into Lent gradually, giving up meat for the first week, then dairy the week after.
The whole Lent thing seems baffling to the unchurched. But the cycle of fasting and feasting does make psychological as well as religious sense. If religion were only about what goes on in your head, if it didn’t entail a corporeal element, it would be less than human. The whole abstinence thing, the element of deprivation, is a physical expression of part of the cycle of the Christian year. And obviously, the abundance of the season – spring lamb and eggs – is more delicious when it follows a period when you can’t have it. Lent, then, isn’t all about chocolate. But when the time comes, make mine a Bewley’s Easter bunny.
Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London