“That he is There (oh heavenly theme!) is as certainly true as that Bread naturally taken removes my hunger—so this Bread of Angels removes my pain, my cares, warms, cheers, soothes, contents and renews my whole being.” -Sister Elizabeth Seton on Communion.
Accounts of women's complex and divine relationships with food date back to the beginning of the Common Era. These stories often use food as a narrative device since food preparation and related responsibilities fell mostly to women for millennia, shaping the way they were viewed by others and the way they viewed the world.
However, food’s religious significance has often been overlooked by scholars since it was seen as a more frivolous interest than a serious area of study. Yet, evidence that food was a powerful symbol holding a great deal of force in people’s lives has always been on record. Especially indicative of this are the stories of Christian saints who were especially devout in their religious practice.
In Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Caroline Walker Bynum explains how food guided medieval Christians through their lives, particularly how they frequently used food to define Catholic extremes. She recites, "They often spoke of gluttony as the major form of lust, of fasting as the most painful renunciation, and of eating as the most basic and literal way of encountering God." Although food was shown to be spiritually crucial for all, it was by far more prominent in the achieving of holiness by women. Miracles related to food and acts of sanctity, such as fasting with austerity for long periods of time, as well as having the eucharist transform bread or wine into the body of Christ, were also historically characterized by females. For example, the fasting of Lidwena of Schiedam and Catherine of Siena was regarded as a sign of sanctity and a miracle.
Food’s religious significance has often been overlooked by scholars since it was viewed as more of a frivolous interest than a serious area of study. The centrality of food in historical narratives of religious women demonstrates how women were more strongly associated with food than men, and today, stories of modern religious women have not shed this association despite the shifting of gendered food practices. Catholicism may no longer carry the societal weight that it did in Medieval times, but foodways in our current media culture remain gendered, and our fixation with stories of the divine hasn’t waned over the centuries.
The 2021 film A Banquet by director Ruth Paxton centers around a teenage protagonist, Betsey, who begins to refuse all food, claiming it's not for aesthetic purposes, nor does she have an eating disorder, but instead, she has been chosen for a higher purpose through a supernatural experience. Despite her mother's desperate insistence that she abandon her new dogma, Betsey goes months without consuming any food and miraculously manages to maintain her original weight, although her health declines and she eventually slips into a state of unresponsiveness.
Stories about the ability to survive without nourishment for religious purposes have historically been linked almost solely to women, and Betsey's claim that she must stop eating by divine decree because her body is in service to a higher power mirrors these stories. Unlike being canonized like Lidwena of Schiedam and Catherine of Siena, Betsey faces contemporary stigmas and is ostracized by her boyfriend as well as her social group. Rather than being treated as a miracle, she faces confinement to the home by her mother, who is afraid she will be institutionalized. This film relies heavily on the viewer's interpretation, posing many of the same questions to the viewer that scholars ask when researching the tales of females fasting through history: Was it fraud? Was it “female hysteria” or mental illness? Is religious fasting a manifestation of anorexia?
The Wonder (2022) by director Sebastian Lelio also deals with fasting females. The film is set in 1862 Ireland and follows the story of an eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell, a girl whose long-term fasting is attracting attention from tourists and health professionals. She claims to be perfectly healthy despite allegedly not having eaten in months. The small village in which she resides begins to wonder if they are harboring a saint surviving on manna from heaven or if there are more ominous motives at work.
The movie is inspired by the stories of 19th-century “fasting girls,” where there were numerous reported cases of young women refusing to eat or claiming the ability to subsist on the eucharist alone. Some of the girls also exhibited stigmata, and most claimed that their fasting was a religious gift.
In The Wonder, a set of two nurses are assigned to the post of keeping watch over Anna 24/7 to ensure that she is not being fed, leading to a slow but devastating decline in the health of the young girl. This was often the case when real fasting girls of the era were subjected to this kind of test. (Some even died when put under such observation.) As the story progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that Anna and her caretakers are likely afflicted with what would today be recognized as a manifestation of religious obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The framing of fasting religious women in The Wonder and A Banquet are both “food as self” and “God as food,” but the act of telling a story of self-starvation in contemporary media shifts this framing into themes of mental illness because of our modern preconceptions about what it means to stop eating. Even the fasting girls of the 19th century were widely dismissed by scholars as being examples of historic anorexia mirabilis (or holy anorexia) cases. Ultimately, the question presented by modern storytellers is whether it truly matters if the fasting of these girls is self-imposed or a result of some divine mandate. Regardless, religious fasting continues to be portrayed as suffering. As medieval historian Caroline Walker Bynum writes, “Too fast, that is, to deny oneself earthly food, and yet to eat the broken body of Christ – both acts were to suffer. And to suffer was to save and be saved.
The 2015 horror film The Witch, directed by Robert Eggers, also deals heavily with themes of salvation and suffering and uses food to set the film’s tone. Set in Massachusetts 62 years before the Salem Witch Trials, it follows the story of a family exiled from their colonial settlement. They attempt to establish a homestead out in the wilderness, but a sense of evil and impending doom takes over the family, and many of the issues they face manifest through food. The family runs out of their supplies as their planted crops fail, possibly diseased with ergot fungus (a hallucinogenic). The oldest daughter, Tomasin, is suspected to have made a deal with the devil or to have joined with the witches that lurk in the woods, and the clues to her allegiances lie in the food that is becoming increasingly scarce for the family. In one such scene, she goes out to milk one of the goats and is disturbed to find that the milk has been replaced by blood.
The Witch is unique in its portrayal of the feminine ties to religion and witchcraft because in giving the female protagonist agency, it subverts the victim narrative of witchcraft and makes a statement on female salvation through acquired autonomy–and it is shown as terrifying. Food has always been much more closely associated with women because women were more involved with food preparation. Through food, women were able to control themselves and the world around them; it could even be used as a means of manipulating or converting family members. And as medieval scholar Bynum suggests, men have feared the extent to which women had control over food.
Within this context of women controlling food and men fearing this power, the use of food as a plot device in The Witch makes perfect sense. Although some audiences took issue with the fact that The Witch seemed to equate female liberation with possession or devil worship, the film is more morally complex than that, playing with the notion of women taming their natural evils” through food-related behavior. By communing with God through fasting or subsisting on the eucharist, women have been portrayed both in history and in contemporary media as empowered by their ability to transcend their flesh and become a part of something higher than the self.
The prominence of contemporary filmmakers using food as a narrative device for religious females in their stories shows that, as a culture, we still find fasting females fascinating, if not for their magnificent piety, then for their pitiful pathology. And although we continue to relate food to women in religious storytelling over men, as we have done throughout history, how these girls are portrayed does seem to be shifting to adjust for modern religious sensibilities and more nuanced female stories. A Banquet ends with the fasting Betsey seemingly being raptured and thus, through her deliberate abstinence, liberated and saved. In the similar ending of The Witch, we see not a young witch being burnt at the stake, but instead one rising up into the night.
Ella F. Sosik is in her final semester of the Food Studies graduate program and is a co-editor for Bite. She is from New England and previously studied baking and pastry arts at the Culinary Institute of America. Her passions within food include exploring gastronomy through the arts and creating sustainable and equitable food systems for the future. IG: @ellasosik
Cover image and article image from IMDB.com.