What’s your go-to comfort food?
I think C. Lewis thought he might go one up on Milton in describing the role of food in temptation. But let’s start with Milton. Here is Eve having tasted the apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden:
............., for Eve [ 785 ]
Intent now wholly on her taste, naught else
Regarded, such delight till then, as seemd,
In Fruit she never tasted, whether true
Or fansied so, through expectation high
Of knowledg, nor was God-head from her thought. [ 790 ]
Greedily she ingorg'd without restraint,
And knew not eating Death: Satiate at length,
And hight'nd as with Wine, jocond and boon,
Thus to her self she pleasingly began.
Milton thought temptation in the mind of those being tempted lay in the need for stimulants – for access to ‘such delight’ that surpassed all others and was untasted before, even in your imagination (‘whether true / Or fansied so,’) that made someone feel like they think Gods may feel. The irony is, in Milton’s mind, that Milton suggests that appetite, far from being a new experience as it presents itself each time, actually suppresses knowledge of coming realities – of experiences also never felt but never wished for either, terrors so vast and incomprehensible and empty that the are intent on eating you. He calls that experience ‘Eating Death’, the fear of death that eats you from the inside out.
Hold on a minute, a canny reader says, ‘Eatng’ is a verb in that phrase you quote, not an adjective. “What Milton means is that Eve does not know when she is eating the apple that she is inviting Death into a world where there was none before, the world before the Fall Of Man.” I bow to my interlocutor, for they are half-correct. But Milton’s verse has as many twists and turns as his cunning Serpent when it comes to meaning. Death is a strange beast in Paradise Lost, but one thing for certain is that, however unshaped and empty, even when described in allegory, it is, it is always hungry, always trying to fill it’s emptiness. Unleashed on Earth, whose smell of food had filled his nostrils , we heat this of Death’s vast appetitive ‘maw’:
Hogarth: Satan, Sin & Death.
Whom thus the Sin-born Monster answerd soon.
To mee, who with eternal Famin pine,
Alike is Hell, or Paradise, or Heaven,
There best, where most with ravin I may meet;
Which here, though plenteous, all too little seems [ 600 ]
To stuff this Maw, this vast unhide-bound Corps.
Not only a huge mouth but a thing that is a shade without boundary of skin or hide, Death is all Emptiness to be filled but which cannot be ever filled. He is the disillusioned in the finite and, in the eyes of the everlasting, insignificant, that almost existential condition in which the religious,now they can no longer convince us that Hell exists, must be the fate of the irreligious and is, anyway, the fate accepted by existentialism who put engagement and commitment to establishing one’s own self-determined meaning in its place.
But what has this to do with food? Food claims to fill you, and the thing we call ‘comfort food’ more fully, and in metaphor as in reality, with all kinds of desired meanings. Otherwise physical food only serves to fuel ongoing life. My comfort foods are starchy carbohydrates that make you feel replete, even to the point sometimes of discomfort. Those of us that accept that there is something of an ‘eating disorder’ here should not forget that this acceptance does not preclude the hypothesis that one eats and over-eats to fill some emptiness that has meaning over and above the idea of unfulfilled appetites, like any addictive craving.
We seek comfort that is assured and fills us up. The fact of being filled must be beyond question: hence the drive to painful discomfort often involved in comfort eating. Now C,S. Lewis, again like Milton, also has a supposed religious allegory to support his meanings when he co fronts the idea of successful temptation strategies. This time the Tempter is an Ice Queen, the tempted, a boy who never feels that people notice him.
But the substance of temptation remains food – highly calorific food that stuffs and sticks up the maw, Turkish Delight. The text follows the supposedly tempting appetiser, though it feels and looks unpleasant to me – and uncomfortable.
‘‘It is dull, Son of Adam, to drink without eating,’’ said the Queen presently. ‘‘What would you like best to eat?’’
“Turkish Delight, please, your Majesty,” said Edmund.
The Queen let another drop fall from her bottle on to the snow, and instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon, which, when opened, turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish Delight. Each piece was sweet and light to the very centre and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious. He was quite warm now, and very comfortable.
While he was eating the Queen kept asking him questions. At first Edmund tried to remember that it is rude to speak with one’s mouth full, but soon he forgot about this and thought only of trying to shovel down as much Turkish Delight as he could, and the more he ate the more he wanted to eat, and he never asked himself why the Queen should be so inquisitive. She got him to tell her that he had one brother and two sisters, and that one of his sisters had already been in Narnia and had met a Faun there, and that no one except himself and his brother and his sisters knew anything about Narnia. She seemed especially interested in the fact that there were four of them, and kept on coming back to it. “You are sure there are just four of you?” she asked. ‘Two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve, neither more nor less?” and Edmund, with his mouth full of Turkish Delight, kept on saying, “Yes, I told you that before,” and forgetting to call her “Your Majesty” but she didn’t seem to mind now.
At last the Turkish Delight was all finished and Edmund was looking very hard at the empty box and wishing that she would ask him whether he would like some more. Probably the Queen knew quite well what he was thinking; for she knew, though Edmund did not, that this was enchanted Turkish Delight and that anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves. But she did not offer him any more. Instead, she said to him,
“Son of Adam, I should so much like to see your brother and your two sisters. Will you bring them to me?”
“I’ll try,” said Edmund, still looking at the empty box.
“Because, if you did come again—bringing them with you of course—I’d be able to give you some more Turkish Delight. I can’t do it now, the magic will only work once. In my own house it would be another matter.”
‘Why can’t we go to your house now?” said Edmund. When he had first got on to the sledge he had been afraid that she might drive away with him to some unknown place from which he would not be able to get back, but he had forgotten about that fear now.
“It is a lovely place, my house,” said the Queen. “I am sure you would like it. There are whole rooms full of Turkish Delight, and what’s more, I have no children of my own. I want a nice boy whom I could bring up as a Prince and who would be King of Narnia when I am gone. While he was Prince he would wear a gold crown and eat Turkish Delight all day long; and you are much the cleverest and handsomest young man I’ve ever met. I think I would like to make you the Prince—some day, when you bring the others to visit me.”
“Why not now?” said Edmund. His face had become very red and his mouth and fingers were sticky. He did not look either clever or handsome whatever the Queen might say.
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950; this edition from The Essential C.S. Lewis (Touchstone, 1996)) 74-76.
Cold as you might expect to be in the presence of an Ice Queen – the first example of what some psychodynamic thinkers called a ‘refrigerator mother’ – Food makes Edmund feel ‘quite warm now, and very comfortable‘. But such food goes with getting too attention of which you feel starved: that raises your esteem to the level of a Prince (clever’ and / or ‘handsome’), and to being a son who was wanted.
But the characteristic of comfort food (that it impels towards consciousness of discomfort as a condition of its nature) is also present in Lewis’s temptation scene. The equivalent of Eve knowing ‘not / Eating Death’ is also present. Eve can only negate what she can not ever know until she has ‘fallen’ is there. The knowledge of death is one such thing, but as in Freud, negation and denial is a sure sign of the presence of a desire for what is denied or negated. We get almost the same formulation in C.S. Lewis. The Queen presenting the temptation knows the link of appetite to death intimately, but Edmund does not:
she knew, though Edmund did not, that this was enchanted Turkish Delight and that anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves.
Not knowing ‘Eating Death’ again is being unaware of being eaten by Death and his horrid ‘maw’. According to what is called the ‘dopamine hypothesis’, food addiction is the same as any other addiction in its mechanisms in the neural biochemistry of the body and begins and ends with appetite turning into craving. Addiction necessarily ends with, but sometimes causes Death (it did so in once who was a dear friend once), either directly or as a result of other qualities of the addictive substance. That seeking comfort to console us from facing emptiness in spirit, emotion, cognitive self-value, and its physical concomitants can lead to death is a certainty in an otherwise uncertain chasm that cultures have longed filled with Gods. Satan knew that and knows that he and his colleagues are qualified for that role. So does the Ice Queen, who rules more coldly than the Infernal Angels.
And true emptiness is to ignore the fact that even as I tap this message people are being shot by IDF soldiers as they queue for food for starving children, and that other means restrict the flow of food as a deliberate tool of genocide, whilst pretending it is not that. In Sky News this morning, hardly a tool of the radical left, we see that the suspension of UN food aid has, even when resumed, lowered tne total of trucks bearing food aid aimed at reaching Gazans, even if they dare collect it from US sponsored killing fields.
Is not this a sign of the emptiness of Anglo-American culture and the readiness of the current Labour government’s appetite to taste and relish in the air the death of Palestinian people and their cultures in the interests of Western greed for the glow of oil and the planting of resorts on the Tyrian coastline.
This morning the British government states its unwillingness to recognise a Palestinian state until it is negotiated with Israel, who will (they know) never negotiate this result. Instead Sir Keir Starmer dines with Donald Trump tomorrow on the plum.pudding of the world in a Scottish golf resort owned by the American president.
Pitt the Younger and Napoleon carving up the world to eat. Seems familiar.
We should set to music for them the following Milton’s lines from Book 10 of Paradise Lost, replete with relish at government-induced famine:
... who with eternal Famin pine,
Alike is Hell, or Paradise, or Heaven,
There best, where most with ravin I may meet;
Which here, though plenteous, all too little seems [ 600 ]
To stuff this Maw, this vast unhide-bound Corps.
The term ‘Eating disorder’ should be reserved for the current British, American, and Israeli governments and be the name of the cynical use of starvation whilst pretending to give food aid, in order to fight genocidal wars.
I feel pretty bitter at the moment.
With love to those who love justice
Steven xxxxx
Steve_Bamlett_blog 
