The news that Rishi Sunak likes to begin his week with a 36-hour fast was genuinely alarming to me, a woman raised to believe that without breakfast, no important task is achievable. As a student, I religiously ate a large banana before every paper of my finals; as a journalist, I won’t write a piece, or even head out to do an interview, without having first had a slice of toast. Such an attachment to regular meals is, admittedly, connected in part to the fact that I am – let us use the chic French word – a migraineur. Headaches are more likely when my blood sugar is low. Mostly, though, it’s because I listened to mother. How can a person think clearly, let alone run a country, on an empty stomach?
Obviously, this makes me deeply unfashionable. Thanks to the likes of Professor Tim Spector, the epidemiologist and ubiquitous developer of the Zoe app, delaying breakfast to the point where it’s almost lunch is all the rage (the number of hours a person fasts overnight is thought to play a role in maintaining a healthy weight, for which reason 11am is now decreed banana-time). But practice and theory are not, for me, the same thing. Even as I cleave to my Sunday morning bacon and eggs, I find myself more and more fascinated by the relationship between elective hunger and a certain kind of (non-religious) holiness. It seems to me to speak to our times like almost nothing else.
