Gluttony

The hungriest year I ever lived through, I watched them burn the food.

It was the bottom of the Depression, out in the growing country, and there was a mountain of oranges—good oranges, sound and sweet, more of them than the market would bear at the price the owners had set. So they did not give them away. They could not give them away, you understand; a free orange is the deadly enemy of a sold one. They heaped the surplus up, soaked it down with kerosene, posted a guard on the pile to keep the hungry from digging through it, and put a match to the whole mountain. I stood at a fence and watched good fruit go up in greasy black smoke—and not three miles down that same road there were children walking to school with nothing in their lunch pails but the memory of breakfast.

They did it with the potatoes too, and dyed them so no one could eat what they dumped. They poured milk into the ditches by the tank-load. They slaughtered the little pigs by the millions and plowed them under, to hold up the price of pork in a year when poor folks had forgotten its taste. And every man who ordered it done could show you, on paper, that it was the only sensible thing to do.

Now mark what that was, because it is the whole of this essay in a single picture. That was not scarcity. There was no shortage of oranges; there was a mountain of them. The children were not hungry because the earth had failed to grow enough—they were hungry in the very shadow of more than enough, and the food was burned on purpose to keep it that way. Because somewhere a ledger had a number written on it, and that number had an appetite all the valley's children together could not fill. The belly that had to be fed was not in any child. It was on paper. It was bottomless. And it would sooner watch good fruit burn than watch a hungry man eat for free.

That is Gluttony. Not the second helping at supper, not the loosened belt, not the fellow too fond of his beer and his pie—that is a private softness, and a small one, and the preachers are welcome to it. The deadly thing, the fifth of our seven thieves, is an appetite with no bottom and no off-switch, lodged not in any man's stomach but in the books of the few—a hunger that consumes long past all need, all use, all sense, and would rather destroy a thing outright than let it feed somebody for nothing. And what it steals, going about its endless feeding, is the one word that would set you free and put a fence around the few. It steals the word enough.

I put Gluttony fifth, and he is close kin to the second of our thieves, so let me draw the line between them clean. Greed is the hand that grabs; Gluttony is the mouth that will not close. Greed wants to have the thing; Gluttony wants to consume it—and then the next thing, and the next, world without end. Greed can at least picture a sum that would satisfy it, a number, however obscene, at which it might finally stop. Gluttony cannot picture stopping at all. Stopping is the one act it has no machinery for. And that is exactly what makes it, of all the thieves, the most ruinous thing you can turn loose at the top: a Greed that could be sated is a danger, but a Gluttony that cannot be is a fire, and a fire goes on eating until there is nothing left to burn.

The first lie of Gluttony is that there is no such thing as enough. Everything else rests on this one. The lie says that more is always better; that a man, a company, a fortune must grow forever or be counted a failure; that this quarter must be fatter than the last, and the next fatter still, on and on without end, on a planet that is not getting any bigger. It is the doctrine of the tumor dressed up as the doctrine of health. Anything that truly tried to grow forever, with no notion of enough, we would call by its right name in a living body. In an economy we call it ambition and pin a medal on it.

The second lie is that your hunger is your own fault. This is the belt-tightening sermon, and it is always preached to people who have no notch left to tighten, by people who have never in their lives missed a meal. Want less. Show some discipline. Live within your means—said to the worker whose means were set, deliberately, below the cost of keeping body and soul together, and set there by the very mouth doing the preaching. They engineer the emptiness, then bill you for the lack of willpower.

The third lie is the oldest and the sweetest—that the feast at the top feeds you too. Be patient, it says; be grateful. The more they gorge, the more is bound to fall from the table; their bottomless appetite is, somehow, by a magic no one can ever quite explain, your dinner. Forty years now this country has waited under that table for the crumbs to thicken into a meal. They have not. They never do. What trickles down off a glutton's table is not the feast. It is the bill.

The rule of the hill has not changed since the orange fires: the appetite at the top is fed by the want at the bottom, and the two are not an accident of the system but the same fact seen from two ends. A wage held low is a meal moved upstairs. A pension stripped is a course served to the few. The feast and the famine are not two problems. They are one machine, and it runs in only one direction.

Let me be fair, because there is a hunger that looks like Gluttony from across the room and is nothing of the kind. When a working man wants a full plate—wants it heaped, wants seconds, wants his children to grow up never once knowing the particular cold fear of an empty cupboard—that is not Gluttony. That is the most decent hunger there is, and I will not stand by and have it shamed. Wanting plenty is no sin. Wanting comfort, a good table, a little abundance at last after a life of going without—there is not one thief hiding in that. The men who burned the oranges would dearly love for you to believe that your wanting a full plate is the very same disease as their wanting the whole farm. It is not. It is the opposite of it.

So here is the test, and it is a simple one. Gluttony is not measured by how much sits on your own plate. It is measured by whether you have left anything on anyone else's. A man may eat his fill and heap his children's plates high and still be no glutton at all, so long as the table is set for everyone and the next man's plate is full beside his. The glutton is never merely the one who eats well. The glutton is the one who eats the table—and then the kitchen, and then the farm, and then the town—and turns to the people he has left with nothing and calls them lazy for being hungry.

And here, as in every one of these essays, I leave the pulpit to its own business. The old books file Gluttony among the sins of the flesh—a matter of the waistline, a weakness of appetite, a thing to be confessed on Sunday and fasted off by Lent. Let the preachers fret over your supper and the state of your soul; that is their trade, and they are welcome to every minute of it. I am not the least bit worried about the size of your dinner. I am worried about who owns the orchard, and why the shelves of the richest country that has ever existed on this earth stand groaning full while one cupboard in seven of its own homes stands bare. Gluttony's true crime was never that it makes a man fat. Its crime is that it leaves a whole continent hungry in the middle of a mountain of food.

The barons of our time have built Gluttony a machine, and the cunning of it would have stopped the old orange-burners cold. The men I watched at that fence still had to destroy the surplus to keep you hungry—a crude business, smoke and guards and matches, a thing a man could stand and witness and be sickened by. Today's lords found something far cleaner and far worse. They learned to reach inside the body itself and break the part that tells you when to stop.

For the body was built with a signal that says full: put down the fork, push back the chair, you have had enough. To most of mankind for most of history that signal was simply a fact of nature, like the tide. But to a certain kind of business it was a defect—money standing up and walking out the door—and defects are there to be corrected. So they hired chemists, and the chemists went hunting for the exact knife-edge of sugar and salt and fat where the tongue sings out in pleasure but the gut never quite gets the word that it is satisfied. They found it. They named it the bliss point, and they have built the better part of this nation's food around it. More than half of every calorie this country now swallows comes from food formulated to defeat the very fullness that would make a person stop eating it—and for the children it is past three calories in every five. They did not blunder into those numbers. They took aim at your off-switch, and they hit it dead center.

And now watch the machine close its circle, for this is the part that ought to bring you up out of your chair. Having spent fifty years engineering the fullness out of the food, they have arrived at the most profitable idea in the history of appetite: sell the satiety back. There is a class of drug now—you know its names, Ozempic and Wegovy and their cousins—that does by injection the one thing the food was built to prevent: it tells the body it has had enough. Something near one American adult in eight is now on it. The companies that make it have swollen into some of the most valuable on the face of the earth; the maker of one became, for a spell, the most valuable company in all of Europe. The market for putting the off-switch back is reckoned in the hundreds of billions. So follow the meal from end to end: one set of firms strips the enough out of your food and sells you the eating; another sells you the chemical to put the enough back; and the first set, not to be left off the gravy train, now races to sell you "weight-loss-friendly" versions of the very snacks that started the trouble. They have found a way to bill you on the way down and again on the way back up. The wound and the bandage, off the same economy, charged to the same tired body.

And the appetite does not stop at your dinner table. It has learned to eat the very things you work inside of. There is a whole order of money in this country now whose entire trade is the eating of healthy companies. It buys a sound firm—one that has paid its people and served its town and turned an honest profit for fifty years—and it does not run the firm. It consumes it. It loads the company with debt the way you'd cram corn down a goose, sells the building out from under it and leases it right back, and bills the carcass enormous “fees” for the privilege of being devoured. When there is nothing left but bones, it moves on—and the men who did it are toasted in the financial pages as creators of value. They created nothing. They ate something that was already there and left a debt where a living business used to stand.

You want it plain, with a name on it? They did it to Red Lobster. A firm bought the chain, and to pay for the buying it sold off the land under five hundred restaurants and made the company rent its own dining rooms back—until the rent alone ran to the better part of two hundred million dollars a year and helped sink the whole works into bankruptcy. And the newspapers, God love them, blamed the shrimp. They blamed the all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion—told a whole country that working families had eaten a seafood chain to death with their bottomless plates—while the real bottomless plate, the one that ate the buildings and the land and left the rent behind, dined quietly upstairs and was never once named at the table.

And when this same appetite is loosed on something that is not a shrimp dinner but a hospital, people die of it. There was a hospital chain—thirty-odd hospitals, the people's only doctors for whole counties—bought by a money firm that pulled the very real estate out from under the wards, the same sale-and-rent-it-back trick, and carried off something like eight hundred million dollars, while its chief executive bought himself a forty-million-dollar yacht. Then the maternity wings closed. The cancer care closed. Hospitals went dark, thousands of people lost their work, whole towns lost the place where their children were meant to be born—and the appetite, having licked the plate clean, simply pushed back its chair and looked about for the next course. That is Gluttony with the gloves off. That is what it does when you let it past the kitchen and into the rooms where life and death are kept.

It is the same mouth that swallows every rival until you have no other door to walk through—one company that owns the ticket booth and the arena and the resale window besides, so that whichever way you turn to buy a seat, you are buying it from the same hand. It is the same appetite that takes the profit working people made and, rather than raise a wage or mend a machine, spends it buying back its own stock to fatten the few who already hold it—the hundred biggest of the low-wage houses sluiced some six hundred and forty billion dollars into exactly that between 2019 and 2024. One hardware chain alone spent better than forty-six billion of it—enough, the figuring goes, to have handed every one of its workers a fat bonus every year for six years running. It went the other way instead. And it is the same appetite, grown sly, that eats your portion before it ever reaches the shelf: the box that quietly shrinks while the price holds firm, so that you carry home less and are told it is the same.

Now stand back and take in the whole table this machine has laid, because it is the very picture I saw burning at that fence, only grown to the size of a continent. This country now throws away close to two of every five pounds of food it produces—a wasted mountain north of a hundred billion pounds in a single year, hundreds of billions of dollars scraped off the plate and tipped into the ground. And in that same country, in that same year, better than one household in seven cannot be sure of its next meal, and millions upon millions going short are children.

Hear it plainly, the way I had to learn to hear it at that fence: the hunger in the richest nation in the whole history of the world is not, and never was, a hunger of scarcity. There has never in all of time been more food than there is right now. The hunger is a hunger of distribution—a mountain of plenty on one side of a fence and an empty lunch pail on the other, precisely as it stood the morning I watched the oranges go up in smoke. We did not solve that problem in the long years between. We industrialized it. The orange-burners at least had to strike the match themselves and stand in the heat of what they'd done. Now the waste is automatic, built quiet into the machinery, and no one in particular ever has to watch it happen—and so no one in particular is ever to blame.

So mark this, for it is the strange dark heart of the whole thing. Gluttony, alone of the seven, is the thief who cannot be quieted even by its own winning—not ever, not by its very nature. The envious man can at least imagine the thing that would hush him; the greedy man can name his number. But Gluttony's whole essence is the missing sense of enough, and so there is no quantity on this earth that can supply what is, precisely, the absence of a place to stop. This is why the man with the bottomless fortune is not, as you might fancy, the most contented man in the country. He is the hungriest man in it. He sits before more than a thousand lifetimes could spend and feels the identical gnawing that a man feels who has missed his lunch, and reaches—past all use, past all sense, past any need a sane mind could name—for more. Because the appetite was never truly about the food. It was about the hole the food was meant to fill. And that particular hole does not close from the inside, no matter how much a man shovels into it.

Which tells you where the cure has been hiding all along. It is the very word they stole. To know what is enough—to be able to say it out loud and mean it—is not weakness, and it is not failure, and it is not some sorry want of ambition. It is the single freedom the machine cannot manufacture and cannot sell you. A man who has found his enough cannot be made to defeat his own fullness with food built in a laboratory. He cannot be sold the cure for a wound he does not carry. He cannot be kept forever running and forever buying and forever ashamed. That is why enough is the most dangerous word in the English language to the people who burned the oranges—because their entire fortune, top to bottom, depends on no living soul ever once saying it and meaning it.

Now hear the good news, because Gluttony has been brought to heel before—every single time the people stood up, said the word out loud together, and made it the law of the land. We have not always lived under an appetite with no fence around it. The eight-hour day was a fence: the people saying enough—you have eaten ten and twelve and fourteen hours of our one wild and only life, and you will eat no more of it. The weekend was a fence. The end of child labor was a fence—for they used to eat children in those mills, eight years old at the loom in the dark before dawn, and the people rose up and said enough and shut the gate on it. The minimum wage was a fence, and the pension, and the laws that broke the great devouring trusts apart, and the whole New Deal that I watched go up with my own eyes—every last one of them was working people building a rail around the feast and saying, this far, and not one inch farther.

And here is the thing to carry home with you: the bottomless appetite is not a law of nature. It only ever looks like one because we have let it. Every fence we ever built, we built with our own hands—and every single one of them was called impossible, and ruinous, and against all nature, by the very men whose dinner it interrupted. Not one of those fences brought the sky down. The country grew stronger behind them, not weaker; broader, not poorer. The appetite roared that it would die if it were ever made to stop. It was lying. It always is.

The Word They Cannot Afford

So when the appetite comes for your life—and it will, dressed now as a glowing screen that will not let you set it down, or a wage that keeps you forever running and never once arriving, or a smooth voice telling you that your hunger is your own weak fault—do the one thing it cannot survive. Say the word. Say it inward, first, against the manufactured wanting: I have enough. I am enough. You will not have my one life to feed a number on a page. And then say it outward, up the hill, where the same small word turns into a law and a fence and a limit: enough. Tax the bottomless plate. Break the great mouths apart. Pull the money firms off the hospitals before another maternity ward goes dark. Set a rail around how much one man may eat of the common store while a child down the road goes to school on an empty stomach. Put the fruit on the table, for God's sake, instead of on the fire.

Because the orchard was always big enough. That is the thing I carried away from the fence and have never once been able to set down. The mountain of food was real; it was right there; I watched it burn. The only thing that was ever truly scarce in this whole abundant country was the willingness of the few to hear the one plain word that would have fed everyone. Say it anyway. Say it louder. Say it together, until it is too loud to burn. And don't you dare lose hope.

Notes On The Record