However you celebrate, in 2016, Shrove Tuesday can seem anachronistic. It marks a last day of indulgence before the austerity of the Lenten season—six weeks of repentance and atonement to prepare for Easter in Christian traditions. In a world of central heating, well-stocked mini-marts, and Congressionally-mandated clock changes that attempt to trick us about the season, it’s difficult to imagine a world that runs on an annual cycle of plenty and want. Or to realize the importance of abundance as a gateway to deprivation.

Shrove Tuesday brings us back, back to a world of agricultural time and medieval Catholicism. It’s the 500-year-old world of Gargantua and Pantagruel, where the French monk François Rabelais describes the carnival as a flood of booze, a glut of food, and an endless run of sexual and scatological jokes. All the carnality you need before a season of denial.

The medieval church understood how to make a virtue of necessity by religiously mandating meatless diets for late winter. Many animals were slaughtered in autumn to save on feed during lean times to come. Those that remained would be slowly dispatched from October to January, with one last celebratory cull just before Lent. Much of the meat was salted for spring, but plenty was devoured in a final gluttonous frenzy, along with the offal that wouldn’t keep. Even the dearth of winter dairy was turned from practical fact into pious choice. Along with flesh like beef and lamb, the church restricted fat-rich “whitemeats”—milk, cream, eggs, butter—during Lent.

When the winds of Reformation blew across Europe some 400 to 500 years ago, Protestants, who mainly clustered in the cold north, were eager to wipe out “Popish” customs. Saints days were abolished or transformed into useful state occasions. And the rituals of Christ’s life and death were simplified. Doctrines of moderation replaced the alternation of gluttony and dearth. But the food of Shrove Tuesday persisted, along with the tradition of using up all the “whitemeats” in pastries and pancakes before Ash Wednesday. It still persists today across Scandinavia, where at least 70 to 80 percent of the population in the region still identifies as Lutheran—as well as in England, where the Anglican Church is the state religion.

Iceland transformed suffering into laughter and diffused the power of the older religion by making a joke of its rituals. The Catholic self-flagellation of Flengingardagur (Spanking Day) was turned into Bolludagur (Bun Day). Today Icelandic children make homemade wands to beat their parents, who submit and give up one éclair-like bun per beating. Iceland’s bakeries sell over a million buns in a single day, says Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir in Icelandic Food and Cookery. Dozens more are made at home. Add them all together and divide by a nation of 300,000 for a sense of the pleasure and pain.

In Sweden, it’s about semlor. These cardamom-scented sweet buns are filled with whipped cream and dusted with confectioner’s sugar. Sometimes there’s a spoonful of almond paste hidden under the filling. Today’s Swedes, though, eschew the feast-and-then-fast thing to eat semlor steadily from January to Easter. (And thanks to growing interest in Nordic food, semlor are growing in popularity in the U.S., from New York’s Fika coffee shop chain to the Fika café in Minneapolis’ American Swedish Institute.) Whether both trends are driven by raw commercialism, modern plenty, or simply the power of food rituals to persist, proliferate, and adapt beyond their original meaning is impossible to know.

The fastelavnsboller are much the same in Norway and Denmark. Here children also decorate birch wands. The branches pre-date even Christianity; both phallic and fruitful with spring buds, they were once used to playfully beat the believer into fertility. At some point, mythology has it, the sticks were transformed into weapons in a brutal game of “hit the cat in a barrel”—designed to dispatch the evil of a witch’s familiar. Thankfully today the cat has been replaced with candy, much like a piñata.

In the UK, where Henry VIII’s indecision about wives sparked the country’s break with the Catholic Church in the 16th century, they still keep calm and carry on with Pancake Day. Not the fluffy American quick breads happy to swim in butter and maple syrup. British indulgence looks more like a slender crepe—heavy on the egg and minus the leavening—tailor-made for a dignified dressing of sugar and lemon. There are still pancake races all over the island that involve a lot of flipping as you run.

Pancakes continued to be so central to British Shrove Tuesday that in 1600, one of Shakespeare’s rivals, Thomas Dekker, turned them into a festive play, The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Though it has a good three other plot strands, it’s mostly about a successful London tradesman-turned-lord-mayor who feasts all the apprentices in the city with pancakes for the day. The audience hears of “an hundred tables five times covered” with hordes of young men scarfing pancakes and downing wine “as plentiful as beer, and beer as water.” Even in the new Protestant era of Elizabethan England, it was as Rabelaisian a vision for the day as the Catholic monk himself might have imagined.

Or so modern inheritors of these traditions still imagine. Food customs have a way of persisting, even when we divorce them from their religion and ritual. Shrove Tuesday treats connect us to who we once were. They also suggest that even among contemporary abundance, a cycle of plenty and want is inside our cultural DNA. We hunger for the significance of the feast—and not just all the good food that it brings.

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As I write this, I’m still full. I just returned from my neighbors’ house and a long, extravagant Sunday lunch. We feasted to celebrate my successful olive harvest. First we fired up their 300-year-old wood oven and cooked some quick flatbreads. Then, as the oven cooled, we piled in traditional dishes like lasagna, roasted farm chickens and rabbits, and potatoes soaked in salt water and coated with olive oil and aromatic herbs from the garden. We sat at a table laid for 15 people and covered with bottles of wine, baskets of bread, and trays of crostini and house-cured salumi. We struggled mightily not to overeat, knowing all the delicious courses that were to follow.

My neighbors and I have not enjoyed a meal this gluttonous together for many years. Harvest traditions have fallen by the wayside as even this remote hamlet moves into the 21st century. These are the traditions I discovered when I first met my neighbors, the Antolinis, in the early 1970s. It was early June, I was 8 years old, and it seemed like we had extravagant meals every day at a long table under a grape arbor. My family had arrived for the summer just as the wheat harvest was getting underway, and we were quickly invited over to participate in the trebbiatura, or threshing of the wheat—no doubt because it was just assumed that every able-bodied adult in the community would join in the day’s labor during the time of the harvest.

But at the end of the summer, I learned that the feasting was an exception, a necessary reward for the hard work of threshing wheat on a June day under a relentless hot sun.

Back then, my neighbors seemed to straddle the 19th and the 20th centuries. The old sharecropping system called mezzadria was finally dying off (the Italian government ended it in 1964). My neighbors owned their property; the patriarch Agostino bought it with his World War I mustering-out pay. But many people in the village were still tenant farmers who did all the work on the farm and paid half their agricultural production to the landowner. This system had been in use since the Middle Ages in Italy and across Europe.

When my family arrived, we didn’t understand what profound changes, good and bad, the demise of mezzadria would have on the lifestyles of our neighbors. They went from living without electricity or indoor plumbing—as basically slaves to the land, whether they owned the property or not—to owning cars, watching TV, and growing cash crops like tobacco to pay for it all.

The Antolinis had three children—the youngest of whom, Arnaldo, was 17 when we first met them. He was the first child to complete high school and remembered a childhood of abject poverty and struggle. Gluttonous feasting was rare, privation the norm—even in the ’70s. Though the Antolinis owned their property and thus didn’t have to split their crops with anyone, they still survived off their land and what they raised on it. Perhaps because they lived so frugally most of the time, feast days were celebrated without restraint. We ate more food on a harvest day in a single meal then we ever consumed otherwise. There was wine and, eventually, music and dance. All of this was shared freely and with joy, as though entering fully into the experience cancelled out all the sober times.

In retrospect, these meals and the many other feasts I have shared over 40 years with my neighbors and “adopted” Italian family—from Christmas parties to the marriage of their son, Arnaldo—were quite gluttonous. I usually end one of these meals with a half hour spent walking it off, just to begin to feel normal and not stuffed to bursting.

Gluttony is about excess, taking more than what one needs or can comfortably consume. Yet excess of any sort can be intoxicatingly pleasurable. As a sensualist who absolutely believes in pleasure for its own sake, I don’t consider it wrong to enjoy gorging on a fine Sunday afternoon after the harvest has been reaped and stored. I don’t think it’s immoral to be seated amongst friends and family, enjoying the warm embrace of affection and contentment and sharing well-loved foods and wine, guzzling after-dinner digestifs as an accordion player accompanies a friend’s spontaneous song.

Gluttony has its place in a balanced life. Indeed gluttony can be part of the joy and pleasure of life. After all, it’s really just enjoying to excess—and why is that wrong? Is it wrong to enjoy the sweet perfume of a summer’s day on a fresh-cut lawn or field? Must we deny ourselves an apex of joy, since we have no ability to control the nadir of misery? Isn’t the occasional indulgence in anything—including food—to be respected and enjoyed as part of living?

To me, the idea of self-induced sober deprivation is a sour vestige of puritanical thinking, a remnant of a time when people were expected to suffer the miseries of human existence by consoling themselves with the promise of a hereafter filled with glorious pleasure. We shouldn’t deny ourselves the pleasures of the table in this life. We also probably shouldn’t have gluttonous meals like the one I just enjoyed every day. But we can relish them on occasion and enjoy a feast like that for what it is—a sensual pleasure followed through to the extreme.

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In my defense, lunch was a work meal—I operate an international freight-forwarding firm in Los Angeles and was meeting longtime partners for the first time. Dinner was more of a dare by a Tsingtao Beer Museum employee who enjoyed goading one of the few visitors to Qingdao, a seaport city, in its tourist off-season.

The idea of gluttony in Chinese culture is an extremely muddled issue. I know this from my frequent trips all over China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan for the last 20 years. These trips have all involved serious eating and drinking of one kind or another, and have made me interested in the stories behind the meals and beverages I’ve enjoyed.

There is no direct translation for “gluttony” in Chinese, not in the colloquial sense. There is certainly no religious law proclaiming gluttony a sin, and there are no Chinese TV shows devoted to ingesting superhuman quantities of food (see Adam Richman’s Man vs. Food). After all, a good Confucian would not be so crass as to demonstrate such a wanton attitude toward food.

But, there are certainly examples of extravagant consumption of food in China. Among the massive cook-outs and eat-ins are attempts to set world records for the most people eating breakfast in bed, the largest serving of fried rice, the largest piece of tofu, and the biggest stuffed bun.

From what I’ve seen in China, it’s not really about eating for the sole purpose of bodily pleasure. At a recent dinner I had, a group of Sichuan foodies mocked the idea of American gluttony and proclaimed themselves merely lovers of mei shi, “beautiful food.” More often than not, laying out an extraordinary amount of food demonstrates pride, relationship-building, and mian zi—face, the social concept of prestige.

If gluttony ever existed in China, it was reserved for the emperor and the royal court, much as it was in countries across Europe. History books describe extravagant imperial meals that were fit only for the emperor—and maybe a few of his concubines. The most famous imperial feast was “Manchu Han Imperial Feast,” a three-day banquet in 1713, thrown by the fourth emperor of the Qing Dynasty. It was the emperor’s 66th birthday and he had just conquered one of his greatest rivals and brought about national unity. To celebrate, there were 108 dishes from six distinct regions of China, including not only beef, pork, mutton, and venison, but also the creative use of ape lip, pork brain, and leopard fetus. To this day, some Beijing restaurants still serve mock “imperial” feasts.

The Chinese commoner’s diet, however, stayed pretty bad for a long time. After the Qing dynasty was overthrown by the nationalist Kuo Ming Tang democratic party in 1912, the government threw immense resources at combating Westerners, Japanese, and fractionists—but not at feeding people. Things definitely got worse when the Communists booted the nationalists off to Taiwan after World War II. Despite benign sounding name, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward campaign caused severe famine and millions of deaths from 1958 to 1961. No one ate well except Chairman Mao, and perhaps his many mistresses and “nurses.” During the Cultural Revolution, which lasted 20 years, the elite and intelligentsia fled—and, of course, so did their chefs.

So, why do Americans think of the Chinese as heartless eaters of all things?

Blame it on President Nixon, who dined at the Great Hall of the People in 1972, an event broadcast live on the major U.S. networks for three hours straight. The Great Hall was not normally used for dining, but the Chinese Communists rolled out the red carpet in an effort to persuade the American TV audience that their country was not impoverished. President Nixon and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai dined on shark’s fin soup, black mushrooms with mustard greens, spongy bamboo shoots in egg-white consommé, and fish fillets in pickle wine sauce. Americans were smitten. Chinese cuisine, and all those dozens of plates appearing simultaneously on a giant round table, became associated with gluttony, never mind that this was a special display of showmanship.

When, in the ’80s, Deng Xiao Ping decided it was cool to get rich or die tryin’ while still being Communist, a huge wave of poor people became rich, and the middle class blossomed. With money came the desire for nose-to-tail pork and the explosion of a foodie culture, especially after Jiang Zemin’s 1993 push to turn China into a severely regulated capitalist country.

We’re not talking about an American-style obsession with food, driven by Yelp and Guy Fieri. We’re talking about a population even larger than that of the U.S. that suddenly had enough income to buy meat. In the last decade, billions of dollars in chicken feet and pork hocks have been imported from the United States to China to meet the growing demand.

I saw a kind of arms race develop in the realm of business meals. By the ’00s, a 12-course meal of steamed fish, poached crab with roe, giant prawns with chili and scallions, braised abalone, giant pork hocks, more local fishes done up every which way, and a mountain of fried rice was no longer enough to demonstrate sincerity and interest. Real brown-nosing required four-hour banquets on a Tuesday dotted with interminable toasts of Johnny Walker, Hennessy and baijiu (a Molotov cocktail of a grain liquor usually distilled from sorghum), then a few hours at a karaoke club, then even more liquor. During this time, and in these contexts, American business types were doing serious trades and investments in China; they caught a glimpse of these Chinese schmoozing meals and were shocked.

Still, to me, this wasn’t gluttony. This extravagance was about lubricating relationships. Supersize portions don’t exist in Chinese McDonald’s. Buffets are uncommon. Obesity, though said to be steadily rising in the last three decades amongst higher income Chinese, is not commonplace.

In fact, the arrival President Xi Jinping in 2013 has curtailed excess in the name of cracking down on corruption. Lavish banqueting was but one symptom of the Communist graft and extravagances that were going on, which also involved parties with prostitutes, multiple wives, and expensive cars. Government crackdowns on extracurricular spending have taken a toll; even Moutai, the most famous of the baijiu in China, has complained of a drop in sales.

A Central Party edict might be capable of wiping out over-the-top Communist cadre-sponsored banquets, but it can’t wipe out desire from the population. (Nor can it eliminate the fact that having dinner with a business partner is the best way to build camaraderie. Not everyone can play golf, but everyone can gush over abalone.) Technology has changed China, as it has the rest of the planet—and helped to advance the idea that culinary delicacies are within anyone’s reach regardless of income, and that everyone’s dinner is worth sharing on social media.

Major metropolitan areas across China are scrambling to fill storefronts left empty by e-commerce giants. People used to go shopping at the massively constructed malls, but now everything is available on Taibao—the equivalent of Amazon. More often than not, restaurants are moving in. Merchants who formerly trafficked in shoes now sell street snacks from every province. Shoppers are now eaters. Cities prop up dying retail corridors by converting them into colorful “old streets” evocative of street markets filled with nothing but eateries. And in up-and-coming cities like Tianjin—most recently in the news because it was the site of warehouse explosions—entrepreneurs are catering to all strata of society. I passed a street stand that served up food at $1.50 a plate, with bottomless rice, to taxi drivers, who may only eat one meal a day. The restaurant industry is booming so big that Chinese chains like Meizhou Dongpo and Little Sheep are opening up in American cities.

Still, this is not actually gluttony. It is simply 1.37 billion Chinese coming to terms with their starved past and even hungrier future.

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Even today, we interpret these vibrant images as celebrations of eating and drinking in a time when food was sometimes scarce for the poor and part of a conspicuous display of wealth and bounty for the upper classes. But amidst all the pageantry and spectacle, it is easy to overlook that something is amiss: Nobody’s eating.

Medieval people had what one might call an uncomfortable relationship with food. Of course sustenance was both essential for survival and a source of pleasure. But when allowed to run wild, pleasure could lead to sin. Overindulging in food and drink trod dangerously close to gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins prohibited by the Church beginning around the 4th century A.D.

I first considered this uneasy balance after my colleague Amy Neff, a professor at the University of Tennessee, pointed it out. A few years ago, she was preparing a fascinating study of images of the biblical story of the Wedding at Cana, in which Christ miraculously transforms jugs of water into fine wine. In image after image, she started to notice a pattern: None of the attendees are ever shown drinking it. Even the steward who samples the vintage and pronounces it superior to wine served earlier in the meal doesn’t actually take a sip.

As I prepared for the exhibition currently on view at the Getty Museum, “Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: Food in Medieval and Renaissance,” and gathered manuscripts from the Getty’s collection and from a private collection depicting the consumption of food, each and every feasting image supported this observation. Take a look:

Last Supper, Benedictional, Regensburg, about 1030-40, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig VII 1, fol. 38

In the earliest manuscript in the exhibition, a 1,000-year-old book of prayers from Regensburg, Germany, has a striking Last Supper scene. At a semicircular table, Christ sits with his apostles and blesses them. Some of his followers pick up knives to eat bread, fish, and, yes, even a pretzel, laid out on the table before them. The two figures closest to Christ raise food to their mouths, but do not actually consume it. Only one apostle ingests the bread—Christ’s betrayer, Judas, who’s seated alone on the side of the table closest to us. In the biblical text, Christ identifies the rogue apostle by his act of consuming food: “Truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me” (Mark 14:18). The sinister black bird that emerges from Judas’s mouth in the image marks not only his sinful act of betrayal, but also his solo consumption of food.

Temperate and the Intemperate, Master of the Dresden Prayer Book, miniature from Valerius Maximus, The Memorable Deeds and Sayings of the Romans, Bruges, about 1470-80, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 43, recto

Valerius Maximus, the author of The Memorable Deeds and Sayings of the Romans (circa 30 A.D.), appears at far left in blue conversing with the emperor Tiberius. He gestures to two groups of diners, one staid and one rowdy, discussing good and bad behavior of the temperate and the intemperate, respectively. The well-dressed nobility sit in an orderly fashion at the dining table elevated in the back of the room and placed before a luxurious textile cloth of honor. Items on the table are carefully arranged, and each individual sits in his or her proper place. In the foreground, dressed in coarse clothes, the lower-class figures signal the server for more drinks, sleep at the table, and fall off the bench onto the floor. Crumbs and an overturned cup litter the rumpled tablecloth.

Valerius never mentions feasting in his writing, and his text pre-dates the Christian Church and its warnings against gluttony, but the artist responsible for illustrating this 15th-century copy of the text chose to illustrate moral versus immoral behavior through the lens of eating. Although the haphazard arrangement of the “intemperate” people implies over-consumption of food and drink, close examination of the image reveals otherwise. Even those who demonstrate their moral failings with their poor table manners and inappropriate feasting behavior don’t actually eat.

The Feast of Dives, Master of James IV of Scotland, Spinola Hours, Bruges and Ghent, 1510-20, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig IX 18, fol. 21v

In this early 16th-century image, “Spinola Hours,” the cut-away view displays both the exterior and interior of a well-appointed dining room in a wealthy household. A retinue of servants brings various dishes to the well-fed gentleman’s table, including roast poultry rakishly decorated with one of its own feathers. More than just a slice of medieval life, this image depicts the biblical story of Lazarus and Dives (the Latin word for “Rich Man”). When Lazarus, a beggar, comes to the door asking for scraps from the table, the Rich Man sets his dogs on him. For medieval Christians, the Rich Man came to represent the epitome of gluttony, not only because he consumed food to excess, but because he failed to share his bounty with others less fortunate. One would expect such a figure to be shown lustily consuming the bounty of his table, but though he raises a bowl, suggesting the impending quaff, it remains a good distance from his mouth. Even a biblical figure closely associated with gluttony does not eat.

Images of feasting that appear in medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts illustrate the types of foods consumed by people at that time, elegant food presentation, and proper table manners. More importantly, they reveal medieval attitudes toward food. In the earlier Middle Ages, and in the context of books used by high-ranking clergy, such as the Regensburg Benedictional, it was desirable to implicate Judas as a sinner through his act of eating and to set up a contrast with the 11 more restrained apostles. Centuries later, as the concept of the seven deadly sins became more entrenched, concern seemed to increase about the depiction of eating, especially in manuscripts owned by wealthy laypeople who might easily be accused of gluttonous behavior at their feasts. The ambiguity revealed in the fact that people do not eat, especially in these later illustrations, expresses the medieval struggle to straddle the fine line between eating enough food to survive and eating to excess.

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So when we went out to eat with my grandparents, we invariably gravitated to a Jewish deli. It was the deli, of all places, where they seemed most at home, where my grandmother could wrap her mouth around a tongue sandwich, and my grandfather slurp up his mushroom barley soup, before proceeding, with renewed gusto, to sweet-and-sour stuffed cabbage. My younger sister and I, far more Americanized, preferred open-faced roast beef sandwiches, blanketed with bland brown gravy.

In interwar New York delis, comedian Harpo Marx exulted, he found “my people, speaking my language, with my accent.” The deli was a place for New York Jews to articulate a newfound but potent sense of secular, rather than religious, Jewish identity. What their immigrant parents had experienced in the musty precincts of the synagogue they found by fressing salty, spicy, smoky flesh on crusty rye bread.

No matter that their half-starved, persecuted ancestors had almost never eaten pastrami and corned beef—these lower-middle-class children of immigrants “learned to think of them as traditional,” as historian Hasia Diner puts it, retroactively endowing the deli sandwich with a Jewish pedigree.

In her seminal study, The Invention of the Restaurant, historian Rebecca Spang finds that restaurants were founded in pre-Revolutionary Paris for the aristocracy to repair their delicate constitutions by sipping bouillon; the broth itself was known as a restaurant (restorative). Elaborate eateries were places of respite; in the words of Dr. Louis Véron, a patent medicine entrepreneur and opera manager quoted by Spang, they promised “silence and solitude in the middle of a crowd.”

In inaugurating the deli, New York Jews created a noisy, crude establishment that turned this original notion of a restaurant on its head. While it had roots in the take-out gourmet shops of Paris, Rome, and Frankfurt, the deli mutated in New York into a venue for eating out, and a remarkably laid-back one at that. The deli was a place where Jews could disregard the perceptions of the majority society and let it all hang out, like the sausages dangling enticingly in the plate glass window.

They could dress down, joke, and talk loud (including with patrons at neighboring tables) and eat with their hands, in a casual and convivial atmosphere with no candles and tablecloths. They were no longer, for the most part, speaking Yiddish, but much of their boisterous style of behavior was carried over from Eastern European Jewish culture, characterized by flights of impassioned, free-wheeling argument and debate.

Indeed, if, for the German-Jewish sociologist Norbert Elias, becoming “civilized” in Western society meant learning to repress one’s bodily functions, then the deli was a place to flout the standards of polite behavior in a safe space that was largely, if not exclusively, populated by other Jews. Other ethnic groups had their own particular, similarly indispensable gathering places: Irish pubs, Italian social clubs, and black barbershops (or beauty parlors).

But the Jewish deli was different in two senses: It was oriented around bodily pleasure, and it was dedicated to an extravagant form of visual display. (Little wonder that the most notorious deli scene in pop culture, from Rob Reiner’s 1989 rom com, When Harry Met Sally, involves a histrionic exhibition of a normally very private moment of pleasure.) Particularly in the glitzy, glamorous kosher-style delis in and around Times Square, Jews—mostly male—showed off to each other how much meat they could commandeer and eat.

Morris Wepner and his deli in East Harlem, 1920

Served in an entertaining fashion by sneering, wise-cracking waiters (“Is anything OK?” they demanded, sarcastically), who were frequently failed performers on the vaudeville, Yiddish, or Broadway stage, the overstuffed sandwich—one of the first types of fast food in the metropolis—was elevated into a towering, skyscraper sign of affluence, a multi-layered symbol of the American Dream.

Before long, however, deli meats were demonized for having too much fat, cholesterol, and sodium to fit into the diet of upwardly mobile Jews. As they spread to the suburbs after World War II—and sought to join the country clubs that went with them—Jews reshaped their bodies according to prevailing notions of fitness and beauty, and revamped their diets to embrace more “exotic” fare like Chinese food. The deli inevitably lost its purchase on American Jewish identity.

Yet the gestalt of the deli lives on in myriad ways in our culture, from the Borscht Belt, schticky humor of Billy Crystal and Mel Brooks (“Got pastrami?” Brooks quips as his tagline on Sirius XM radio) to Subway’s brash “Big Hot” pastrami sandwiches. Political pundit Bill Maher tweeted that the recent Democratic debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders was “gonna be like an elderly Jewish couple arguing in the deli.”

Furthermore, while greatly diminished in number, Jewish delis are not yet extinct, nor have they evolved. Walk into Brent’s in L.A.’s Northridge neighborhood, Manny’s on Chicago’s Jefferson Street, or Katz’s on New York’s Houston Street and you’re transported back into an era when the deli still functioned as a stark counterpoint to the rest of society, a place where courteousness and gentility were ejected in favor of relaxation and ribald humor.

Zarkower’s Deli in White Plains, New York, 1962

The irony is that few of the patrons eating in these delis are Jewish; they are Asian-American, Latino, African-American, you name it. So, rather than Jews paying tribute to a tradition that they have long ago transcended, non-Jews are—as, ironically, Jews did with Chinese food—adopting aspects of a once-vibrant ethnic heritage and incorporating it into their own unfolding experience of urban life.

Indeed, a potato knish by any other pronunciation tastes as good, especially if you slather it, as my grandparents did, with thick and spicy mustard—a three-dimensional edible canvas ripe for painting and repainting however you like before stuffing it swiftly and unceremoniously down the hatch.

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Henry was certainly a big man. When he became king just before his 18th birthday, he stood 6-foot-2 in his socks. He inherited the height and the strength of his Yorkist grandfather Edward IV through his mother, Queen Elizabeth. Like Edward, he was considered handsome by his countrymen and foreign observers. Henry had a good opinion of his own appearance and was especially proud of his legs, which he showed several times to visiting ambassadors. A superb athlete, he was a champion jouster and a capital archer. He loved hunting above all other sports and regularly tired out half a dozen horses in a day. With his strong legs, height, and a sportsman’s sense of balance and control, he also danced frequently and superlatively. He “did wonders” on the dance floor according to the ambassador of Mantua, Italy, who, at a ball in 1514, saw the king “leaping like a stag.”

How, then, did this high school jock of a prince become the “Humpty Dumpty of nightmare,” as he was once described. Even by modern standards, and certainly by those of the ordinary man or woman in 16th-century England, Henry ate a good deal. That was what his social group, the high nobility, did. When the noble entertained, food was often served in large quantities as part of the display of generosity or “magnificence” incumbent upon them, and as proof of their high social status. As king, Henry was the chief nobleman of the realm, so kept a large court and meal times were an important aspect of daily life there. The Eltham Ordinances for the royal household, published in 1526, indicate that the king usually had two main meals a day—what we would call lunch and dinner. He was fueled by red meat (venison, beef, and mutton) and poultry (chicken, partridge, and a wide range of other birds). Meat was often roasted and served with rich herb and butter sauces, but much was also consumed in the form of pies or pasties, together with bread. It was washed down with large quantities of beer, ale, and wine. Henry also ate a fair amount of fish (trout, carp, and many other kinds), usually on Fridays, in Lent, and at other times of the year in accordance with Catholic custom. Although the quantities specified for the king are large, much of this was for display; there is actually no evidence that Henry always ate all that was set before him.

His diet was highly calorific, but until his late 30s, Henry’s relentlessly active lifestyle burned most of them off almost as fast he absorbed them. In his early 20s, the king had a 32-inch waist and 40-inch chest. His athletic build at 29 can be judged fairly accurately from a made-to-measure suit of armour he wore at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the meeting held in June 1520 with his great rival Francis I of France. With the natural advantages of youth, Henry remained in reasonable shape with his weight proportionate to his height. (Mercifully for Henry, body mass index measurements and the like were the medical obsessions and tortures of a later age).

Unfortunately, this same youthful athleticism in such dangerous sports as jousting and hunting led, almost inevitably, to injuries—not least to those legs of which the king was so inordinately proud. His first serious injury came in 1525. When he was hunting, Henry attempted to leap over a ditch using a stave. It broke, pitching him face down into the clay at the bottom of the ditch. Had a quick-thinking footman not lifted the king’s head, he would have drowned. By then Henry had developed ulcers on his legs, perhaps the result of incompletely healed (and unrecorded) injuries in jousting and/or hunting in previous years. He hurt his foot while playing tennis in 1527 and was forced to wear a black velvet slipper in consequence. The most serious recorded jousting injury came in 1536 when he lay unconscious for some two hours after he crashed to the ground and his horse ended up on top of his legs. By the following year there was evidence of ulcers in both the king’s legs, and Henry was clearly often disabled, unable to move without intense pain. Exercising in the way he had done as a young man proved impossible, although he continued to ride and to hunt for some years. His appetite was, nevertheless, undiminished. He quickly gained weight, which could then not be worked off. An unhealthy cycle was set in place.

All of that would be enough to explain the king’s size as he entered the last decade of his life, but medical specialists have also suggested that his behaviors indicated symptoms of debilitating medical conditions. It is clear that despite his reputation for it, Henry did not suffer from syphilis. Tudor doctors treated the disease with mercury, but there are no purchases of mercury in the surviving royal doctors’ and apothecaries’ accounts. More recently and perhaps more plausibly, Cushing’s syndrome and McLeod’s syndrome have been advanced to account for Henry’s appearance and behavior. Their symptoms include obesity in the upper body, hypertension, irritability, and, in extreme cases, paranoia and psychosis. Type II diabetes, dementia, and deep vein thrombosis have also been offered for consideration. Such medical hypotheses may appeal, but none can be proven for lack of genetic evidence. Given the recent English predilection for digging up dead kings, however, such evidence may yet come to light—at least we know where this one is buried.

Still from The Private Lives of Henry VIII (1933)

Henry is shown as big and robust in Holbein’s portraits of him in the 1530s, but as grossly overweight with a “moon face” (consistent with the syndromes named above) in an anonymous drawing of him towards the end of his life. Yet, there is only one specific reference to Henry eating too much in all of the more than 20 volumes of the letters and papers of his reign. In 1541, the French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, who frequently made clear his distrust of the king in his correspondence home, reported that Henry was “very stout and marvellously excessive in eating and drinking so that people with credit say he is often of a different opinion in the morning than after dinner.” The popular image of Henry as a glutton seems to derive from the other elements of his historical reputation. Henry was a big man, a great bon viveur, a bully, and larger than life, so he must have been a glutton goes the reasoning. It is very largely the product of film and television portrayals. Charles Laughton hammed it up, throwing chicken bones about in the 1933 film, The Private Lives of Henry VIII. In a more serious vein, Keith Michell played the old and paranoid king in a “fat suit” costume in The Six Wives of Henry VIII on television and in a film version. Just about every other portrayal of the older Henry has also emphasised his girth in one way or another.

By the end of his life, Henry certainly was morbidly obese. But the popular explanation, like so many aspects of his historical reputation, is based largely on misunderstanding and our wish to make him even larger in death than he was in life. On closer inspection, the evidence for Henry as one of history’s greatest gluttons is actually surprisingly slim!

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Those panelists—a historian, an author of a book on gluttony, and a well-known chef—argued that feasting helps define us as human. When the moderator, Zócalo Public Square publisher Gregory Rodriguez, posed the question that gave the event its title, “Can Gluttony Be a Virtue?,” the chef, Eric Greenspan, replied: “If it’s gluttony to sit around with a lot of friends and have good food and get drunk, then you’ve got your answer.”

The evening’s subject matter of gluttony was inspired by the medieval art on feasting included in the Getty’s current exhibitions, “The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals” and “Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: Food in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.”

The event, Zócalo’s first-ever in L.A.’s South Bay region, offered a feast of tangents and digressions—about being fat, a great Oaxacan restaurant in West L.A., a drunken bachelor party, a Zen monk who ate steak, the heftiness of the Buddha, and every kind of food, from caviar to bean-and-cheese burritos.

The panelists talked in detail about the social role of feasts. Historically, feasts and acts of gluttony could be displays of power and even godliness. (Medieval monks ate very well, one panelist noted pointedly). Today, the script has flipped, and eating a lot, or eating unhealthily, can be marks of lower status, and make you a subject of fat shaming. “Gluttony is a way of looking down on the lower classes,” said Greenspan. “Whereas before, it was exemplified by the upper classes.”

Francine Prose, author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including Gluttony, explained how our notions of gluttony have evolved with our ideas about salvation and damnation, health and illness, and life and death.

“Now we think of gluttony in a narrow construction—overeating,” she said. “When the early church fathers made a gluttony a sin, it wasn’t about quantity so much. It was about obsessiveness. The idea was not how much you ate, but how much you thought about eating. You actually were supposed to be thinking about God.”

Prose was critical of today’s obsessions with dieting and what she described as self-righteousness about eating and health. In response to an audience question about the perils of overeating, she lamented, “It’s very hard for people now, and especially women, to separate eating from guilt.”

“Feasts are an inherent part of our becoming human,” argued UCLA medieval historian Teo Ruiz. He noted that some historians have connected the beginning of agriculture to feasting, and feasts are part of Christianity, including Jesus’ miracle of turning water into wine, and the Last Supper.

Centuries ago, feasts and gluttony were also an expression of status—and remain so today. “There is a phrase that says, ‘You are what you eat.’ The reality of it is you eat what you are,” Ruiz said. Society in the Middle Ages was very hierarchical and “the people at the top saw it as part of their social duty to eat well and eat a lot,” while the medieval poor were gluttons, too—they were so poor and hungry all the time that they always thought of food. “Even to this very day … if you eat caviar and foie gras and all kinds of elaborate foods, you are clearly a member of the overclass,” Ruiz said.

Greenspan—a former contestant on Food Network’s “The Next Iron Chef” and owner of Greenspan’s Grilled Cheese, The Roof On Wilshire, and the recently opened Maré—said the food he makes is meant to be so “comfortable and hearty” that it “inspires that gluttony and obsession.”

Greenspan said that when he was executive chef at one of L.A.’s fanciest restaurants, Patina, he worried that diners weren’t having fun. He was wary of elite food culture. “Food is for sustenance and, for me, food is for enjoyment. When you put it on the pedestal—‘I’m here to take a picture and put it on Instagram’—that to me is the gluttonous part.” In response to an audience question, he said that food festivals often put food on too much of a pedestal.

The panelists said that a great meal or feast gets people talking to each other—and often what they’re talking about is what they’ll eat when they get together again. Said Ruiz: “The real moment of gluttony as a quality, not as a sinful activity, is when you are eating and already plotting the next meal.”

Greenspan agreed, but in response to a question about his greatest feast, he suggested his greatest meal might have been a 16-course lunch at the Pierre Gagnaire at the Hotel Balzac in Paris, which ended with him “passing out in the Jardin du Luxembourg.”

Either that, he quipped, or that great batch of chili cheese fries from Pink’s Hot Dogs in Hollywood.

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This bit of wisdom from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) gets at how tricky it can be to measure how much is too much—to know when the glass is full and set to overflow.

In modern America, one need not look hard for signs of excess. Everything is big here, from our cars to the portions of our meals. Indeed, one-third of American adults are obese. On the other hand, we’re obsessed with healthiness and moderation, as evidenced by “carbophobia” and our fixation on the latest diet fad.

When we move toward asceticism, what do we miss? In advance of the Zócalo/Getty event “Can Gluttony Be a Virtue?’ we asked a handful of thinkers: Can excess ever be a virtue?

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