Good Cheer, The Romance Of Food And Feasting

The word stands for everything I have always wanted not to be and everything and everyone I have felt apart from. It is the shibboleth of the club I would never join, could never join, the club outside whose doors I might stand jeering, while all the time a secret part of me watched with wretched self-loathing as the elected members pushed through the revolving doors, whistling, happy and self-assured. The word is HEALTHY – a word that needs some unpicking. Its meaning derives from whole and hale and is cognitively related to such words as holy and healing. Heal is to weal (as the Eleven Plus might say) as health is to wealth. To be healthy is to be whole and holy. To be unhealthy is to be unclean and unholy, insanitary and insane. For the English the words healthy and hale, at their best, used to carry the full-bellied weight of florid good cheer, cakes and ale, halidom and festive Falstaffian winter wassail. By the end of the seventeenth century, the hale health of pagan holiday was expelled from the feasting-hall along with Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch by the sombre holy day piety and po-faced puritanism of Malvolio, Milton and Prynne. ‘Health!’ became no longer a bumping boozer’s toast but a quality of the immortal soul ...»