The Twinkie Defense

Saint Macarias the Younger (d AD 394) was a confectioner by trade.
AS I read his life in Butler’s – and of the culinary austerities he undertook following his early years in the pastry field– it struck me that he followed in his life the macro- trajectory of which our holiday season is the micro-trajectory. Which is to say we inhabit the sugar-sated, sweet-replete days of Advent and Christmas and then – disgusted, fattened, hyperglycemic – we segue into the the New Year and its dietary resolutions and restrictions.
But I was wrong on one rather significant point. Sugar, refined or otherwise, did not appear in the larder of a 4th century baker in Alexandria, Egypt.
Cane sugar as we know it (though not yet the refined kind beloved of the Twinkie trade) – originally from southeast Asia – came to Europe and northern Africa with the expansion of the Arab Empire about the 10th century. By the 12th century, upon the establishment by the Venetians of sugar plantations in the Levant, cane sugar (usually in a hard cone form) regularly supplemented honey as a sweetener.
But enough about sugar and back to Macarias who eschewed sugar entirely when he became an official hermit, with cells in no fewer than three deserts: Skete, Cells and Nitria. In his own time he was well known for his remarkably no-calorie diet: for seven years he ate nothing but raw vegetables and beans. And for three years after that he ate no more than 5 ounces of bread a day and 1 vessel of oil a year.
Was it because of his early career as a confectioner that honey was not included in his desert diet? Last week in the Science Section we learned of the realities of a 19th century workhouse diet, and frankly, Oliver Twist ate better than Saint Macarias. (And please don’t think that Macarias’ marvels were limited to eating very little; he also performed feats of endurance and prayed a lot.)
Almost daily I read in Butler’s of yet another hermit who survived on so little. Most of the time I am simply struck by the paucity of the diet and impressed by such self-discipline. Only sometimes do I actually wonder. And when I start to wonder it seems that I should wonder and doubt all the time.
What is more remarkable? Our willing suspension of disbelief or the whole hagiographical construct, these tales of miracles, wonders and freakish feats that we are told indicate holiness?
It should be inevitable to wonder. Yet I don’t wonder as much as I might. There is something about a life being written down that gives it – to me – credence.
I read of Saint Christina levitating to the rafters or Saint Kevin standing still enough for long enough that the robin’s eggs nesting in his hand can hatch, and before I doubt, I believe. Because it seems natural to believe a story and it seems like a good thing to believe that such things are possible.
And even Butler, the gold standard in hagiographica, refers to many of the lives he tells as: "romance…untrustworthy…legendary…spurious…preposterous…fiction…fictitious…audacious fiction…historically worthless…fabulous…fabricated….suspect.” And so on.


Lest we get too serious, we can always admire the imagination of the scientists who gave cocaine to honeybees. Under the influence, they “danced more frequently and more vigorously for the same quality food”. They didn’t dance at the wrong time. They didn’t dance incorrectly. Just more vigorously.
Put that together with the fact [we are playing loosely with the fact- concept here] that Sherlock Holmes, he of the amazing deductive powers, was a cokehead, we might take another look at the merits of cocaine.