“Super Size Me.”
There are phrases that outgrow their original context and become a kind of shorthand for an age. This is one of them. What began as a fast-food upsell—and later, a documentary title exposing the grotesque logic behind it—now serves as an accidental creed for a civilization that rarely asks whether enough might actually be enough.
Super size the fries.
Super size the house.
Super size the vehicle.
Super size the vacation.
Super size the entertainment package.
Super size the outrage.
Super size the self.
We do not call this gluttony, of course. That word feels too old, too churchy, too accusatory. We prefer softer, more flattering terms. Lifestyle. Comfort. Treating yourself. Curated abundance. Wellness. Self-care.
But one of the recurring burdens of this series is to recover words we have lost precisely because they still name us too accurately. Lust became liberation. Greed became ambition. And gluttony, in its modern costume, has become something like therapeutic indulgence—excess with a good publicist.
The old image of gluttony was a man at table, swollen with appetite, unable to stop. The modern image is subtler, and for that reason perhaps more dangerous. It is the woman with the perfectly arranged charcuterie board and the ring light. It is the man with the streaming queue, the food delivery app, the premium subscriptions, the ergonomic chair, the noise-canceling headphones, the temperature-controlled mattress, and the vocabulary to describe all of this as a form of emotional health. It is a culture so adept at feeding itself that it no longer notices how spiritually malnourished it has become.
In one sense, food is still the obvious doorway into the subject. We are living in a society where many are overfed and undernourished at the same time. The body bears witness to an economy of abundance that somehow still fails to nourish. The statistics are no secret. Obesity, diabetes, chronic inflammation, diet-linked disease—these are now woven into the fabric of ordinary life. The food industry has spent decades engineering products not for health but for repeatability, optimizing sugar, salt, fat, and texture until appetite itself became a business model. This is no longer controversial. It is simply how the system works.
But if we stop there, we miss the larger point.
Gluttony was never only about food.
It is about the soul’s relationship to appetite. About what happens when the human being ceases to receive good things with gratitude and begins instead to organize life around consumption itself. Food is only one theater in which this drama plays out. Entertainment is another. Shopping another. Travel another. Comfort another. Stimulation, distraction, novelty, and self-soothing—these too belong to the family of gluttony.
If greed asks, “How much can I acquire?” gluttony asks, “How much can I take in?” One builds bigger barns; the other empties them. One stores; the other devours. But both are children of the same restless hunger.
That hunger is difficult to diagnose in modern people because we are surrounded by affirming language. We no longer say, “I am indulging myself past the point of wisdom.” We say, “I’m taking care of myself.” We no longer say, “I am ruled by appetite.” We say, “I know what I need.” We no longer say, “I have become soft.” We say, “I’m protecting my peace.”
Now, to say this honestly, some of those things are real. Rest is real. Recovery is real. The body is not an enemy, and the nervous system is not a theological abstraction. There are people whose lives have been so marked by trauma, deprivation, or pressure that gentleness is not decadence but medicine. I do not want to flatten all pleasure into sin, or all comfort into corruption. God is not threatened by joy. The world was not created in grayscale.
But that is precisely why gluttony is so difficult to confront. It attaches itself to things that are genuinely good.
A feast is good.
A Sabbath is good.
Wine in its place is good.
Laughter is good.
Celebration is good.
Even luxury, rightly held, may at times be good.
The issue is not the existence of good things. The issue is what happens when our relation to them becomes disordered.
Isaiah’s vineyard offers the right image for this. God plants, clears, tends, expects fruit. What comes instead are wild grapes. That is gluttony in miniature: not the rejection of the gift, but the corruption of its purpose. The vineyard was not evil. The fruit was not meant to be bitter. Something in the cultivation went wrong.
And then Isaiah gives us the line that has become the diagnostic refrain of this whole series:
“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil...”
—Isaiah 5:20 (KJV)
That is the genius of modern excess. It is not merely that we indulge; it is that we moralize indulgence. We convert excess into necessity and appetite into identity. We insist that no one may question our habits, because our habits have been wrapped in the language of healing, freedom, or authenticity. In that sense, gluttony has become one of the most socially protected vices in contemporary life.
Paul is blunter:
“For many walk... whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.”
—Philippians 3:18–19 (KJV)
That phrase—whose God is their belly—is severe enough to offend modern ears, but only because we have become unfamiliar with the idea that appetite can become an object of worship. And yet what else would we call a civilization structured around feeding desire, inflaming desire, monetizing desire, and then calling the resulting dependency freedom?
The “belly” in Paul’s sense is more than digestion. It is the whole lower economy of demand. It is the self insisting on satisfaction now. It is Esau trading birthright for stew. It is the appetite so narrowed to the immediate that the future disappears from view. It is the soul surrendering inheritance for relief.
That, too, feels contemporary.
We trade silence for stimulation.
Sabbath for streaming.
Health for convenience.
Calling for comfort.
Discipline for sedation.
And because these trades are incremental, they rarely feel tragic in the moment. They feel normal. Earned. Reasonable. Even kind.
That is what makes gluttony such an important vice to recover. It names the slow deadening of the soul by means of pleasant things.
In The Hardness of the Heart, and really across the trilogy, one of the themes that kept returning was how difficult it is for modern people to tell the difference between blessing and bondage when bondage arrives padded, personalized, and pleasurable. We imagine slavery always comes in chains. Often it comes in conveniences. It comes with menus and subscriptions and personalization settings. It comes with algorithms that know what we want before we do, and industries designed to keep us mildly dissatisfied so that consumption can continue without interruption.
We are not merely consumers now. We are fed.
Fed images.
Fed content.
Fed chemical reward.
Fed outrage.
Fed options.
Fed enough noise to ensure that serious self-examination becomes nearly impossible.
This is one reason I have written, elsewhere, about the need to accustom children to hardship. A civilization that never teaches its young to endure discomfort, delay gratification, or bear limits without resentment is not producing free human beings. It is producing highly marketable ones. People who will mistake every appetite for a right, every frustration for injustice, and every act of self-restraint for repression.
Gluttony, then, is not only what happens at the table. It is what happens to a people when they no longer know how to say no to themselves.
And, as with the other sins in this series, hypocrisy enters almost immediately.
The same person who denounces corporate greed may be completely captive to private consumption. The same person who critiques systems of exploitation may organize daily life around convenience, luxury, and endless intake. The same person who speaks publicly of justice may be unable to imagine a life not padded on all sides against boredom, silence, hunger, fatigue, or want.
This is where the sins begin to overlap again. Gluttony borrows from greed. It is inflamed by envy. It is protected by pride. It is marketed through lust. It is defended with wrath whenever someone dares to question it. And then, perhaps most insidiously, it is hidden beneath the approved language of virtue.
The self is not merely indulgent. The self is healing.
The self is not avoidant. The self is setting boundaries.
The self is not overfed. The self is finally giving itself what it deserves.
Perhaps. Sometimes.
But sometimes gluttony has simply learned to speak fluent therapeutic English.
The Bahá’í writings are unusually helpful here, not because they indulge ascetic disdain for the material world, but because they insist on a disciplined freedom within it. If greed can be understood through Bahá’u’lláh’s image of gold testing the servant, then gluttony can be understood through a related principle: the gift must not become the master. The world is not evil, but neither is it meant to rule us. Appetite is part of creation, but not its king.
That is the line modern culture cannot hold.
We know how to prohibit.
We know how to indulge.
We do not know how to receive with reverence.
And yet that is exactly what a sane life requires.
A feast is not the same as a feed. A feast has shape, occasion, gratitude, companionship, and end. A feed is endless. There is always another episode, another order, another package, another scroll, another course, another taste, another little merciful hit of novelty to keep the machinery of appetite humming. The feast belongs to celebration. The feed belongs to retention.
One is human.
The other is extractive.
That distinction matters because gluttony is not overcome by joylessness. The answer is not a gray, suspicious life in which every pleasure is treated as compromise. The answer is rightly ordered delight. Pleasure in its place. Appetite under governance. Gratitude before grasping. Limits not as cruelty, but as form. Celebration without captivity. Enjoyment without surrender.
In that sense, the opposite of gluttony is not misery. It is freedom.
Freedom to fast.
Freedom to feast.
Freedom to stop.
Freedom to enjoy without being owned.
Freedom to receive the gift without kneeling to it.
Jesus’ critique of the rich fool applies here by analogy. The man in Luke stored up more because he believed abundance could secure him. The glutton, by contrast, consumes more because enough no longer feels like enough. The one builds bigger barns. The other builds a bigger appetite. Both confuse abundance with life. Both are ruled by a false arithmetic of satisfaction.
And so the questions gluttony forces us to ask are not ultimately nutritional. They are spiritual.
Am I grateful, or merely hungry?
Am I free, or merely fed?
Have I learned delight, or only dependence?
Do I still know the difference between rest and sedation, between celebration and self-soothing, between blessing and excess?
These are not abstract questions in a civilization built to answer them for us before we ask.
For those who want to go deeper into the personal and civilizational arc behind these reflections, my trilogy—People of the Sign, The Hardness of the Heart, and The Rod of Iron—is available here:
In the next article, we’ll turn to Sloth—not merely laziness, but spiritual inertia, passivity, and the refusal of calling.
For now, perhaps the prayer is simply this:
Lord, show me where appetite has become authority.
Show me where comfort has made me soft.
Show me where I have called indulgence healing and excess peace.
And teach me again how to receive Your gifts without being ruled by them.
—Wade Fransson
