Food gluttony

In Parts outdated: This page needs to rewrite, because there are outdated and wrong parts in it.

About

Gluttony is the process by which a pioneer in the new world raises their maximum humour values.
To raise a humour during gluttony, a pioneer must eat Food to gain influence equal to his or her highest humour value, which will raise one of the maxed values by one point.

Activating Gluttony Mode

When gluttony is available, a new icon folds down below the humour-bars. Clicking the bar changes the mouse pointer to a fork, and any edible item can be left-clicked to consume it for gluttony. Moving, even to open a container, will cancel gluttony. After you finish eating food in gluttony mode, you will be “Full and Fed Up” for a certain amount of time, depending on the foods you ate during that gluttony session. You may glutton food from your inventory and from a table which is open at the start of gluttony mode.

Consuming Food in Gluttony Mode

Hovering the mouse (fork) over a food in gluttony mode shows the maximum and minimum amounts that each humour bar will be filled by that food item. Once the food is consumed, the (random) amount that each bar is filled is displayed clearly within the humour bars. If the influence value is in excess of the highest maximum humour value a pioneer has, then he or she will immediately gain one point in whichever humour has exceeded the value. The influence diamond will then reset to zero. Any excess influence does not carry over.

The points gained from consuming a food item are reduced by all category debuffs relevant for the food item in question. If you have received some category debuffs, hovering over a food item will light up the debuffs that are applicable to the item hovered over. Notice that food items can belong to several categories. (For instance, “Wortbaked Wartbites” have the types “Slugs, Bugs & Kritters”, “Flowers & Herbs”, “Forage” and “Food”.)

Apart from adding points to the gluttony meters, consuming a food item in gluttony mode also adds a certain amount of the “Full & Fed-up” debuff, as well as reductions (and possibly, restorations) to certain categories of future food items consumed during that same gluttony session. The base amount of “Full & Fed Up” timer that is added is shown on the tooltip for the food, along with the possible reductions and restorations.

A food item needs to be completely unused to be possible to be consumed in gluttony mode, and consuming the item in gluttony mode will consume the item entirely, regardless of how many uses the item still has left.

If eating a food causes two humours to exceed the highest value, one of the two humours will be randomly chosen to be increased.

Note that it’s a good idea to plan ahead before entering Gluttony Mode, so that you can:

• Strategize. Plan combinations of food that are more likely to raise a particular humour value. This will lead to less wasted food and better-planned humour values. You should also consider the categories, reductions, restorations and Full & Fed Up timer that each food offers when deciding how much to eat in one session, what foods to eat, and in what order, and the optimal solution depends on what is available.
• Raise humours at a relatively steady rate. Keeping all humours balanced means that less food will be required to raise the lower-valued humours. For example, if a pilgrim’s Blood (a very easy humour to raise at the start of the game) is raised to 10 before raising any other humours, those other humours will all require 10 points, rather than 5, to advance — Gluttony’s effectiveness will have essentially been halved. (need to be verified with the new version)
• You can only open table container while gobbling (and no other character can have the same table opened at the same time).

Full and Fed Up Timer reduction

The amount of “Full & Fed Up” time shown on the tooltip for each food is only a base amount. The actual amount depends on how many humours have increased already in this gluttony session, and the multiplier fn to calculate the true amount that the timer will be increased is

fn = (2n + 1)/2n+1

i.e.

0	1
1	0.75
2	0.625
3	0.5625
4	0.53125
∞	0.5

Gluttony Bonuses

Your Sugar & Spice Proficiency will help decrease your Full & Fed Up timer. For every 3 points you gain in a session, you get a RNG roll based on this proficiency which will remove some amount of time from your timer. It is weighted to be more beneficial to newbies than to veterans as a means to help them catch up to older players.

There is also a ‘Gobble Bonus’ that can be had from very long Gluttony sessions if you have a dedicated clothing set with a high enough Feasting Artifice value. Each time you raise a humor during a session, you receive a Gobble Point displayed below your Humor Bars. With a Feasting Artifice of 100 or more you will, if those gobble points reach 10 or more, get you 2 or more points to that Humor instead of 1. The gobble points will however still only go up with 1 point.

• Gobble Points yield (2) Humors once you achieve a 10+ point session.
• Gobble Points yield (3) Humors once you achieve a 30+ point session.
• Gobble Points yield (4) Humors once you achieve a 60+ point session.

Take note that the Feasting Artifice also determines the limit of these bonuses. A set of 200 Feasting points will only allow you to gain bonuses up to 20 gobble points.

Purity & Humours

Food now has increased gluttony and regeneration values based on its Aether value, with aether going up to a value of 100% maximum, awarding a maximum of 100% bonus to the base value.

These remaining elements are listed as

• Mercury

• Sulphur

• Lead

For now the other elements have no use but more uses are planned for them with the re-working of the alchemy system.

A line of text is listed under “When Gobbled” that show which influences are gained during the event. These numbers represent how much influence in each humour is gained, somewhere between the base (left) and max (right), when the item is consumed. The numbers are shown in order of Blood, Phlegm, Yellow Bile, Black Bile. This means that the influence values in the columns, from left to right, will correspond to the humours in your main display, read counter-clockwise, starting with Blood.

Quick Newbie Guide

Gluttony in Salem can be very complex if you want to make the most of your food with the least debuff, but getting from 5 to 20 is fairly simple.

First, a new player will have access to only a few Food Groups, so choose carefully to spread your food to be Gluttonied across as many groups as possible. Three main groups accessible to newbies are Foraged, Seafood, and Meat. Note that smaller groups inside these main groups include Slugs Bugs and Kritters, Fishes, Crustacea and Shellfish, Berries, Nuts and Seeds, Flowers and Herbs and Mushrooms.

You always want to gain as many points as possible in a single session until you run out of food in your inventory and table or until the reductions on the food you have are greater than the reduction to the timer from points gained. This means early on when most food have high reductions you will probably only want to eat 1 thing from each category. Also pay attention to foods that reduce categories that contain other categories, such as Food, Foraged, Seafood, and Meat and try to save them for last.

If you have a hard time planning out multiple points or finding a selection of food types some than it’s best to have short gluttony sessions involving eating one or two foods for a single point, and then waiting for the debuff to wear off, its better to miss out on the timer reduction then to mess up a glutt and waste your glutting for a day. Good foods for one point sessions include Cranberry, Lilypad Bulb, Wild Garlic, Sizzled Slug, Sugar Caps, Roasted Crab Meat, Oakworth, Boiled Toadstool (key for Black Bile), and Honeysuckle Kudzu.

If Gluttonying for more than one point at a time, start with the food or combination of foods that will give the smallest amount of debuff for the first point. See the section above for a more in-depth explanation on the debuff timer.

Good early Blood foods include: Crispy Cricket, Roasted Chestnut, Lilypad Bulb, Cranberry, Roasted Crab Meat, Devil’s Wort, Berries-on-a-Straw, Roasted Trunk-Nosed Lake Perch, Lobster Mushroom, Roasted Angel-Winged Seabass, and Lumberjack Frikadel.

Good early Phlegm foods include: Roasted Silt-Dwelling Mudsnapper, Roasted Rabbit Cut, Huckleberries, Filet on the Rocks, Wild Salad, Roasted Red-Finned Mullet, Roasted Red Herring, Wild Garlic, Sizzled Slug, Roasted Rabbit Steak, Boiled Witch’s Hat, Froghetti, and Cooked King Crab.

Good early Yellow Bile foods include: Ostrich Fiddlehead, Roasted Pine Nuts, Lavender Blewit, Oakworth, Sugar Caps, Wild Salad, Roasted Crab Meat, Lobster Mushroom, Roasted Red-Finned Mullet, Roasted Shin Spinner, and ‘Shrooms-on-a-Stick.

Good early Black Bile foods include: Blackberries, Lilypad Bulb, Roasted Chestnut, Boiled Toadstool, Roasted Silt-Dwelling Mudsnapper, Boiled Witch’s Hat and Honeysuckle Kudzu.

A Note on Long Gluttony Sessions

As a newbie, most of the foods you use will be part of the Foraged Food Group. Most of those foods will reduce groups like Mushrooms or Berries rather than Foraged, but beware those that do, such as Roasted Crab Meat.

When setting up a long Gluttony session, try to get foods from as many groups as possible. An example Gluttony session in very early times might include most of the following:

• Berries

2 Cranberry
1-2 Berries-on-a-Straw

• Flowers and Herbs

2 Lilypad Bulb
2 Oakworth

• Nuts and Seeds

2 Roasted Chestnut

• Mushrooms

1 Boiled Toadstool
1 Boiled Witch’s Hat

• Slugs Bugs and Kritters

1-2 Crispy Cricket
1-2 Roasted Rabbit Steak OR Roasted Rabbit Cut
1-2 Sizzled Slug

• Seafood / Crustacea and Shellfish

1-2 Cooked King Crab
1-2 Roasted Crab Meat

• Seafood / Fishes

2 Roasted Trunk-Nosed Lake Perch OR Roasted Angel-Winged Seabass
1 Roasted Red Herring
1 Roasted Red-Finned Mullet

==Quick Low Humor Guide (everything passed this point may be obsolete. needs updating.)==

Because every player’s situation is different, with some players finding it easy to hunt small game, and others having good fishing sites, or living in a biome with one foraged ingredient being common while another is rare, it’s difficult to say “Just use these foods and you’ll be 50 Humors in no time”, but there are some tips that can be given to make you more efficient.

Also, at this point, your debuff timer will be getting longer per point you gain. Don’t be surprised if you gain only about one Humor point per hour of debuff as you pass 35-40 and your timer starts lasting half the day.

First, it’s not necessary at all to be farming yet, or even to by worrying much about Variable Foods. You can get to 50 Humors off foraged and hunted foods, while still searching for that perfect place to settle, or using your inspiration on defensive skills rather than agricultural ones.

Second, there are a few Food Groups that have only a few members early on:

• Offal

Marrow Dumplings

• Vegetables and Greens

Boiled Gourd and Tendergrass Rump

• Nuts and Seeds

Autumn Delight and Roasted Chestnut

• Poultry

Roasted Turkey Cut

• Crustacea and Shellfish

Cooked King Crab and Roasted Crab Meat

So, each Gluttony session you set up where you intend to get more than one or two points should include foods from each of these groups if possible, and it is a good idea to lead off your session with points from one or more of these foods.

Third, to find other good Gluttony foods for 21-50, use the table on the Food page for Gluttony Values. Sort by Humour/minute of whatever Humor you need foods for and look in your range of humors.

Fourth, remember that the effectiveness of food Gluttonied will by reduced as you go, so you will need fillers to make up the last little bit you need when the main food doesn’t quite make it. The fillers will mostly be the foods you used as main foods when you were a Newbie. Lots of Berries, Mushrooms, Foraged recipies, Fish fillets. So, good fillers include Berries-on-a-Straw, Boiled Witch’s Hat, Crispy Cricket, Cranberry, etc. Be careful when you chose the filler as many early foods have high reduction penalties to foods you might want to eat later in the session.

Fifth, make a Simple Table if you can, it will allow 9 more foods to choose from for greater variety, more points, and more efficient debuffs. This starts to become almost necessary around 40 points if you want more than a few points in a session. An Old Style Table is even better with 16 food slots, but costs a small fortune which might be better spent on claim setup.

Medium Humor Gluttony

Beyond 50, you should have a good idea of the basics. Now is the time to start farming and gain access to Food Groups like Bread, Candy, Cabbage, and Pies. Expanding your range of foods and food groups with the addition of Farms, Ovens, and Stoves is enough to go from 51 to 80 using the same methods used in the 21-50 range. There are a few tips to follow though.

First, it’s definitely time to farm. Time to build Baking Tables, Bread Ovens, and at least a Pilgrim’s Hovel with a Stove.

Second, become familiar with what the foods you are Gluttonying reduce. Pumpkin Pie reduces Pies, but not Pumpkins and Gourds. You can eat your Pumpkin Pies and follow them with whole Pumpkins or Pumpkin Flesh later.

Third, remember that the foods you eat for your first Humor Point of Gluttony are full timer, but later points have reductions. You will often need to eat two or three foods for that first point, so make sure their combination of timers is small as it can be. This might determine which Humor you start with in a session.

Fourth, it’s more important now to keep your humors balanced and to plan ahead. In the lower humors, you could mostly grab whatever was available and wing it for a pretty good Gluttony session. Now, you’ll still get points doing that, but you’ll get fewer points for a longer gluttony timer than you would otherwise have. If time is not important to you, that’s fine, but if you’re trying to build a raider asap, you’ll need to research the Food table and/or make your own lists of favorite foods.

High Humor Gluttony

Above 80 humors, Gluttony becomes more difficult. The best 0% purity foods with no Variable Food bonuses give only 65 points to whatever Humor. This is the time to get serious about Purity and Variable Foods. Luckily, this is also a good time to stop. For a farmer character, 80 humors is about as far as anyone needs to go as long as you don’t accidentally build a Windmill backwards and have to destroy it. For those who do want to go farther for whatever reason, there are a few ways to eek out a little more efficiency when Gluttonying.

First, Purity. Purity water added to your Oatmeal Crackers or whatever can increase their Gluttony values significantly. Dramatic mulipliers of 10x for 100% purity aren’t possible in the world right now, but increasing some foods up to at least 20% is, and that is nearly a 300% increase in Gluttony values with no increase in Gluttony timer or other ill effects.

Right now, it is possible to find areas for hunting Deer or other game where the products from the animal will have up to 10% purity. The same is true of Water, which is used as an ingredient in many recipes.

10% Purity Water, Lime, and Granite, can also be used to make pots to grow trees with higher purity, which can then be made into Humus bins whose Humus will add some purity to grown crops. See the pages on Compost Bins and Gardening Pots for more information.

Boiled foods also take some of their purity from the water in the pot and from the purity of the pot itself. Having higher purity water and a higher purity Copper Pot (from your own mine or bought), can get you a handful of foods that will have a few percent purity cooked into them for relatively little effort.

Second, Variable Foods. Certain foods such as Cabbage Cakes, and Humble Meat Pies can be made with Leaf of Cabbage, or Meat Shreds, or Flour, generic ingredients that can be any type of cabbage, or meat from any type of animal, or flour from any kind of cereal. Each different ingredient will have a different, usually beneficial, effect on the food it’s added to. See the page on Variable Foods for a more in-depth explanation, and a table listing the effects.

A few things to note about the effects on the table:

Pure Oatmeal has the benefit of a pretty good chance of restoring Meat a bit, but also reduces the amount of Blood or Yellow Bile you will get to 95% of normal. Consider adding a tiny bit, .01 kg, of Barley Flour or other Flour to the mix when you are making your food to avoid the reduction. You will also remove the beneficial restoration, so consider carefully.

Deer meat restores Pies when used as a variable ingredient, so consider setting up to Gluttony Simple Sunday Steak made from Deer or some other variable Deer food after Gluttonying some of your Pies.

Similarly, Leaf of Red Cabbage restores so many useful food groups, it’s almost a must to have Red Cabbage Variable Foods at higher humors.

Also, note which ingredients multiply which humors. Bear has no Reduction, but does add 15% to Yellow Bile and Black Bile. So, don’t use it for Humble Meat Pie, use Beaver and Rabbit. Don’t waste a Garlic Bulb on a Garlic Rabbit. Sugar Caps are an excellent ingredient for the ‘Shroom-Stuffed Bellpepper. And so on.

Blackberries, and Lobster Mushrooms both Reduce rather than Restore, in exchange for rather decent Humor Multipliers. Thus, the Lobster Mushroom is useless for anything but a ‘Shroom-Legume Salad.

For more information on different foodstuffs, and a comprehensive list of what food gives what events, please refer to Food.

salemthegame.wiki

SEASONAL ORGANIC FOOD INSPIRED BY NATURE

• 

Hero Harvest: Asparagus – in praise of simplicity

I caught 30 seconds of Great British Menu the other day. A chef was describing his dish. He talked of dehydrating this, sous-vide-ing that, ballotining, braising, glazing, roasting… The resulting plate was a throng of reductions, foams, tuilles, dots of jellies, smears of this and shards of that and I couldn’t help thinking that there was more ego on the plate than food…

• 

Hero Harvest (again): rhubarb & pistachio macaroons

I am just about back in control. Of the rhubarb, that is. I’ve been compotting, pickling, preserving, baking and have worked my way through armfuls of fat, pinky-green stems. But the pinkest ends of the daintiest stems I have saved for pudding purposes….

• 

Hero Harvest: Rhubarb – pickled with celeriac soup

There’s so much rhubarb in the patch that it is becoming a problem. Rampant and unwieldy, it is technically caged to protect it from rabbits, but I think the barbed wire is really to keep it from taking over EVERYTHING….

• 

Hero Harvest: wild garlic

The veg patch is very needy at the moment. Planting seeds, replanting seeds because the mice eat them, spreading compost on the beds, tending to seedlings etc. So I’m going to crack on with the Hero Harvest – which is wild garlic – and then we can all get back to shovelling compost.

• 

Allotment Planting Plan 2019

I am not normally late. But this year I’m uncharacteristically late to the veg patch. Last week, I finally got round to clearing up the weeds that seem undeterred by winter chill. And this week I have, at last, decided what to plant and where for 2019…

• 

Hero Harvest: Celeriac – with almonds, za’atar and garlic oil

I’ve had better harvests, I admit. My celeriac crop is a collection of golf balls. Still, if you can be bothered to take a machete to the greenery and then chisel away the muddy root to find the walnut sized piece of usable flesh within, there’s much that can be done with it…

• 

Hero Harvest: Red Cabbage

Poor red cabbage. Too often braised, too little loved. It’s an absolute gem and incredibly versatile. But what do we do? We boil it for hours to accompany ham on boxing day then forget about for another year…

glutsandgluttony.com

As you might expect, we’ve discussed the environmental impacts of food waste on numerous occasions. We’ve also discussed the economics of sending edible food to landfills, as well as the innovative ideas created to address this waste. But food waste as an issue of faith? Actually, it makes total sense: certainly, it can’t be moral to dispose of food that people who are hungry could eat… can it?

The Hebrew scripture and Christian Bible speak to the notion of gluttony, but (to my knowledge, anyway) the Quran is the only holy book of the Abrahamic religions that speaks directly to the waste of food. Aisha Abdelhamid of our sister site Eden Keeper wrote about this topic very thoroughly at the beginning of the week, and I was just itching to find a place in the schedule for her post.

It’s easy to see why ancient cultures might have put a religious prohibition on the waste of food: their survival wasn’t guaranteed, and hunger was just a poor harvest away. Share your thoughts with us on Islam’s approach to the morality of waste. And, if you know of other religious obligations or prohibitions here, let us know about them… I’m fascinated by this topic.

UPDATE: Thanks to former Green Options writer and mom blogger extraordinaire Jessica Wilzig Gottlieb for filling me in on Bal Tashchit, the Jewish commandment forbidding wanton destruction and waste. In Deuteronomy 20:19-20, this concept is expressed specifically in terms of food waste…

Islam Offers Easy Answers for Reducing Waste

Since the beginning of time, waste has been an environmental issue for humans. Waste is often equated with trash, but even before the existence of trash, there was waste. Understanding the various forms of waste can help us identify ways to avoid and reduce it. Muslims have had lessons on avoiding and reducing waste for over 1,400 years and we can all benefit from the guidance offered in Islam.

It is He Who has brought into being gardens, the cultivated and the wild, and date-palms, and fields with produce of all kinds, and olives and pomegranates, similar (in kind) and variegated. Eat of their fruit in season, but give (the poor) their due on harvest day. And do not waste, for God does not love the wasteful.

From this verse we comprehend that food is a primary source of waste. Leftover food in the days before refrigeration was probably a perilous invitation for predators to come visiting. Even today, leaving food out for the bears while camping in Yosemite is a dangerously bad idea. However, not only does God command us not to waste, but in the same verse He also teaches how to avoid it. God instructs us to share our food with the poor — not from leftovers after it’s been to the market, but on the same day it is harvested.

A Criminal Degree of Commercial Food Waste

During ten years of life as a small family farmer in South Carolina, I saw a criminal degree of commercial food waste firsthand. Not only did we raise animals for halal meat, we also planted two acres of fruit trees. Taking fruit to market requires separating the very ripe fruit away from the fruit that will handle to sell for a few days. Imagine offering that very ripe fruit to the poor, how thoughtful and generous. No matter who you give it to, it’s much better than discarding it as “rotten” because it won’t handle transporting to the market.

This verse also identifies waste that occurs with consumption of food outside of its natural season. “Eat of their fruit in season” implies that this is better for us than, for example, importing grapes from halfway around the world. It is possible that this one simple command might have spared us all from global warming had we simply followed the guidance from Islam. Just think of all the fossil fuel emissions we might have avoided from only eating what is in season locally.

Waste as a Result of Excess

Waste is also a problem resulting from having too much. It may be the most sweet cantaloupe you will ever eat in your life, but if the farmer planted too much cantaloupe, it’s going to go to waste. Allah addresses this problem of excess in the Quran:

O you who believe! Do not make unlawful the wholesome things which God has made lawful for you, but commit no excess for God does not love those given to excess.

Excess produce is a problem every farmer tries to cope with in a variety of ways. In the case of small family farms, neighborly sharing always was, and still is, a regular practice. In Islam, Allah requires that Muslims share a portion of every harvest with the poor in our neighborhoods. But, sadly, industrialized commercial farming practices have led to the worst forms of food waste due to excess.

Many acres may ripen their produce all at once, and often laborers can not physically harvest fast enough to avoid food spoilage. Sometimes whole fields of produce lay rotting in the sun, and it’s a very depressing sight. My husband and I drove up to the house of a farmer with huge fields full of rotting cantaloupes. The farmer told us the field is under contract, and no more money would be paid for laborers because it was late in the season and the cost of labor was higher than the value of the cantaloupes.

Posted: No Trespassing Allowed

And don’t imagine the poor people in the neighborhood are allowed to take from those fields. We asked about that, too. Even the migrant farm workers are not allowed to do that. Contract farms are tightly patrolled and trespassers will be prosecuted – if they’re lucky and don’t get shot at.

Next, the produce that does get harvested and packaged is distributed to wholesale produce markets in huge quantities. This also is far more produce than can be distributed to grocery stores and restaurants without avoiding another huge loss of food to spoilage. Men drive forklifts around all day in the wholesale markets, carrying pallets of rotten produce to the dumpsters. The dumpsters are also patrolled, and it is illegal to remove any produce from them.

Drive behind your local grocery store and you will witness the next round of food waste from huge quantities of fresh produce on permanent display inside the store. But if it gets one little black spot on it, out it goes, onto the heaping, rotting pile out back. There are some grocery stores where poor people can stealthily grab from the dumpster out back, but in most communities this is definitely illegal trespassing, and I have no idea where poor people can turn for food. Thank God for religious organizations and food banks because harvest day sharing isn’t happening on commercial farms, wholesale markets, or out behind the grocery stores.

Gluttony as a Form Of Waste

From the two verses above, we can understand that God has provided a wide variety of delicious and lawful, or halal, food for us to eat. We can infer from this that God intends for us to enjoy our food, and understands our pleasure in having a wide variety of flavors. This is confirmed by the fact that He gave us taste buds to appreciate the various flavors of food which He provides. But eating excessively, on the other hand, carries a terrible penalty:

Eat of the wholesome things We have provided for your sustenance, but commit no excess therein, lest My condemnation fall upon you; he upon whom My condemnation falls has indeed thrown himself into utter ruin. (20:81)

Gluttony is a form of personal sabotage, leading to a large number of health risks. Overeating may be seen by many as a simple act of self-indulgence in the presence of delicious food, but God obviously doesn’t see it that way. It is easy to understand that unwholesome consumption, like taking drugs, clearly carries dangerous health risks. But the 1,400-year-old lesson here is that even the good, wholesome foods carry dangerous risks when eaten excessively.

Obesity and diabetes, among other life-wasting conditions related to overeating, are risks that God clearly would like us to avoid. And, just as we put the spoon in our own mouth with our own hand, God makes it clear that we are responsible for our own condemnation: “he upon whom My condemnation falls has indeed thrown himself into utter ruin.”

“Jonesing” Is Another Form of Waste in Islam

“Keeping up with the Jones’s,” or conspicuous spending for the sake of prestige, is not an evil born of 20th century, Western society. It is clearly present in the earliest days of Islam, in the Saudi Arabian desert society of 600 A.D., as we see in the following verses of the Holy Quran:

Children of Adam! Wear your beautiful apparel at every time and place of prayer and eat and drink. But do not be excessive – verily God does not love the wasteful.

Not only are we provided with delicious food, but we are also encouraged to wear our beautiful clothes when eating, drinking, and praying. Clearly this is community socializing, and donning your duds is not discouraged. On the other hand, in Islam showing off your personal fortune by spending it on an outrageously expensive outfit is both excessive and wasteful.

Social spending can spiral out of control when being seen as Mr. or Ms. Big Spender becomes more important than enjoying a community gathering. Peer pressure is a trigger for conspicuous spending throughout a community, leading to envy, jealousy, and back-stabbing. Families and whole communities can be destroyed this way, but God provides a warning against this hateful form of waste. And, in fact, even the cycle of peer pressure can be broken easily by following the simple words of the Prophet of Islam:

“When you see one who has more, look to one who has less.”

It is easier to count our blessings when we focus more on the poor people around us, rather than the rich. When God is our mentor, our peers become less impressive. And when we read all this down-to-earth guidance about avoiding waste, it becomes clear that the answers in Islam are simple. They are personal and self-evident.

We need only to focus on our own personal attempt at avoiding waste, and the net effect is possible to ripple through the entire population. Our environment will not change. We will not wake up one morning to a lovely clean environment without each one of us turning our attention inward.

I am not responsible for anyone else’s waste but my own, and no one else will clean up my waste for me. But, God willing, if I clean up my mess and stem my own flow of waste, then I’ll be free and very happy to help out wherever I can!

Featured image credit: Shutterstock

insteading.com

“There is no love sincerer than the love of food.”

―

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.”
― Socrates

“Everything in this room is edible. Even I’m edible. But, that would be called canibalism. It is looked down upon in most societies.”

―

Tim Burton, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“Am I tough? Am I strong? Am I hard-core? Absolutely.
Did I whimper with pathetic delight when I sank my teeth into my hot fried-chicken sandwich? You betcha.”
― James Patterson

“As it turned out, everyone wanted a doughnut. Jace wanted two.”
― Cassandra Clare

“Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.”

―

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Mirrors on the ceiling,

The pink champagne on ice

And she said ‘We are all just prisoners here, of our own device’

And in the master’s chambers,

They gathered for the feast

They stab it with their steely knives,

But they just can’t kill the beast

Last thing I remember, I was

Running for the door

I had to find the passage back

To the place I was before

‘Relax,’ said the night man,

‘We are programmed to receive.

You can check out any time you like,

But you can never leave …”

―

The Eagles, Hotel California

“I have a head for business and a body for sin. Unfortunately, the sin appears to be gluttony.”

―

Jenny Colgan, Meet Me at the Cupcake Café

“The best part is coming.”

“What’s the best part? You swallowing an entire cow whole?”

“No. That’s the finale.”

―

Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse

“Well, what did you have for lunch?” I snapped. “Surely that’s not top secret superhero information.”

“Steak with mashed potatoes and a side salad,” Striker replied. “And a piece of chocolate cheesecake for dessert.”

I gave up on conversation after that. I was too jealous of the cheesecake to continue.”

―

Jennifer Estep, Karma Girl

“Do you think it is a vain hope that one day man will find joy in noble deeds of light and mercy, rather than in the coarse pleasures he indulges in today — gluttony, fornication, ostentation, boasting, and envious vying with his neighbor? I am certain this is not a vain hope and that the day will come soon.”

―

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even when animals are concerned. When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs too much to ever give them up, and yeah it’s sad about the farms but that’s just the way it is, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony. We can say that what makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat.”

―

Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy

“Oh, pity the poor glutton
Whose troubles all begin
In struggling on and on to turn
What’s out into what’s in.”
― Walter de la Mare

“He shook his head in exasperation. “Are you sure you’re not a Succubus? You seem really obsessed with the sin of lust.”

“It’s a good sin. I like gluttony an awful lot, too. Sloth has its moments, but I just don’t understand acedia at all. I mean, what the f**k is that anyway? Oh, and greed is good, to quote Gordon Gekko. Anger, envy and pride,” I ticked them off on my fingers. “I don’t often have much use for them. It’s a shortcoming that I’m hoping to correct in the next millennium or two. I’m not very old; I can’t be expected to have mastered them all yet.”

“I think you’ve worked too hard on some of those,” he said dryly. “Maybe you should switch over to virtues instead. Give yourself a much needed break.”

Virtues? Yeah, right.

“Virtues are too difficult,” I told him, shaking my head. “Look how old you are and you’ve hardly made a dent in them. I’ll admit, you seem to have zeal nailed, as well as faith and temperance. Self control? I’ve got my doubts based on your recent actions. I’m not seeing the kindness, love or generosity, either. That humility thing seems to be pretty far beyond your reach, too. Really, really far. I’m sorry to tell you this, but from what I can see, the sin of pride is a major component of your character. Dude, you’re f**king old. You should have these things pretty well ticked off your shopping list by now. I’m seriously disappointed. Seriously.”

―

Debra Dunbar, A Demon Bound

“I learned that it’s okay to feel the way I do: that my life has no meaning unless I have a boyfriend. A real man is like the perfect vampire-boy and all the perfect guys in Twue Wuv.”

―

Jess C. Scott, Literary Heroin (Gluttony): A Twilight Parody

“Shukhov ate his supper without bread–a double portion and bread on top of it would be too rich. So he’d save the bread. You get no thanks from your belly–it always forgets what you’ve just done for it and comes begging again the next day.”
― Alexandr Soljenitsin

“The only good thing about that decision, Gatt, is that I’ll get tea before you.”
― Graham Gooch

“Many obese people spend a significant amount of their energy on suppressing the urge to tell some of the people who are staring at them that they do not eat as much and as frequently as they seem to.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The way of the consumerist culture is to spend so much energy chasing happiness that it has none left to be happy.”

―

Criss Jami, Healology

“Instead of going out on Saturday night as planned, I decided to stay in with a few of my closest friends from the complex carbohydrate family. Well actually, like most of my friends, they’re not that complex.”

―

Angela Pippos, The Goddess Advantage

“Nothing helps gluttony along so well as eating food you don’t have to pay for yourself”

―

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

“The greatest masters have only made single statues, groups are always inferior; that is why Carpeaux, big though he was, is less so than Rodin, for he never knew how to make single statues. He did not know how to find his rhythm in the arrangement of the shapes of one body, but obtained it by the disposition of several. The great sculptors are there to prove it. Think of the masterpieces which we like most, all standing or seated, and one at a time, and they are not in the least monotonous. The connoisseur loves one spicy cake, but the glutton requires at least six to stimulate his pleasure.”

―

H.S. Ede, Savage Messiah

“How long could we allow this beast

To gorge and guzzle, feed and feast

On everything he wanted to?

Great Scott! It simply wouldn’t do!

However long this pig might live,

We’re positive he’d never give

Even the smallest bit of fun

Or happiness to anyone.”

―

Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“Gluttony is the act of digging a grave with your own teeth.”
― Enock Maregesi

“Wachawi wanamwabudu Shetani. Lakini Shetani wanayemwabudu si Shetani Ibilisi aliyeumbwa na Mwenyezi Mungu kuja kuudanganya ulimwengu wote. Ni Shetani roho ya mabadiliko, mabadiliko ya kweli, ya ufahamu kamilia ulimwengu huu ambamo sisi sote tunaishi. Wachawi, kwa maneno mengine, wanaabudu miungu – kama vile Inanna wa Mesopotamia, Isis wa Misri, Asherah wa Kaanani au Belus wa Assyria ambaye ndiye mungu wa kwanza kuabuadiwa kama sanamu duniani – iliyotwaliwa na Shetani tangu misingi ya ulimwengu huu kusimikwa. Dhambi aliyotenda Shetani mbinguni ni ndogo kuliko dhambi wanazotenda wachawi duniani, ijapokuwa dhambi aliyotenda Shetani haitaweza kusamehewa na ndiyo maana Shetani hataweza kuwasamehe wanadamu. Ni jukumu letu kuwaita wachawi wote kutoka Babeli na kuwaleta katika ukweli kama kweli wanayemwabudu ni Shetani Ibilisi, Shetani Beelzebub, Shetani Asmodeus, Shetani Leviathan, Shetani Mammon, Shetani Amon au Shetani Belphegor ambao ni mabingwa wa kiburi, uroho, zinaa, wivu, fedha, hasira na uvivu duniani. Wachawi hawajui, na usipojua waweza kufa bila kujua.”
― Enock Maregesi

“In Physicia Baal is still worshiped as Bolus, and as Belly he is adored and served with abundant sacrifice by the priests of Guttledom.”

―

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary


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