But such deprivations ooze with privilege. Our eating, like much about our lives, operates in terms of choice, control, and comfort.

How else could — or should — it be? A subtle challenge to our model has been playing out for a month as Muslims observed Ramadan, the sacred ninth month of the Islamic calendar when adult Muslims refrain from eating and drinking (yes, even water) from sunrise to sunset.

In diverse communities, and partly thanks to social media, Ramadan becomes year on year more visible to non-Muslims.

This year saw the Twitter thread #RamadanProblems surge, with participants reflecting on their fasting with (literally) dry humour: “Life is like a box of chocolates. That you can’t eat.”

Food practices are deeply cultural — and personal. We structure our days around types of food and celebrations are punctuated with special consumables, from birthday cake to champagne.

The what, when, and how of eating speaks volumes about who we are and what we value — but perhaps the choice not to eat says even more.

The primary form in which not-eating features in our lives is that dreaded and ubiquitous Western spectre: dieting.

A growing number of fad diets include fasting, such as the 5:2 fast diet, under which dieters cut daily calorie intake to a quarter two days a week.

The guilt, envy, self-deception, jubilation (little), and misery involved — that sense of superiority jockeying with a sense of profound moral failure — doesn’t seem to have much in common with the communal discipline and joint celebration of Ramadan. Diets may be sensible or even necessary but they’re all about me — isolation instead of solidarity, no matter how much camaraderie.

People have been cataloguing our culture’s dysfunctional relationship with food for decades; even a cursory list ranges from the trivial (food as a form of snobbery and elitism) to the dire (obesity, the insidious destructions of body image, crisis levels of eating disorders — the No. 1 killer among mental illnesses, with a mortality rate of about 20 per cent).

Forget tolerance, we can be self-righteous about others’ food choices, from breast-feeding onwards. And mass of food programs on TV — “gastroporn” — suggests something, is out of whack.

It’s a biological given, so there are numerous ways to get the eating of food wrong.

As Lionel Shriver observes in her 2013 novel Big Brother: A Novel , we seem to have “mislaid the most animal of masteries” — that is, how to eat.

Philosophical and religious figures throughout history, from Plato and Aristotle to Confucius and Zoroaster, not to mention Jesus and many of his followers, have practised fasting, believing forgoing food was beneficial, whether as a refusal of the body’s demands, or as a way of focusing on the spiritual.

Interestingly, there is one area (Ramadan excepted) where fasting is making a comeback.

While World Vision’s 40 Hour Famine has been running since 1975, newer events like Live Below the Line, which involves eating on $2 a day for five days, also aims to raise money and awareness of the human experience of hunger.

Unlike dieting, voluntary hunger directs attention outwards in compassion and empathy and in a recognition of what’s more important than the messages our stomachs often send us.

Our dependence on food is not meant to control us. Fasting has been viewed as liberating — but usually with reference to something higher, whether a higher being or a higher purpose.

Perhaps the loss of that higher reference point helps explain the lack of balance that characterises our food culture.

Dr Natasha Moore is a research fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. She has a PhD in English literature.