It would be quite incorrect to assume that John Milton, in his "Paradise Lost", would have penned a stern condemnation of food and gluttony as it was customary in the Middle Age monastic ethos. In Milton’s Christian epic, the proposed model of sainthood is the conjugal, not the monastic one, and the main difference lays in the treatment of the body, of food and its consumption: gluttony causes eternal damnation, but it is also the root of salvation. The apple, the forbidden fruit that caused Adam and Eve to sin, divides the poem in two specular halves: one dealing with the aftermath of sin, the other recreating Adam’s and Eve’s life in Paradise and the hope to regain that condition. While in Eden, Adam and Eve do not enjoy a state of primitive innocence like in the pagan Golden Age, but their passion coincides with reason, and their body with spirit; they build and enhance the delights they are offered. The food they eat daily in Eden is neither spontaneous nor casual and it already shows the features of a ritual. The essay discusses the relationship of the couple with food both before and after the Fall.
