Clement of Alexandria, Instructor 2.1

Therefore, keeping the goal in view and selecting the Scriptures for the benefit of our education, we must outline in summary what kind of person the one called a Christian ought to be throughout his entire life. We must begin with ourselves and with how we ought to harmonize our lives. Accordingly, as we consider the symmetry of our constitution — what each of us presents to his own body, or rather how we ought to guide it — we must say this: when someone is led by the Word from external things, and even from the discipline of the body, to the mind, and he accurately learns the theory of the things that happen to a human being according to nature, he will understand that he must not be eager about external things, but must cleanse the eye of the soul, which is his own, and purify the flesh itself as well. For the one who has been purely freed from the things through which he is still earth, what could he have that is more useful for himself to advance on the way toward the comprehension of God? Other people live to eat, just like irrational animals, for whom life is nothing but the stomach; but our Educator commands us to eat so that we may live. For food is not our work, nor is pleasure our goal; rather, food is judged necessary for our stay here, which the Word educates toward immortality. And this food is simple and unelaborate, suited to the truth, harmonizing with simple and unelaborate children, as it were, fit for living, not for luxury. And this living, which consists of two things — health and strength — is best served by simple food, which is useful for the evacuations and the lightness of the body, from which come growth, health, and just strength, not unjust or precarious and miserable strength like that of athletes from forced eating. Therefore the many-colored qualities of food must be spat out, since they introduce various harms, bad conditions of bodies, upsets of stomachs, the taste being corrupted by some evil demon's technique of cooking and the useless skill concerning delicacies. For they dare to call food the indulgence in luxuries, which slips into harmful pleasures. But Antiphanes the Delian physician has said that one of the causes of disease is this variety of foods, practiced by those who are displeased with the truth, who boast in various vanity, who swear falsely against the temperate diet, and who busy themselves with exotic foods from across the sea.