“Some men live that they may eat, as the irrational beings ‘whose life is their belly and nothing else.’ But the Instructor enjoins us to eat that we may live. For neither is food our business, nor is pleasure our aim. Therefore discrimination is to be used in reference to food: it must be plain, truly simple, suiting precisely simple and artless children--as ministering to life not to luxury. And the life to which it conduces consists of two things, health and strength: to which plainness of fare is most suitable, being conducive both to digestion and lightness of body, from which come growth, and health, and right strength: not strength that is violent or dangerous, and wretched, as is that of the _athletes_ which is produced by artificial feeding.” Referring to the injunction of Jesus, “When thou makest an entertainment, call the poor,” for “whose sake chiefly a supper ought to be made,” Clement says of the rich:-- “They have not yet learned that God has provided for his creature (man, I mean) food and drink for _sustenance_ not for pleasure: since the body derives no advantage from extravagance in viands. On the contrary, those _who use the most frugal fare are the strongest and the healthiest, and the noblest_: as domestics are healthier and stronger than their masters, and agricultural labourers than proprietors, and not only more vigorous but wiser than rich men. For they have not buried the mind beneath food. Wholly unnatural and inhuman is it for those who are of the earth, fattening, themselves like cattle, to _feed themselves up for death_.[68] Looking downwards on the earth, bending ever over tables, leading a life of gluttony, burying all the good of existence here in a life that by and by will end for ever: so that cooks are held in higher esteem than the tillers of the ground. We do not abolish social intercourse, but we look with suspicion on the snares of Custom and regard them as a fatal mischief. Therefore daintiness must be spurned, and we are to partake of few and necessary things.... Nor is it suitable to eat and drink simultaneously. For it is the very extreme of intemperance to confound the times whose uses are discordant. And ‘whether ye eat or drink, do all to the glory of God,’ aiming after true frugality, which Christ also seems to me to have hinted at when he blessed the loaves and the cooked fishes with which he feasted the disciples, introducing a beautiful example of simple diet. And the fish which, at the command of the Lord, Peter caught, points to digestible and God-given and moderate food....