The traditional fast for Lent has to do with food products. In some traditions, this has meant a fast during daylight hours, others going without meat (except on Sundays) or some other derivation on that theme.
Today's suggested fast is to give up a food product you usually eat-coffee, chocolate, Diet Pepsi, etc.
I think there is something to be said for a fast from a particular food product that is part of the daily routine. For most of human history, food insecurity was a fact of life. The end of winter was often a time of scarcity, and harvest festivals are a tradition in every culture because a good harvest means survival for another year. Most people in America do not face the threat of starvation, so it is worth, I think remembering how rare this situation really is from a historical perspective. (There continues to be significant food scarcity, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million people sometimes uncertain about their food source, and 17.5 million going hungry for lack of food at some time during 2008 http://www.frac.org/html/hunger_in_the_us/hunger_index.html) We can get whatever we want, regardless of what time of year it is, just by going to the grocery store in our climate controlled automobiles. The obesity epidemic in America is a testimony that lack of calories is not our nation's challenge.
So see what it feels like to not have immediate access to everything that we want-pass up dessert, or the morning doughnut, the coffee addiction, or whatever your pleasure happens to be, and remember the patterns of seasons, weather, and scarcity that defined food for most people through history, and billions today.
And maybe remember that our current system may not be sustainable, and what it might mean to face new patterns of life.
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