EAT, a novel

Fasting to protest injustice; fasting to lose weight; fasting to demonstrate spiritual control over appetite--all of these are reasons to refrain from eating, and all instantly come to mind when someone embarks on a long fast. Niall DelBianco rejects all of these explanations. His long stint of eschewing food, not for a given period but indefinitely, derives from a different and deeper consideration: rejection of the equation that eating necessitates the death of other beings. He intends, with this refusal, to demonstrate that a human being can gather energy another way, hopefully by light energy. How this radical drama plays out, how it involves the narrator and former instructor, Rick Zito, and how it almost shatters the small college community where it takes place, is the subject of this story.