I wrote this during a glamorous Sunday night study session in the Paloma Lounge but am actually supposed to be on Bourbon Street in New Orleans for Mardi Gras right now. Three final papers and a midterm (during dead week–how is that a mid-term?) intervened, and the trip got postponed a year, but in the spirit of the occasion, I thought I would write about the food-centric traditions that gave rise to our contemporary celebration of Mardi Gras; it beat reading increasingly incoherent text messages from people actually in New Orleans for the week.

“Mardi Gras” is French for “Fat Tuesday” and actually comes from the medieval Christian calendar–not the producer of some low-budget “Girls Gone Wild” spinoff’s twisted imagination. It started out as a celebration of the last day before Lent, 40 days of fasting and atonement in preparation for Easter Sunday. (For a more contemporary analogy, think of how crazy the last weekend before Dead Week can get here on campus.) During Lent, Christians are expected to give up basically any fun stuff–back in the Middle Ages, that included all alcohol, meat and dairy. The 40 days start on Ash Wednesday, a day on the church calendar entirely devoted to contemplating your inevitable death. (There’s a reason why the Ash Wednesday music genre isn’t quite as popular as Christmas carols are.)

So to get their last licks in, people would throw bacchanal celebrations the day before (Tuesday), sort of like carbo-loading for Christ. Today, that Tuesday has morphed into the more recognizable Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans and Rio de Janiero’s infamous Carnival.

But while the celebrations are famous, the subsequent period of atonement isn’t as widely recognized in modern secular society. In an age of instant gratification, excess and constant availability of–well, anything you want, deprivation can feel like a bizarre concept. It’s so easy to buy a gallon-sized tub of Red Vines at the two 24-hour Safeways within a few miles of campus; you can forget that candy is actually a luxury item. I come from a family that observes Lent, but also worships food. (When my little brother was twelve, he put white truffles on his Christmas list.) Piecing those two things together can be hard; Anthony Bourdain isn’t exactly running around telling everyone to forsake their gastronomic excesses, and the popularity of the YouTube video series “Epic Mealtime” speaks to our fascination with over-abundance. But as the nation becomes increasingly conscious of where exactly our food comes from, the post-Mardi Gras period is a great excuse to pare down, cut back on wasteful consumption patterns and really think about how luxurious some of the foods we take for granted are. So what are you giving up for Lent?