In this study, I have endeavored to demonstrate the power of “common sense wisdom” regarding food, the usefulness of food as a tool for institutional authorities and lay people alike to negotiate the lived experience of religion in all its complexity. The perspective of highly literate elites remains dominant but, when they rely on cliché, metaphor, and common experience to communicate ascetic ideologies, they open the door to the world of ordinary religious practice and imagination. Despite the prescriptive and spiritualizing tendencies of late antique homilies and poetry, food itself remains stubbornly material, personal, social, and place-bound. It creates boundaries and breaks them down with equal facility.