In an interview on the Web site for the Breatharian Institute of America, Wiley Brooks—the founder of the Institute—asserts that eating food is simply “an acquired habit, like smoking and drinking.” Moreover, like any behavioural pattern, the nasty habit of eating can be broken through discipline and enlightenment. Instead of snarfing down a cheeseburger for lunch, you can—according to Breatharians—acquire all of your daily nutrition from the air and sunlight, which they call prana, a Sanskrit word meaning breath. Though Wiley is perhaps the most notorious Breatharian—if only because of a debacle that ensued in 1983 when he was caught sneaking into a hotel restaurant and ordering a chicken pie—he is not the first person to advocate abstinence from food. In the first half of the twentieth century, Caribala Dassi, a nun living in India, supposedly lived forty years without eating. Likewise, in nineteenthcentury Bavaria, Maria Frutner gained fame for spurning all food, again for forty years. Even earlier, the son of a Nazareth-based carpenter spent forty days fasting in the wilderness. Although the word breatharian does not yet appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, it began to appear in North American newspapers in 1979.