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Religion, Food, and Eating in North America

2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/utopianstudies.26.1.0252

2154-9648

Timothy Miller,

Culinary Culture and Tourism

Food studies as an academic discipline has expanded tremendously in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Study of the intersection of food and religion is not new, but as a field of inquiry it is ripe for new work. This new compendium edited by Zeller, Dallam, Neilson, and Rubel does double duty in that regard: It provides several important chapter-length contributions to existing scholarship, and it points to the way to new possibilities for scholarship. Indeed, no reasonably imaginative scholar could read this volume and fail to come away with several solid ideas for further study.A standard critique of edited volumes is that they are uneven and often short on overall coherence. That criticism could be applied here, but my response to it would be that the diversity of the chapters, in both subject matter and approach, opens up plenty of new vistas and therefore is more a strength than a weakness. Here we have chapters that are grounded both in mainstream religions and in new religious movements. Several of them deal with food and ritual activities; others take up such diverse topics as ways of teaching a faith to children through food, fasting, and the evolution of food-related practices over time.A rundown through the essays is in order here. The book begins with an introduction by Marie Dallam, whose straightforward and clear prose gets the volume off to a good start. She places the tome in the line of scholarship today that examines lived religion rather than the religion of official texts and prescribed (and proscribed) practices. The point of the book, she tells the reader, is to examine ways in which food and religion are connected and to make sense of that intersection. And from that framework the rest of the book proceeds.The first section of the book is called “Theological Foodways,” and its first chapter, by David Grumett, could actually be characterized as an antifood piece: it examines food abstinence in various Christian traditions. He explores fasting, as it occurs during certain holiday periods, but goes on to look at less comprehensive food avoidance, as in vegetarianism and other religiously based foodways that involve avoiding some, but not all, foods. Jeremy Rapport appears next, analyzing the vegetarian diets espoused by the Unity movement and the Seventh-day Adventists, focusing on their formative years; he finds those diets part of larger lifeway patterns in those two movements, with Seventh-day Adventist founder Ellen White opposing all kinds of intemperance and Unity founder Myrtle Fillmore seeing diet as part of a more comprehensive mental and physical wholeness. Leonard Primiano provides a look back at the extravagant banquets that were for decades a central fixture of Father Divine's Peace Mission movement and then follows the evolution of Peace Mission eating into Mother Divine's emphasis on good nutrition within a creative theology of food. Annie Blazer concludes the section by taking us to Hallelujah Acres, a Christian enclave in North Carolina that combines Bible study with a raw-food diet and dietary supplements.The second section examines food and religion within three American religious subcultures plus one that represents the great growth of “blended families” in which the spouses come from different religious backgrounds. The first essay here, by Rachel Gross, provides a retrospective look at the ways food helped Jews retain their roots as large numbers of them were moving from Orthodoxy to less observant forms of the faith in the mid–twentieth century. In “Salmon as Sacrament,” Suzanne Crawford O'Brien's contribution, the deep interdependence of salmon and people among the tribes of the Northwest, and the contribution of salmon to the renewal of traditional culture, is limned with excellent empathetic sensitivity. From the other side of the continent comes a reflective essay on the interplay of food and faith in African American culture, anchored by gumbo, a food whose subtleties and complexities mirror those of black American religion. Finally, Samira K. Mehta looks at the struggles and triumphs that come to religiously blended families trying to keep alive elements of very different religious backgrounds and thus impart their inherited traditions to the next generation.The third section is called “Negotiated Foodways,” and it looks at ways in which food and eaters have changed over time in still other American religious subcultures. Elizabeth Pérez writes of the role of the orishas for the practitioners of Lucumí in Cuba, focusing on sugar, which can play an important role in feeding the deities. Rather ambitiously, but nevertheless successfully, Kate Holbrook dissects the foodways of two seemingly different groups, the Nation of Islam and the Mormons, two historically marginalized American religious groups. Each of them does a balancing act, fitting into the larger culture and intentionally not fitting into it, and food is intricately involved in the process. Mindful eating as promulgated by American Buddhists comes next in Jeff Wilson's insightful chapter, which concludes that eating practices advocated by various American Buddhist teachers (most of them non-Asian) are helping Buddhism move from the fringes of society into the mainstream. He concludes that “mindfulness has become the Buddhist equivalent of Hindu-derived yoga in modern American culture: a religious technique that has been largely stripped of its original religious context, then repackaged as a universal panacea” (230). Nora Rubel concludes the section with an essay tracking the evolution of a new American Jewish cultural phenomenon, the feast that comes after a day of religious fasting. Jewish fasting goes back to antiquity, but breaking the fast with a feast is a rather newer concept, as Rubel explains.The book's last section, “Activist Foodways,” looks at three cases in which food is a tool for social change. Todd Levasseur guides us through Koinonia Farm in Georgia, that remarkable experiment in interracial cooperation, founded in 1942, that, carrying out founder Clarence Jordan's broad vision of community, pursues environmental stewardship, permaculture, and sustainable food production while working for positive social change, through such programs as Habitat for Humanity, which started at Koinonia. Next, Sarah E. Robinson zooms in on a food cooperative in Chicago that is expanding the concept of halal, which usually means meat that is slaughtered in ritually appropriate ways but, say the activists in the Taqwa Eco-Food Cooperative, should also involve fair treatment of farmers and of the animals themselves. Finally, the book's last chapter, by Benjamin E. Zeller, presents two food options making themselves felt in American culture, vegetarianism and locavorism. His conclusion might well be a conclusion for the book as well: in prefacing his analysis of conversions to new foodways, he observes, “If food and eating look like religion, then we can study them using the tools of [religious studies]” (302). None of his fellow authors would disagree.Now, given that this review is appearing in Utopian Studies, what is utopian about all of this? The utopian elements of the various chapters vary a good deal in both nature and intensity. Some chapters are not very utopian in their concern, except, perhaps, for the fact that religion, which always envisions something better out there, or at least some kind of benefit to the individual practitioner, inherently has utopian elements. But others convey clear and strong utopian visions, none more so than Robinson's work on a cooperative that, by expanding the concept of halal meat for Muslims, really seeks nothing less than an overhaul of the industrial American food system in favor of food that is ethically produced, equitably marketed, and healthful for eaters. Food can surely be a strong vector for the improvement of society. A utopian vision is not hard to find here.As a footnote, this volume seems designed as a textbook, with discussion questions following each chapter. It should not, however, be dismissed as anything less than serious scholarship. The various chapters are by and large engaging and thought-provoking for anyone with a serious interest in religious studies, food studies, or utopian studies.