Religion, Food, and Eating in North America

Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History

by Benjamin E. Zeller (Editor), Marie W. Dallam (Editor), Reid L. Neilson (Editor)

The way in which religious people eat reflects not only their understanding of food and religious practice but also their conception of society and their place within it. This anthology considers theological foodways, identity foodways, negotiated foodways, and activist foodways in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. Original essays explore the role of food and eating in defining theologies and belief structures, creating personal and collective identities, establishing and challenging boundaries and borders, and helping to negotiate issues of community, religion, race, and nationality.

Contributors consider food practices and beliefs among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists, as well as members of new religious movements, Afro-Caribbean religions, interfaith families, and individuals who consider food itself a religion. They traverse a range of geographic regions, from the Southern Appalachian Mountains to North America's urban centers, and span historical periods from the colonial era to the present. These essays contain a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives, emphasizing the embeddedness of food and eating practices within specific religions and the embeddedness of religion within society and culture. The volume makes an excellent resource for scholars hoping to add greater depth to their research and for instructors seeking a thematically rich, vivid, and relevant tool for the classroom.

Genres: Religion, Food, Nonfiction

376 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2014

Reviews

[Emily Monaco]

I literally picked this book of essays up off the street in Paris – and was forced to abandon it in the Seville airport because I bought too many local ceramics. Ultimately, it was a mixed bag, as so many books of essays are. I was particularly intrigued by Jeremy Rapport’s essay on vegetarianism in the formative periods of the Seventh-Day Adventists and the Unity School of Christianity and how while on the outside, the diet of these two groups may have looked similar, the reasons members committed to the diet were vastly different, with the former imposing the diet as a means of growing nearer to God and the latter recommending it as a rational means of engaging with God’s creation, "a logical practice for those who understood God’s design of the world and plan for humanity.” I also very much enjoyed two of the essays on Jewish food culture: Samira K. Mehta’s “'I Chose Judaism, but Christmas Cookies Chose Me': Food, Identity, and Familial Religious Practice in Christian/Jewish Blended Families” and Nora L. Rubel’s “The Feast At the End of the Fast: The Evolution of An American Jewish Ritual,” which offered some interesting insight into the Break Fast that has become common for American Jews at the end of Yom Kippur – and posits reasons why Sukkot, one of the Holiest of Jewish holidays, seems to have nearly disappeared from the calendar for American Jews.

Perhaps my favorite two essays were Suzanne Crawford O’Brien’s on “Salmon as Scrament: First Salmon Ceremonies in the Pacific Northwest,” which delved deep into the relationship between Coast Salish communities and the salmon season, and the last essay by Benjamin E. Zeller, “Quasi-Religious American Foodways: The Cases of Vegetarianism and Locavorism,” which argues – quite convincingly – that the two diets cited in its title are two of the most pervasive religions among modern Americans, with a focus specifically on “conversion."

[Roland Clark · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the big points that Religion, Food, and Eating in North America makes is that a wide variety of people practice their religions through what, how, and when they eat. An astonishing 60 percent of American Jews fast on Yom Kippur, for example, while only 47 percent belong to synagogues. Similarly, most Americans are likely to know that Seventh Day Adventists are vegetarians or that Mormons don’t drink coffee even if they know next to nothing about the doctrines or other practices of these groups. Some new religious movements, such as the Peace Mission Movement, define themselves primarily in terms of their eating habits. When the Reverend M. J. Divine established the Peace Mission Movement in Harlem in 1919, he focused on the Eucharist as a “love feast” in which believers ate rich, bounteous foods that one would normally only touch on Thanksgiving or Christmas. The abundance of Father Divine’s table was the first thing visitors always commented on, and it reflected the prosperity gospel of material blessing that he promised to his followers.

See my full review here: http://wordsbecamebooks.com/2015/06/1...

[David Krueger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listen to my interview with Ben Zeller and Marie Dallam: http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org...

[Mills College Library]

203 R3826 2014