Eating religiously: food and faith in the 21^st century

ABSTRACT

This, the first article in our co-edited Thematic Issue, “Eating Religiously: Food and Faith in the 21^st Century“ introduces Food, Culture and Society readers to the intriguing research questions posed by the volume’s authors, who discussed these with us in a novel Israel Science Foundation-sponsored international conference at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in May 2019. We open this Introduction by presenting a contemporary paradox in which demands for resurrecting ancient animal sacrifices and encouraging the re-traditionalization of religious practices coexist with the growing influence of ecological, climate change and animal rights advocates’ pressures to ban such sacrifices and embrace veganism. After adding a brief overview of the growing anthropological subfield of Food and Religion, we set out the main concepts that guide the structure of this volume and explicate the social, cultural and political importance that considerations of eating religiously bring to bear in the 21^st century.

KEYWORDS:

• Food and religion
• culinary redemption
• sacrifice
• gastropolitics

Since the beginning of the 21^st century, various messianically motivated Jewish groups have been attempting to restore the Passover sacrifice on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site (Feldman 2020). This Passover sacrifice (Zevah Pesach) was one of the major rituals during biblical times and involved the public slaughter of lambs and kids by the Temple priests. The animals’ flesh was then roasted, distributed, and eaten with bitter herbs and matzo in large festive meals to commemorate the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt.

The Romans pillaged and destroyed the Temple in 70 CE and forced the Jews out of Jerusalem; consequently the Passover sacrifice was discontinued. Following the Islamic conquest of the region, six centuries later the Muslims began construction of the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, turning it into Haram Al Sharif, Islam’s third most holy site. Ever since, it has been a contested religious space, claimed by both Jews and Muslims. During the 1967 Six Day War, the modern state of Israel captured Jerusalem’s Old City but left the Temple Mount/Haram Al Sharif under the auspices of the Jordanian Islamic Waqf. Over the years, tension and conflict have only increased.

Recently, demands made by some radical Jewish groups for restoring the Passover sacrifice and communal meal have further exacerbated the fraught situation. Israeli authorities first denied them access to the Temple Mount, but gradually acceded to their claims that the ritual and the meal were part of Jews’ religious rights. Permission was granted to perform the sacrifice, but only at some distance from the holy site.

While the revival of ancient religious practices involving animal slaughter and the consumption of their meat are on the rise in Israel and elsewhere (e.g., Strmiska 2007; Arumugam 2015; Perez 2016), veganism in its many forms and measures has also become increasingly popular throughout the world (Budgar 2017; Lundahl 2020; Sexton, Garnett, and Lorimer 2022). Indeed in Israel, where public consumption of meat is celebrated as an expression of national sentiment (Avieli 2013), veganism has been steeply on the ascent (Gvion 2021). In fact, the country was recently dubbed the “Vegan Capital of the World”¹ and the world’s “most vegan country.”²

Though ritual animal sacrifice and veganism may seem ideologically opposed, they share a fundamental approach to eating: Diets are not only the outcome of nutritional demands in specific ecological conditions but also evolve in specific cultural contexts. Eating practices develop in tandem with cosmological perceptions, moral attitudes, social norms, ideologies, and power structures. In other words, as the articles in our special issue so clearly demonstrate, eating is often a religious act.

“Eating religiously” interrogates, analyzes and critiques everyday encounters in which food, the state, civil society, gender, race, and faith intersect and often transmute. Informed by emergent post-secularist views of religion(s), the issue’s primary aim is to ponder through ethnography the manifold meanings of food, eating and commensality as dynamic social and religious practices. The major goal of this thematic issue is to offer Food, Culture and Society readers cutting-edge anthropological research that examines the intricate causes, effects, meanings and repercussions of theoretical and real-world relationships between culinary practices and religion, including identity politics and national pride. In addition to presenting unique research findings, this special issue also offers innovative approaches to theorizing the culinary sphere in its association with morality, identity, justice and the sublime.

It is not entirely serendipitous that we are publishing “Eating Religiously” some twenty-five years following the release of Gillian Feeley-Harnik’s path-breaking “Religion and Food: An Anthropological Perspective” (1995). Immediately after asserting that food is never a static nor natural symbol, and emphasizing the “intimate involvement of food, eating, and fasting in the beliefs and practices of people” (p. 565), Feeley-Harnik stressed food’s transformative nature. This thoughtful and critical analysis of food contrasts with her treatment of religion, which Feeley-Harnik left uninterrogated, presented as a given, as an implicitly understood phenomenon (e.g., Casanova 2010, 33).

In the years that followed, many scholars abandoned the quest for one universal definition of religion. Others, however, following Freud, Durkheim, Marx or Weber, narrowed their inquiries to focus on one or another perspective or set of characteristics, even though a wide array of religious studies scholars have acknowledged that “There are innumerable definitions of religion, and every philosopher has one to suggest” (Bastide 2003 [1935], 3).

Most recently, Melvin Konner (2019, 98) has proposed a cautious definition of religion “as passionate, often communal, commitments to and experiences of supernatural agents and forces that do not require evidence-based explanations.” These supernatural forces, we suggest, include not only a monotheistic, all-powerful Creator-God, and/or competing polytheistic gods, but might also contain key ideational elements of civil religion in which the State and other types of communities create and embody metaphysical beliefs, values and practices that demand acceptance through custom, ritual and law.

During the 1990s, when the discipline of Food Studies was on the rise, informed by secularization theory (Berger 1967; Martin 1978; cf. Asad 2003; Taylor 2007) and eclipsed by weightier political, social and economic concerns, some scholars asserted that the study of religion had become “a marginal field within the social sciences and the humanities” (Furseth 2010, 19). In the 21^st century, both as an ongoing reaction to the horrific events of September 11, 2001 (Torpey 2010), and the growing realization that “the concept of the secular cannot do without the idea of religion” (Asad 1999, 192; also Casanova 2010, 36), interest in the subject has again taken center stage. This time, however, religion appears and appeals as part of an uncertain post-secular society (Nynäs, Lassander, and Utriainen 2012), where it is intricately and intimately part of political debates in the public sphere of a globalized world.

Food has also come under wider scrutiny as regards its everyday expressive uses, political meanings and semiotic functions (Appadurai 1981, 494). Food is now foregrounded in local, national and global policies, in the ethics involved in resource distribution patterns and eating practices and their broader connections to social justice, sustainability and climate change (Döring, Heide, and Mühleisen 2003; Sack 2000, 138). Public health and foodways have become central to academic discussions of race, gender and equity in sociology and anthropology (see, e.g., Garth and Reese 2020) as well as an immediate concern in individuals’ and families’ lives. Food frequently appears on the agenda of social movements, religious institutions and environmental concerns (Wickström and Illman 2012), in addition to the policies of nation-states and international organizations.

As we pondered these developments in global politics, social theory, contemporary religions and food studies, we discovered several thematic commonalities among the rich ethnographic studies that comprise “Eating Religiously.” We then devised four categories to express the ways that these papers consider how food and religion interact to constitute, confirm, and challenge each other as symbolic and material practices. These are (1) culinary redemption, (2) sacrifice and commensality, (3) gastropolitics, and (4) theoretical reconsiderations, each of which we summarize below:

Culinary redemption

Recognizing the difficulty of defining religion, we suggest nonetheless that the idea of supernatural powers offering support, succor and salvation remains central to most, if not all religions (see, e.g., Konner 2019; Torpey 2010, 174; 2012:284–287; cf. Bayers 2010). Culinary redemption asserts that the sphere of cooking and eating does not merely reflect the theology and cosmology of a given people, but is in itself a powerful arena in which socioreligious innovations aimed at deliverance can be initiated, experimented with and enacted (see also Wurgaft 2002; Paxson 2005). Catie Gressler’s analysis of Australian practitioners of the Paleo Diet contends that the fervor of their adherence and the tendency to proselytize, attests to their faith that this food regime offers redemption from the toxicity of modernity. Nir Avieli and Fran Markowitz’s article about the conspicuous consumption of watermelon among the African Hebrew Israelites during their most important yearly festival demonstrates culinary redemption from two connected angles: the salvation of the watermelon from America’s racialized scorn, and the physical and spiritual regeneration that the Black Hebrews obtain from eating this sweet, nutritious, fertility-enhancing fruit in Israel.

Sacrifice and commensality

Some of the earliest sociological and anthropological explorations of religion interwove rituals of sacrifice and contrition with communal feasting to demonstrate the social character of religious faith. Robertson Smith (1894), for example, concentrated on the direct connection between sacrifices and communal feasts in the religion of the Semites. Claiming that their animal sacrifices were always followed with a sumptuous communal meal, he contended that such commensality created and confirmed a living bond between the Semites and (their) God. The latest work on sacrifice in modernity asserts that “religious developments have steadily changed the idea and practices of sacrifice” (Duyndam, Korte, and Poorhuis 2017, 6) and urge a more nuanced approach to the subject.

Both Susan Pattie’s consideration of the madagh among diaspora Armenians and Melissa Caldwell’s analysis of faith, service and food justice in an ecumenical Christian church in Moscow exemplify Duyndam, et al’s claim that, “In the history of sacrificial practices, we simultaneously notice a transition from the literal sacrificing of animals, crops and libations to more abstract and specialized sacrifices in the form of religious study, prayer, charity and aesthetic practices” (2017, 6). Pattie’s conclusion that Western Armenians now make a sacrifice of time and money in sponsoring community meals blends neatly with Caldwell’s assertion that communally-prepared and -consumed food can both strengthen ethno-religious boundaries and transcend them through the notion and practices of Christian good works.

Janet Hoskins continues the discussion by tackling more traditional issues in food studies. She demonstrates the importance of what is not consumed, as practitioners of the contemporary Cao Dai religion in Vietnam challenge the dichotomy between meat and vegetal fare, with elder practitioners sacrificing strong tasting vegetables in their aspirations for ever higher levels of spirituality. Taken together, the papers in this section question, disturb and perhaps dismantle hitherto accepted definitions of sacrifice and commensality.

Gastropolitics

Gastropolitics, “conflict or competition over specific cultural or economic resources as it emerges in social transactions around food” (Appadurai 1981, 495), encapsulates the idea that the culinary sphere often serves as an arena for the negotiation of power and political identities. Azri Amram and Mirjam Lucking expand the concept of gastropolitics into the realm of religion. Amram shows how Muslim Palestinian citizens of Israel, restaurateurs and butchers, negotiate and create their own versions of Kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) when dealing with their Jewish customers. His article demonstrates how religious laws, as rigid as they may seem, may be adjusted to specific sociopolitical circumstances. Lucking recounts how Indonesian pilgrims in Jerusalem rework their foodscapes. Both Christian and Muslim pilgrims expect East Asian-style food: steamed rice and spicy stir-fried dishes, and shun Palestinian fare such as rice-and-meat stews. Increasingly however, the Muslim pilgrims demand a “Halal environment” along with Halal meat during their visit. Evangelical pilgrims, identifying with Israel and “The Hebrew Roots movement,” seek Kosher fare. Both groups want to eat “Indonesian” (or at least “Asian”) but each eats separately to distinguish itself religiously.

Theoretical reconsiderations

In this final section Susan Sered and Michael Herzfeld reexamine their pioneering work so as to expand and complicate their readings of the interface of food and faith. Sered returns to her groundbreaking study of Women as Rituals Experts, where she has argued that elderly Kurdish Jewish women use their traditional culinary expertise to manage both their families and the sublime. By comparing her original monograph to research conducted within a wide and variegated ethnographic context, Sered provocatively concludes that women’s culinary power can be used for both good and harm, and is highly ambivalent.

Herzfeld’s reassessment of what is edible suggests a reinterpretation of food taboos as reflections of national cultures. Relying on his seminal work in Greece, he argues that in both Hellenism and Zionism food taboos are important markers of exceptionalism. The irony, he points out, is that all exceptionalisms are structurally similar. Flouting food taboos, however, does not necessarily challenge national cultures or religions and may be perceived from the perspective of cultural intimacy as a transgression that proves the rule.

Taken together, these nine articles depict a complicated, nuanced and sometimes shocking tableau of “Eating Religiously.” Like any nine-course meal, some of the texts served here are saltier than others, some sweeter and some spicier, but none is bland. We hope that they will leave a pleasant, perhaps provocative, lingering aftertaste.

Acknowledgments

We heartily thank all the participants who joined with us in “Eating Religiously: Food and Faith in the 21^st Century,” an International Research Workshop funded by the Israel Science Foundation (grant # 2157/18) at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, May 22-24, 2019. We especially appreciate those who transformed their presentations into the nine articles that comprise this Thematic Issue. We also wish to express our gratitude to the eighteen peer reviewers whose perceptive and generous comments contributed to each of these articles.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fran Markowitz

Fran Markowitz is Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University. Having conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the US, in israel, in Russia, and in Bosnia-Herzegovina with populations as diverse as Russian-speaking Jewish immigrant families, post-Soviet Russian teenagers, Bosnian returned war refugees and African Hebrew Israelites, her many publications address interests in community, identity, religion and culture change, diasporas, and race and racialization. She is currently completing “Food for the Body and Soul” with Nir Avieli and continuing her work on Almost-Peace and Almost-War in Israel.

Nir Avieli

Nir Avieli is Professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University, and former president (2016-2019) of the Israeli Anthropological Association. Nir has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the central Vietnamese town of Hoi An since 1998, and his book, Rice Talks: Food and Community in a Vietnamese Town (2012) is a culinary ethnography of Hoi-An. He conducted further ethnographic research in Thailand, India, Singapore and Israel. His book Food and Power in Israel (2018) is based on multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in Israel since the late 1990's. Currently, with Fran Markowitz, he is completing an ethnographic study titled “Food for the Body and Soul” on the vegan soul food of the African Hebrew Israelite Community, and preparing a new research project on leisure in Greece.

Notes

1. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-link-between-eating-meat-and-the-holocaust-according-to-vegan-activist-1.5465747

2. https://thebaffler.com/latest/vegan-nation-teicher