(Episode 503) SO GLAD YOU ASKED about Religion & Food

Transcript! Because accessibility is mandatory…

PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.

Shownotes! Because citations are political…

This is the first SO GLAD YOU ASKED episode. We got a LOT of requests for this one! So today we can’t cite just one nerd, but we’re here to answer the question: “Religion and food: what’s THAT all about?”

The 101:Where we did the professor-work

Why Religion & Food?

IF religion is what people do and if people need to eat—and since lots of folks LIKE to eat—then we can expect that religion has a lot of food and food has a lot of religion. There’s a lot to say—and, like all SGYA epsiodes, not nearly enough time to pretend to cover it all. What Megan and Ilyse talked about was food-based rituals, food rules (like cleanliness, what’s allowed or not, and holiday-specific foods) and let’s also talk about the politics of food–how groups mark themselves as groups with cuisine, culture, dietary practices.

For our basic lesson plan, here are a few of the main things that we talked about…

  • 4 categories for thinking about religion and food, as we see it: dietary laws, customs, cultures, and cuisines

    ⇒ dietary laws = things that are explicitly part of religious traditions, whether that’s textual or interpreted, like later traditions that claim (or don’t) to be original

    ⇒ food customs, like: Catholic “fish on Fridays,” wine blessings, dates before breaking Ramadan fasts; saying prayers before eating

    ⇒ food cultures: I’m thinking here like temple food for Buddhists; “purifying” foods in Hindu ayurveda; and even just surrounding issues, like access to spice, salt, types of grains, dairy consumption, etc.

    ⇒ cuisines, are regional! Not necessarily religious! But also dictate how religious people do stuff – like debates over the correct Xmas dinner (turkey? Ham? khetum?) or the right sweets for Ramadan or the proper food offerings to Hindu deities. Bagels and lox are expressly Jewish. And they’re also absolutely not Israeli, or British, or Austrailian. So, what of the Jews in those places? Are bagels their thing, too? Or is this a Yiddisher NYer thing only? Where does religion end and food begin?


    So, what is the thesis here? We have to eat—that includes people doing religion. We eat alone, we eat as celebration, we eat when we mourn, we abstain from eating to mark certain days, times, festivals, grief. We grow food, we cultivate land, we slaughter animals (some of us). We do all these things and most religions have a way to manage most if not all of it—which makes it a great place to ask questions.

Don’t forget your homework, nerds!

We mentioned some of this on the pod, but promised extra resources here. Eat it up.

Michael Twitty’s work, like all of it

Ted Merwin, Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (NYU 2015)

Krishnenu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas, eds. Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Febe Armanios and Bogac Ergene. Halal Food: A History (OUP 2018)

Religion, Food, and Eating in North America, edited by Marie W. Dallam, Reid Neilson, Nora Rubel and Benjamin E. Zeller (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

Abel Gomez, salmon ceremony on Indigenous Religions, Part 2 episode

Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Paulina Kolata and Gwendolyn Gillson. "Feasting with Buddhist Women: Food Literacy in Religious Belonging", Numen 68, 5-6 (2021): 567-592, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15685276-12341640.

Ambros, Barbara R. 2019. "Partaking of Life: Buddhism, Meat-Eating, and Sacrificial Discourses of Gratitude in Contemporary Japan" Religions 10, no. 4: 279. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10040279.

soup’s on