When Blue Hill Restaurant chef Dan Barber and author Michael Pollan, both Jewish, appeared together at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan in January 2008, they each gleefully opened their remarks before this heavily Jewish audience with a personal pig anecdote.¹ Ironic, to say the least, since eating pig is prohibited by the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic law. Barber began by welcoming the audience to “my shul” (Yiddish for synagogue), since he celebrated his bar mitzvah at the Y, joking that “like a good bar mitzvah boy I’m going to talk about pork.” He launched into a tale of the agonizing decision regarding whether or not to castrate Boris, the aging boar of Stone Barns Farm, which supplies his restaurant, relating that he consulted with the pork-loving Rabbi Rabinowitz of the Reform Westchester Synagogue.² Pollan followed with a brief mention of his childhood pet pig named Kosher.

Cookbook author and food writer Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan described the evening as including “many a joke about Jewish boys liking artisanal pork.”³ Indeed, but this goes beyond performative irony and self-mockery. Pollan devoted an entire chapter of his most recent major work on food, Cooked (2013)—more than a quarter of the book!—to whole-hog barbecue, reveling in details about learning from the pit masters of North Carolina, perfecting the technique of crackling (making crispy pig skin), and inaugurating his own now-annual Berkeley pig roast tradition in his front-yard fire pit. In his earlier, best-selling Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), Pollan described his revelatory first hunt for feral California pig.

Many of those involved in the growing food movement , including some of its leading figures, are Jewish—and love pig meat. In this book I connect this transgressive fetish or sheer disinterest with larger questions about the food movement and the politics of culture and what comes under the sign of “religion.” Though I treat a number of figures, I focus on the writings of Michael Pollan; since he is a sophisticated journalist and his thought-provoking books contain a great deal of substance, he has become one of the leading public intellectuals of the food movement.⁴

Before I proceed I want to clarify how deeply I share many of the assumptions and conclusions of the food movement.⁵ It was Pollan’s work itself that first taught me how to really think about food. Pollan ascribes most of our food-related crises to US-style capitalism, which favors efficiency, productivity, and profit above all else, barely restrained by moral considerations, if at all. Corporations, which now process most of the food products we eat, have shown, until very recently, little or no interest in nutrition, health, environment, family life, conservation of culture, or social costs/benefits. Government policy in the United States is not much better, for the main reason that those who govern for the most part subscribe to the tenets dictated by corporate self-interest, which is frequently taken to coincide with the general welfare. Pollan’s whole message can be summed up in a conclusion he repeats in perhaps his most political text, In Defense of Food: “Our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the entire food web,” “the health of the soil, plant, animal, and eater are all connected” (In Defense of Food, 103, 167). I could not agree more.

A careful reading of food movement discourse reveals some interesting assumptions regarding culture, identity, and religion, however, which I find to be an ironic hindrance to the movement’s very goals. In the following pages I lay out this argument. Many Jewish foodies fail to recognize Judaism as a religion and culture, as a set of foodways, that continues to have much to teach us about our relationship to food and to the land and ecosystems that grow it. They feel this way because they are overwhelmingly secular, modernist, and materialist or, contrarily, because they have become converts to other spiritual and/or ecological or political modalities which they no doubt imagine to oppose the values of Judaism. Despite his rhetoric, Pollan represents a particularly materialist approach to food issues, one that generally undervalues culture and religion as elements shaping people’s worldviews. Hence his feeling, shared by many (Jewish) foodies, that refusing to eat pig meat is irrational, even superstitious, a vestige of pre-modern nonsense. This one example of a traditional food avoidance or food law might stand in for many cultural understandings regarding the place of individual and group choices. I use this Jewish example in order to widen the conversation to talk about what we lose when we ignore or erase cultural and culinary difference in the name of universalism and rationalism.

While many treatments of the pig as an identity marker have been written, I try to turn the discussion elsewhere, in order to produce a reading of omnivory. In response to dismissiveness about an ancient food choice , I try to show the vital contribution that traditional cultures, almost all indigenous to a particular place and particularistic life- and foodways, almost all with cosmological and holistic worldviews, offer to a world increasingly de-natured and de-cultured by global capitalism. I end by meditating on the political significance of omnivory, since Pollan describes modern Westerners as omnivores and seems to prescribe such an approach to food. I claim that this form of omnivory as a program or ideology is a post-Christian orientation (I explain post-Christianity below) whose often unacknowledged imperialism correlates all too comfortably with Western capitalism and globalization. I highlight instead the goals of the food movement that I admire, which seek to resist the industrial and globalizing erosion of local foodways and flavors, which understand the power of traditional cultures in combatting the agriculinary and ecological plagues wrought by techno-scientistic capitalism.⁶ While I focus mainly on culture(s) with spiritual or cosmological connectedness, culture in general occupies central place. Food cannot be yielded to systems of production, consumption, and valuation that do not stem from real culture(s). If people concerned about food do not fight modern deculturation, the food movement will not achieve its mission. My treatment is analytical, but also unabashedly polemical.

Many Jewish foodies share a fixation with pig meat. In this, of course, they reflect a widespread Jewish reality, as will be discussed below. Locally famous half-hog butchering classes have been offered by The Meat Hook with The Brooklyn Kitchen Labs , which opened in 2009, co-founded and co-owned by Harry Rosenblum. When butchering guru Tom Mylan suggested starting with small animals and working up, Rosenblum “said, let’s start with half a pig. Part of that was my own perverse curiosity … I want to see that. Don’t other people?”⁷ The perversity here merely might have pertained to his desire to watch the usually hidden and seemingly dark act of killing an animal and turning it into food, an admirable desire that seeks to make food preparation more “honest” and less impersonal, but it might have had something to do with his Jewishness and interest in non-kosher pig. It was from the author of a book named Pig Perfect, food and fly-fishing writer Peter Kaminsky, a New York Jew, that renowned African-American North Carolina barbecue pit master Ed Mitchell (with whom Pollan “apprenticed”) learned about the traditional pig breeds nearly eliminated by commercial industrialization (Cooked, 78–79).⁸ In his loving, obsessive rhapsody to things porcine, Kaminsky calls himself a “ham idolater” and owns his agent’s description of him as a “professional ‘hamthropologist.’”⁹

Jewish chef Jason Marcus co-founded a short-lived Williamsburg restaurant named Traif in 2010. (Treyf means unkosher in Hebrew and Yiddish.) It specialized “in pork and shellfish and global soul food.” Holding a degree in philosophy, Marcus avowed on the restaurant blog that as someone “Jewish, although obviously not great at it. Traif … celebrates the foods that I love most, which just so happens to be the foods that I am not supposed to eat.”¹⁰ Aside from hosting many Latinos and a hipster population, Williamsburg is the residence of a large hasidic community. In 2013 amateur chef Wesley Klein founded...