Religion, Food, and Eating in North America

Benjamin Zeller, Marie Dallam, Reid Neilson, Nora L Rubel

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231537315
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

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.

Part One

THEOLOGICAL FOODWAYS

One

DYNAMICS OF CHRISTIAN DIETARY ABSTINENCE

DAVID GRUMETT

WHAT MAKES a dietary practice “religious”? Dietary practice can be a key means by which religious groups identify themselves and develop cohesion, but a particular set of practices cannot be classified as religious purely on the grounds that a specified group of people who are religious happen to observe them. The set of practices might extend beyond group boundaries to encompass people who are not adherents of the religion in question. Furthermore, members of a particular religious group might observe specific practices on a whim, or see in them no religious significance. In this case, even if the practices were distinctive to that group and their observance distinguished them from other religious groups, they could not strictly be classed as religious.

To establish whether specific dietary practices are religious in the truest sense, those practices need to be related to the theological discourse of the particular religious community that observes them. They also need to be located within the wider logic of practice with which that community, both consciously and unconsciously, identifies. In the first section I examine a range of Christian communities in the United States in which distinctive dietary practices have been observed and promoted and situate those practices within the wider history of Christian diet.

In so doing I might be seen to be setting myself a challenging task. In Christian and post-Christian societies, solid food rules (in contrast with those surrounding alcohol) have often been associated with “other” religions. In our current religiously pluralistic age, this perception has, if anything, grown. As the discussion proceeds, it will therefore be important to understand the underlying doctrinal reasons why Christians have sometimes regarded dietary practice as unimportant, and why those reasons for not taking diet seriously are ultimately difficult to support.

Christians interact with members of other religions and might share table hospitality with them. These interactions present Christians with different images of what it means to be religious. In particular, they make proper appraisal of the place of food in Christian life a pressing matter. The Christian dietary practice analyzed in this chapter should not, however, be seen as simply an attempt to cash in on an interesting feature of non-Christian religions. From the perspective of the Christians being studied here, the doctrine of the incarnation affirms that, in taking physical human form, God in Christ brought the whole of material reality into his presence. This makes the whole of material reality, including food and diet, an intrinsically relevant sphere of Christian concern.

The view of the relationship between dietary practice and tradition, cosmology, scripture, and theology here presented is therefore structurally specific to Christianity. Sources of authority and interpretive methods function differently in different religions, and the same explanatory framework cannot be applied to all. Nevertheless, by developing a framework appropriate to Christianity, I also wish to offer a starting point for considering the specifically religious character of dietary practices in religion generally. Dietary practices are increasingly prominent as secular spiritual disciplines, being an area of everyday life in which practitioners seek to recover order, meaning, and purpose without making any personal commitment to Christianity or any other institutional religion.¹ These developments make it increasingly difficult to distinguish dietary disciplines pursued for specifically religious ends from those embraced for reasons of self-help (e.g., to address health problems) or self-improvement (e.g., to cultivate a discipline of mindfulness). If diet is to continue to be a significant and meaningful identifier for religious believers, however, it is important that such distinctions continue to be made.

CONSTRUCTING BODILY BOUNDARIES

Food has performed a significant role in defining and preserving the boundaries between different church bodies and different human bodies. By requiring abstention from specific foods, especially meat, particular Christian churches and groups have established markers of inclusion in their corporate body and of exclusion from that body. Moreover, by associating immoderate eating with promiscuity and seeking to prevent both, Christian groups have sought to impose moral and spiritual discipline on their members’ physical bodies.²

The ideological power of this sexual symbolism of food links the two activities that reveal most potently the permeability of bodily boundaries. In Christian dietary discourse, abstinence has frequently been associated with the regulation of sexual desire. Early Christian ascetics realized that reducing their overall food intake and avoiding some foods altogether reduced that desire. They might well have learned about the severe adverse effects of extreme fasting on the reproductive system from contemporary famines, seeking to endure these effects voluntarily for spiritual ends.³ The key principle believed to govern this causal relationship between diet and sexuality was that both foods and human bodies exhibited the four properties of heating, cooling, drying, and moistening. Ascetics confined themselves to very small quantities of foods classified as “cold” and “dry” and avoided “hot” and “moist” foods, believing that these fanned the flames of sexual passion. Meat was viewed as the paradigmatic “hot” food, and therefore to be avoided completely.⁴

In the United States several Christian communities have embraced vegetarianism. The earliest was the Ephrata cloister of Seventh Day Baptists in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The cloister was founded in 1732 by Johann Conrad Beissel, who had emigrated from Germany to escape religious persecution. Beissel recommended a diet of bread and grains and proscribed fatty and meaty dishes, and archaeological evidence suggests that this was followed at least during the community’s early decades.⁵ A related aspect of the community’s asceticism was the celibacy of its higher-ranking members, which they believed left them free to serve God. This associates them closely with the dietary discipline of the desert fathers just described.

Another Christian vegetarian group, the Dorrellites, became established in Leyden, Vermont. Their founder William Dorrell was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1752. His vegetarianism was based on the belief that humans should not kill any living creature, and it extended to a complete prohibition on the use of leather or animal skins.⁶ The community around him differed radically from the Ephrata cloister, however, in a key aspect of moral teaching: members could be married and moreover need not marry before entering into sexual relations.

These two eighteenth-century groups were well defined and self-contained, with a vegetarian diet part of their distinctive identities. They had mainly local appeal, were centered on the direct leadership of their founders, and did not endure much beyond their death, at least in their vegetarian forms. A third community, which also had European origins and developed in the early nineteenth century, was the Bible Christian Church. It promoted what would become the Christian vegetarian norm of sexual continence, or restraint, within the context of marriage and family life. In 1817 forty of its numbers had arrived in Philadelphia from Salford, near Manchester in England, with their minister William Metcalfe to found a new congregation. The church was small, like its eighteenth-century predecessors, never growing larger than about one hundred people.

Yet during the 1830s interest in vegetarianism spread in wider society as part of a nexus of concerns that included health reform, teetotalism (complete abstention from alcohol), and sexual morality. A key figure in this development was Presbyterian minister and temperance lecturer Sylvester Graham, whose interest in vegetarianism was sparked by contact with Bible Christians and sustained by correspondence with Metcalfe.⁷ Graham was particularly well-known for developing graham flour as part of his program of opposition to white bread, which he regarded as insufficiently nutritious. He also created the graham cracker. Made with the same flour, the graham cracker had a taste and consistency similar to a digestive biscuit, with its dryness intended to curb sexual urges.⁸

This wider social interest in vegetarianism inevitably spread into the churches. For example, vegetarian experiments occurred in some Shaker communities during the 1840s, partly in response to health concerns about meat.⁹ Vegetarianism was, by this time, mostly aligned neither with the free love of the Dorrellites nor the celibacy of Ephrata but with continence in the context of married family life. Continence was regarded as a moral virtue commended by scripture. Its promotion also had the practical effect of strengthening the boundaries of those Christian communities that had a strong sense of their own distinctive identity by discouraging a plurality of sexual relationships and nurturing the bonds of marriage and family within the community.

The extent to which the Bible Christians and other Christian groups shaped the 1830s health reform movement is contested. Historian Jayme Sokolow acknowledges Graham’s work as a minister but discounts Metcalfe’s possible influence on him, arguing that Graham advocated vegetarianism on physiological grounds whereas Metcalfe’s case was biblical.¹⁰ Similarly, Stephen Nissenbaum suggests that Graham’s work as a temperance lecturer signaled the end of his active ministry and also dismisses his links with Metcalfe as unimportant.¹¹ But such assessments rely too heavily on assumptions about the nature of ministry and the sources on which Christian theology draws. The growing interest from the 1830s in dietary reform, in which Christian ministers, laypeople, and communities played a prominent role, should instead be seen as part of the Christian traditions of dietary abstinence as a medicine for the soul and of bodily health as linked inextricably with spiritual well-being, both signifying and facilitating a disciplined spiritual life.

WITNESSING SCRIPTURE

Stories of feasting and fasting are prominent in scripture. Indeed, the epic history of fall and redemption that scripture unfolds is precipitated by Adam and Eve’s simple act of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 3.6). From this dietary transgression follows their loss of sexual innocence and expulsion from Eden. This narrative suggested to various Christian writers—such as Evagrius of Pontus, John Cassian, and Gregory the Great—that gluttony was the cardinal sin, which engendered all others.¹² In turn, Christ as the second Adam was seen as redeeming the world by offering on the cross his body, which is represented in the Eucharist as bread. The centrality of food to this history of fall and redemption is beautifully illustrated in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s “Virgin and Child Under an Apple Tree,” in which Jesus stands in the lap of his mother Mary under the tree, holding an apple in his left hand and offering a broken piece of bread in his right.

By means of fasting, Christians have identified themselves with key figures from scripture, such as Moses, Hannah, David, Elijah, Ahab, Hezekiah, Anna, and Paul, whose fasts scripture records.¹³ Yet the undoubted hero of early Christian hermits was John the Baptist. A voice crying in the wilderness announcing the coming of the Messiah, John offered in his ascetic life, dress, and diet of locusts and wild honey (Mt. 3.4; Mk. 1.6) the most striking ascetic role model in Christian scripture.¹⁴

In some cases scriptural interpretation has provided the principal foundation for Christian vegetarianism. A notable example is William Metcalfe and the Bible Christian Church, already discussed. Some of Metcalfe’s ideas were quixotic. He argued that the Genesis 9.3 description of God giving to humans for food all moving things referred, more precisely, to all creeping things, which he identified with the vines of Noah’s vineyard and their grapes. When an animal was described as “permitted,” this meant that its milk was permitted, not its flesh. Metcalfe also maintained that the sheep and oxen offered by Solomon at the consecration of the Temple (1 Kings 8.63) were pieces of money whose value equaled that of the animal after which they were named and with whose image they were imprinted. Furthermore, he believed that the Jerusalem Council’s prohibition of all things strangled (Acts 15.29) had been intended to proscribe all things that had suffered a violent death, that is, all animals. His vegetarianism extended to fish, and he contended that the references to Jesus eating fish (Lk. 24.42; Jn. 21.9–13) were in fact to water plants or other tasty vegetarian foods.¹⁵

Other points that Metcalfe raises are ...