Food and Religious Rituals

Abstract

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Please check back later for the full article. Food rituals, whether articulated intentionally or performed unconsciously in our biologically necessary acts of eating, do nothing less than construct and maintain people’s fundamental relationships in the world and define who or what they are in it. In that sense, it might be said that all food rituals are religious, although that depends on very specific definitions of ritual and religion. One should distinguish between rituals in the weak sense (habitual patterned behaviors performed unconsciously) versus rituals in the strong sense (performed with explicit, conscious intention as in the work of J. Kripal). However, all rituals are performances of myths, that is, the basic stories people live by, whether practicing them makes people’s intentions explicit. Food rituals are “religious” in that they govern and express the fundamental relationships people have in the cosmos: who or what they eat, with whom they eat, and for whom they are “food.” Food rituals create and sustain worldviews, and so are all fundamentally “religious” or “religion-like.” To distinguish between the way critical comparative scholars of religion use the terms religion and religious and their use in common parlance, it makes sense to underline that “religious food rituals” normally refers to food rituals in the strong sense. Thus, religious food rituals often involve specific words or scripts (eating and talking, eating and reading), as well as other nonverbal cues and modes of paying attention: music, costumes, special props, accentuated or exaggerated gestures, and designated authoritative officiants. For example, the Jewish Passover seder, Christian communion and Lenten fasting, Aztec human sacrifice, Muslim observance of halal rules and Ramadan fasting, Jain or Buddhist vegetarianism, and many forms of Hindu puja are rituals in the strong sense. Examples of food rituals in the weak sense are secular veganism, shopping for food in grocery stores, WeightWatchers dieting, or eating meals in a breakfast–lunch–dinner sequence (Mary Douglas). These rituals imply certain assumptions about people’s relationships to animals and plants, capitalist consumer culture, ideals of beauty and well-being, and identification with special social groups (e.g., family, national cultures, geographic regions). In other words, they too are enactments of the stories people live by.