How Food Teaches and Why It Matters for Religious Education

Abstract

Food (systems, cultures, and practices of eating) is a significant site of cultural, political, and identity formation to which religious educators can pay attention, not only in a critical sense—to be “readers” of culture—but also as a potential path of creative engagement and re-formation—a way to become “cultural producers.” Food studies scholarship that foregrounds the pedagogical nature of food and food’s participation in racial formation projects can help point toward a religious education grounded in formational, embodied, aesthetic, playful, and consciousness-raising approaches to food.