Religion and Food, Religions as Foodways

Abstract

Foodways (everything related to the production and consumption of food) are gaining increasing attention in studies of religion. They allow us to achieve better understanding of the fluid relationships between everyday lives and formal rituals, rules and hierarchies. This article seeks to demonstrate that more is at stake in research and teaching about religion and food. In considering foodways we do not simply add spice (aka rich description) to our work. Theorisation about religion is vastly improved when we engage with (a) the ways in which people deal with the necessary acts of violence involved in consuming other species, and (b) with the ways in which people eat or avoid eating particular foods with other people. It reinforces the need for vernacular, material and performative issues to be placed firmly at the centre of our discipline. Studying foodways allows us to replace unhelpful (early modern polemical) questions about beliefs with more focused questions about the doing of religion in real world, everyday contexts.