The introduction by the editors provides an entry point to the field. It provides some reminders of familiar themes – those food rules, ritual meals, cultural preferences and abstentions. It seeks to do this in interesting ways, e.g. providing a vignette of what foods different Muslims might share for Iftar rather than blandly stating that Ramadan is a time of fasting. It sets out what has been achieved in previous scholarship about religion and foodways, e.g. pointing to foundational or required reading in the area, perhaps tracing a feast from Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger (1966) via Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1988) to Devon Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover’s Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health (2019). Even in pointing to these works, the introduction emphasizes the complexity not only of religiously-inflected foodways but also of understanding “religion” and “culture,” “health” and “transcendence” and more. It places the volume in relation to multi- and inter-disciplinary scholarship of food (production, consumption, waste, sovereignty, sustainability, etc.). In addition to encouraging a fuller conversation about the different interests of particular disciplines, the introduction crucially highlights the diversity of approaches and methods that might be applied in studying taste and religion.

Recognizing the need for sustainability—a cyclical notion of continual replenishment of natural systems, including human communities, toward mutual flourishing—can be described as a conversion experience, renewing ethical and practical commitments. Converts to agricultural sustainability often recover the notion of inherent value in the beasts, birds, bees, flowers, and food plants, a range of beings morally sublimated in industrial systems where monetary value dominates the agricultural landscape. The author’s U.S.-based case studies display Muslim and Buddhist sustainable agricultural practices highlighting ethically integrated relationships of care, offering a social, economic, and environmental alternative to exploitative industrial agriculture. In Chicago, Taqwa Eco-food Cooperative (2002-2009) provided locally and sustainably produced halal meat, permissible for Muslims. Taqwa leaders educated on integrating ethics with food practice, emphasizing tayyib, or wholesomeness. Taqwa combined ethical reflection with practice improving the health of consumers, lives of animals, livelihoods of farmers, as well as the Muslim prayerful tradition of slaughter, not undertaken lightly. Green Gulch Farm is a part of the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC), which was founded in 1962. Managers and apprentices cultivate several acres facing the Pacific Ocean, producing vegetables for farmer’s markets, local restaurants, and for the SFZC community. In interviews, leaders reflected on sustainable farming and the Buddhist concept of dependent co-arising, dynamic interdependence. Each case study represents a unique context in time, place, and social location, which affords both a strong critique of industrial agriculture and a local-scale alternative designed for mutual flourishing. The case studies demonstrate sustainable, local, religiously oriented projects, producing viable alternatives for food production and distribution. The religious notions of dependent co-arising and tayyib socially support sustainable conversions to concretely care for people, land, water, agricultural ecosystems, and other-than-human living beings eaten as food.

For many Native American communities, understandings of family, fertility, and “collective continuance” are closely rooted to the protection, preservation, and revitalization of native seeds.1 Following on generations of eradication and assimilation, during which the fertility of both Native peoples and gardens have come under threat, Native people have utilized or developed a series of movements, including the reproductive justice movement, the environmental justice movement, and the seed rematriation movement, in an effort to protect and reunite Native families, including their seed relatives.

When visiting a Dene elder with whom I have been conducting ethnographic research in subarctic Canada for the last decade she inevitably, in the course of every in-person and phone conversation, broaches the topic of what she is currently preparing: tanning two moose hides, sewing a pair of caribou-hide mittens or moose-hide moccasins with a beaver hair cuff, stirring flour and lard for bannock bread, filleting fish to hang in the sun for dried fish meat or, if a male relative has had the luck of hunting some caribou, hanging the meat on poles suspended over the fireplace for making dry caribou meat. Each of these gendered tasks of preparation is essential, not only for providing food and other goods to her family, but for maintaining good relations between Dene and their ecological relations; the animals and ancestors on whom they depend. In the study of Indigenous religions, food is an essential yet often overlooked feature. Much has been written on the acquisition of food in traditional hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies. However, the necessity of food preparation has seldom garnered attention. Similarly, scholarship, predominantly by male academics, tends to highlight the roles of men in Indigenous foodways; such as hunting or farming. My Dene consultants, male and female, do not make this mistake. In this chapter, I discuss Dene food preparation and women’s labor to highlight their unique importance in maintaining familial, ecological, and spiritual relations in a more-than-human world.

Eshu is the African trickster God, naturalized in Brazil after slavery. He is present in every Afro-Brazilian religion occupying different positions: guardian, master, god and trickster, some other religions even attribute him the post of Demon. His place and functions can be confusing, for this is part of his character. He transits across epistemological binarisms always taking devotees out of their comfort zone and that’s probably why it is so difficult for most cartesian minds to understand him or his advices. In addition, Umbanda is itself a religion that subverts many values, for devotees to get advised, in spiritual consultations, by spirits of former African slaves, native Indians, gypsies, mistresses and many who have been despised and oppressed in history. Umbanda has been a very decentralized and dynamic religion showing no pattern in its rituals, liturgic calendars or hierarchy of spirits, each Umbanda temple’s character is reflected on its food practices. Within this deconstructing context, preparing Eshus’ food offerings is no less tricky, there are not clear and “universal” principles for Eshu’s food preparation, whoever is designated to prepare their food has to learn it straight from the spirits, whom, incorporated in the mediums in trance, tell her/him what they want to eat, how it should be prepared, when and where it can be offered. In this chapter I seek to explore the preparation of foods to be offered to the Eshus of Templo da Liberdade Tupinambá, an Umbanda temple located in Rio de Janeiro.

The most thoroughly documented and intimate accounts of funerary cannibalism in the ethnographic record come from the testimonies of Wari’ elders in western Brazil, among whom the practice of consuming the bodies of their dead lasted until the 1960s. Contrary to taken-for-granted views of cannibalism as an act of self-gratification, Wari’ purposefully allowed their loved ones’ bodies to begin to decay before they were roasted, which made consumption a deeply unpleasant experience. Taste was just one dimension of immersive, multisensory ritual processes in which eating encapsulated and mediated spiritual, social, and symbolic relations centered in shifting dynamics of feeding and being fed, hunting and being hunted, among kin and between humans and animals the living and the dead. Wari’ experiences challenge assumptions about distinctions and hierarchies among the senses, and show how acts of eating are enmeshed in affective potencies shaped by people’s histories of procuring, producing, and partaking in food together.

Religions are replete with feasts and fasts, with food rules (explicit or assumed). They are social acts that are often structured around shared meals or shared rules about what can or cannot be consumed. Religious festivals are often identifiable by the specific foods. Some mythologies emphasise the consumption of helpful or salvific beings or substances. Sub-arctic bear ceremonies, Christian eucharists, meals during or after periods of fasting in many religions all illustrate the centrality of consumption. Foods and drinks often play significant roles in the oppositions that highlight the key themes of particular religions, especially when these view physicality as problematic. In the everyday lives of religious people, foodways act to reinforce affiliations. But they also flavour commitments and communities. This chapter surveys the tastes of selected religions to experiment with a definition of religion as social foodways.

Combining the notions of “culinary citizenship,” (Mannur 2010) and “culinary nationalism” (Parkhurst Ferguson 2014), this chapter will discuss how “tasty nationalism” is at work in public schools and streets in contemporary France through four case studies that involve food, religion, secularism, and identity. First, the focus on school lunch policies and menus will demonstrate how lunches served (or not) to children participate in the debated French notion of “vivre ensemble” (living together) in diversity, which translates into “manger ensemble” (eating together) at the table of the Republic, the same dish, at the same time. I will show how the public school system shapes French children into becoming future citizens of “good taste” with healthy food habits through a specific culinary education that emphasizes refraining from certain food items and sourcing food from local territory and patrimony. While certain foods (such as ketchup) are banned, at the same tables, some citizens (such as observant Muslim students) are excluded through enforcing particular food items on the menu in the name of French laïcité (secularism). Other cases will give more background to discussions on culinary identity and nationalism in relation to religion: first, the “apéros saucisson-pinard” (serving wine and pork sausage appetizers in the streets) organized by groups manifesting forms of islamophobia through promoting laïcité; then, the “maraudes” (distribution of food to French homeless people, prioritizing “les nôtres avant les autres” or “ours before others”) organized by identitarian groups whose reclaiming of a French Catholic identity remains contentious. The chapter will thus highlight how different forms of resistance emerge through food in sites where secular French identities are constructed or affirmed: first, a resistance against globalization taking the form of American culinary imperialism (“McDonaldization”), then a resistance against dietary restrictions perceived as a form of ostentatious religious belonging in this highly secular framework.

While there has been significant scholarly interest in religious food law as containing dietary restrictions, rules, and regulations (whether rational or irrational), there have been fewer attempts to re-think religious food law as a matter of bodily, lived experience. In this chapter, I consider statements of gastronomic pleasure, disgust, joy, satiety, pain, and conflict as sites for thinking about how religious actors narrativize bodily experience through the lens of religious identification, and organize and integrate that experience as practice. In particular, I focus on stories of dissonance and integration of food experiences in the narratives of Jewish and Muslim interlocutors who participate in religioning via food, farming, and ecology. When vegans eat fish, when eaters of religiously-slaughtered meat eat conventionally-slaughtered animal flesh, or when meat-eaters swear off meat or sing praises of vegetable food, there is an opportunity to understand embodied ideologies (broadly understood) of what is appropriate, desirable, endurable, and also tasty. Manifestly obvious and individualistic though “food preferences” may seem, the phenomenon glossed by “preference” or “non-preference” for particular foods is, rather, a richly interpersonal and experience-laden matrix of meaning-making. Pleasure, far from being a straightforward, received experience, is actively reconstructed in tandem with an architecture of value that contextualizes the mouth-feel and body-feel (and perhaps even a mind-feel, or soul-feel) of food.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon church or the LDS church, has a rich, though recent history. Within the 200 years that this religion has been practiced, traditions regarding food have developed and morphed into the current cultural and religious taste of the LDS church. The LDS church, led by a modern day prophet, has issued guidance to help its members through challenging times, including the instruction for each Latter-Day Saint family to store a year’s worth of food. This, in addition to nearly 1 million acres of land owned by the LDS church used for farms and ranches, many of which are welfare farms, creates an unparalleled dynamic between food and Latter-Day Saints. Though self-preservation is expounded upon continuously, Latter-Day Saints are encouraged to store food that they would usually eat and church welfare programs give out staples that can be used to make a variety of popular LDS dishes. This leads to LDS families not only storing beans, rice, and pasta, but also ingredients to bake bread, cinnamon rolls, and other sweets. As LDS families have kept food storages through the decades, food storage businesses have shifted from only offering staples to making food storages taste good. Although many members of the LDS church abstain from consuming specific foods, looking at the foods Latter-Day Saints do taste and the unique ways they approach storing food offers particular insight into the history and values of their religion.

A contrast between “sacred” and “profane” is evident in some religions. While derived from a relatively neutral Roman distinction between temples and their surroundings, it has taken on a more dramatic sense of a contrast between good/valued and bad/denigrated. “Profanity” can then refer to bodily functions or to words for / about some body parts. This chapter reflects on the materiality and the discourses of waste, disposal and “dirt” (following Mary Douglas). Following discussion of some examples of the profane problem of toilets and waste in some religions, the chapter engages with the scholarly theorisation of sacrality and profanity, of temples, tables, toilets and, indeed, tombs. The absence or distance of toilets from many religious buildings before the secularising and democratising impact of Modernity provides some telling religious examples. Some Qumran / Dead Sea texts suggest that toilet areas were beyond the permitted shabbat travel distance. Rabbinic Judaism’s imagination of tables in Jewish homes as somehow equivalent to the altar in the temple also marks them as separate from toilets (so that mezuzot are not placed on toilet doors). In some forms of Christianity, unconsumed communion wafers and wine have to be disposed of in particular places, not in drains. Further or different examples will be drawn from other chapters in this book and other sources. Before too strong a contrast is reified, it will be important to note contrary indicators. Medieval monastic production of sacred art required tanning of skins and the production of paints. Excrement and urine were vital ingredients in such processes. The sacred/profane contrast is not only a religious one but also sometimes a scholarly one. The chapter will therefore confront the reification of the terms as bordered and boxed categories rather than as continuously negotiated and assemblages.