This paper situates the importance of fasting rituals in the deepening divisions among Christian denominations in the Reformation era. While subtle theological arguments among Catholics and Protestants may have eluded the average believer, clear rules about what people were allowed to consume rarely escaped their attention. I will argue that food regulations played a more important role in dividing various sects than is generally recognized in the historical literature.

In 1858 the French writer Alexandre Dumas undertook a voyage to the Caucasus and a concurrent memoir of the trip. Much of this travelogue is devoted to descriptions of his reception in various regions of Georgia, in lodgings ranging from palaces to embassies to mountain hovels. His detailed commentary on Georgian rules of hospitality is particularly relevant to an understanding of alimentary ritual – with a twist, however: Dumas’ Voyage au Caucase is a better source for what it reflects about presuppositions and projections of French gastronomic laws than for what it reveals – and simultaneously veils – about Georgian culinary rites.

Kansas City is famous for barbecue and jazz–and ‘Boss’ Thomas J. Pendergast, whose machine politics controlled Kansas City from 1925 to 1939. Under certain conditions, Pendergast’s reign allowed for the unthinkable in an era of strict racial segregation: covert interactions between blacks and whites in public dining spaces, particularly during spook breakfast parties that happened after musicians wound up their all-night jam sessions. When the horns stopped blowing and the drums stopped beating, musicians and their fans sat down to copious amounts of food and alcohol. This paper examines the rules and rituals of these parties as they unfolded at the Reno Club near the northeast corner of Twelfth and Cherry on downtown’s edge, and at Old Kentucky Barbecue at Nineteenth and Vine in the heart of the black commercial district. Mixed-race interaction at these venues helped set in motion the forces that ultimately toppled segregation in Kansas City eateries.

Food rules and rituals, whether articulated intentionally or performed unconsciously in our biologically necessary acts of eating, construct and maintain our fundamental relationships in the world and define who or what we are in it. Drawing from my discipline of religious studies, I suggest for this year’s OSFC topic of ‘Food Rules and Rituals’ some important ‘ground rules’ and examples of how to apply them which I’ve selected from my own research in Jewish, Christian, and American Thanksgiving meal rituals.

In this paper, I take as the point of focus a now universally known and widely appreciated food item, namely spaghetti, both as a simple ingredient and as the label for associated composed dishes in which this form of pasta is featured. In particular I draw attention to the very complex set of relations and rules which govern its use within an endocuisine, that of Campania in southern Italy, a region in which spaghetti has been enjoyed for centuries and which served as a principal source of this food’s diffusion to other cultures. The goal is to illustrate not only the complexity of the rules surrounding a seemingly simple food in an endocuisine but also to demonstrate how these rules relate to other, deeper conceptual constraints in Campanian cuisine and the ways in which these rules and constraints imbue the food itself and dishes made with it with cultural meaning. A natural contrast suggests itself between Campanian and more generally Italian uses of spaghetti and those found in cultures where spaghetti is a relatively recent borrowing to mainstream foodways, such as the United States and Britain, but already is well along in the process of being nativized in highly adapted forms.

In San Sebastián, a way of eating has developed over the past century: packing into crowded bars, grabbing pintxos off the counter, and enjoying them with friends. A relatively recent influx of foreigners has changed the way this food is consumed, spurring an attempt to codify its rules.

Based primarily on the official Malta prison documents from 1920 to 1939, this research explores the confluence between institutionalized food, rituals, and the prison experience. The evidence presents us with three broad categories: issues related to food quality and quantity, expressions of a culinary identity, and forces of resistance. Institutionalized food formed part of a more comprehensive set of prison ritualized practices intended to reform the inmate’s body and soul. With hardly any opportunity to express one’s identity, food catered simply as a means to keep the prisoner alive. Therefore, to what extent does institutionalized commensality reform the Foucauldian ‘social body’? How far could institutionalized food rituals influence the bond between use value and identity value?

Kaiseki is widely acknowledged by Japanese and non-Japanese alike as Japan’s most representative cuisine. It originated from the meals served during gatherings for chanoyu, the Japanese tea ritual widely known today as the ‘tea ceremony’. This paper investigates the history and development of kaiseki cuisine and discusses its practice today mainly through the chanoyu tradition but also with reference to contemporary dining practices. The discussion will also include the meanings behind the rules and rituals of kaiseki that are not immediately obvious to non-practitioners of chanoyu but which have become important markers for Japanese cuisine in general.

This paper explores the challenges facing three American museums incorporating food content into their initiatives: the FOOD exhibition at the National Museum of American History (NMAH) in Washington, D.C., the Southern Food & Beverage Museum (SOFAB) in New Orleans, and the Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD) in New York City. These museums offer distinct approaches to presenting, celebrating, and interrogating larger patterns in American food, often bending the rules of conventional pedagogy, playing with spatial, sensorial, and discursive modes. As food-focused content in museums becomes more popular, these case studies demonstrate the pedagogical expansiveness that ‘exhibiting’ food can offer.

Napkins appear several times throughout Roman literature. While they are often mentioned in passing, napkins are occasionally the focus of poems by authors including Catullus and Martial. Through examining the literature of the time, this paper outlines rules of etiquette surrounding napkin use in Rome while examining their multiple roles in society as essential tools, status symbols, objects of sentimentality, and targets of theft.

Much, if not most, of the scholarship written at the intersection of food studies and Holocaust studies tends to focus almost exclusively on trauma and pathology. That venerable research tells a crucial story that must never be forgotten. Alone, however, it does not tell the whole story. This paper explores how and why my maternal grandparents developed a consistent and perhaps subconscious code of exuberant, excessive, occasionally exhausting alimentary practice that shaped every meal we shared together. It examines how trauma, yes, but also joy, triumph, and love shaped the ritualistic zeal with which my grandparents, my Bubbe and Zayda, fed their grandchildren.

How do adults play with their food? This presentation explores ways intricate rule-based food practices give rise to play. It begins with two particularly curious and little-known historical examples of rule-driven dining rituals (enigmatical menus and conundrum socials), and continues by exploring three more puzzle-inspired foodways (speakeasies, scripture cakes, and assiettes parlantes or talking plates). There are other examples of course, and I hope some will emerge in discussion. But these five offer strong evidence of ways adults have relied on rule-based rituals as thematic prompts for recipe and menu development, as well as to script conversations over food and to make meaning of their meals.

Rules, rituals, and food are three words often associated with the University of Oxford in its many centuries of existence. However, rarely together.

What insights can we learn about Anishinaabe lawmaking practices and what role does food and ritual play? Hosting is at the crux of Anishinaabe lawmaking practices, and the role of feasting and key foods such as strawberries held great cultural, spiritual and political significance. Examining these aspects of treaty making can offer insight into how food can be used as a tool to build empathy and relations between perceived strangers and nations.

This paper explores the role of technology in maintaining, modernizing, and redefining food rituals and relationships during the COVID-19 crisis, discussed through the perspectives of a remotely onboarded professional who oversaw a national recipe contest at a social media service.

Anthropological literature discussing rituals is often divided between two perspectives: the structural and often rigid aspects of ritual and a contextual perspective that emphasizes change, creativity, and innovation stemming from the changing sociopolitical and cultural ecology in which the rituals are embedded. Neither approach satisfactorily explains how rituals produce the necessary responses to their surroundings and maintain their core features, thereby remaining recognizably “the same”; ritual. In this paper, we develop a formulation of the mutual dependency between the structural and contextual levels of rituals. We focus on the ‘ada – a pivotal component that drives the Mimouna ritual, a Moroccan Jewish spring holiday that takes place the day after Passover – itself characterized by ritual virtuosity.  Foods, just like rituals, are matters of collective cultural production within which tensions between structure (cuisine, recipes, culinary rules, etc.) and performance (private palates, particular ways of cooking, and the like) are always at play. The ‘ada – the structural component that drives the ritual practices in Mimouna festivals in Israel, particularly the culinary ones – seems to be designed according to this tension between prescription and improvisation, between observance of formal rules and deviation from these rules, and between rigidity and flexibility. We highlight the interdependence between ritual structure and context by drawing on the Israeli Mimouna ritual and its structural mechanism (the ‘ada). We argue that ritual structural mechanisms may enable the incursion and influence of external (contextual) sociocultural and sociopolitical factors. To unpack this argument, we will begin our culinary ethnography of the Israeli Mimouna by contextualizing the Mimouna’s origins (the mid-18th century) and evolution and transition from Morocco to Israel. Discussing the culinary aspects that form and express the ‘ada in the Mimouna ritual as it moved from Morocco to Israel, we show how a structural mechanism that emphasizes divergence allows the incursion of external sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts.

In 1911 my Viennese great-grandmother Malvine Löb Iranyi took over a cake-mix company that had been started by her sister-in-law, Rosa, in 1908. This essay explores the significance of cake-mix in a culture of famous cakes where recipes are the result of a process to standardize traditional cooking practices. Olga and Adolf Hess’s famous Wiener Kuche appeared in 1913, a few year after Rosa established the cake mix company. This may indicate that there was a general desire in Vienna to standardize traditional kitchen know-how and define Viennese cuisine in a series of, if not rules, specific directions that will “lead to a particular outcome.” Could it be that cake-mix, by virtue of its goal of taking the guesswork out of baking, replaces a the “rules” of the recipe–whether handed down through kitchen knowledge or found in a recipe book– and erases that recipe?

In the early twentieth century Smithfield was the largest meat market in the world, a central node in a food system that supplied Imperial London with meat from across the globe.  This paper explores the ‘rituals of hygiene’ that informed the market’s handling, inspection, and disposal of meat. These practices not only shaped the market’s workplace culture, but also reached the national public through the lens of mass media. As Britain’s food system spiralled into new scales of globalisation and institutional complexity, such performances of cleanliness addressed the material risks and symbolic anxieties proliferating in the gulf between farm-and-fork.

The Pride Lands is a fictional kingdom ruled by generations of one lion family in the Lion King universe created by The Walt Disney Company. The geographically bound territory, under the rule of a lion family, claims to exist under the overarching principle of Circle of Life. According to the Lion King Fan Wiki (2019), this concept involves, ‘respecting all the creatures so that nature can follow its natural course’. This paper explores the enforced details of the actual food rules present and enforced in the Lion King universe and if they benefit all creatures in the universe equally.

This paper discusses the braided Jewish Sabbath bread called berches (or berkhes, barches, Bärches or berchess) around the Rhineland. We site berches within the great traditions of Judaism, and to a lesser extent Christianity, but we also look closely at the little traditions of the Jewish and Christian women who made them, asking what is the relationship of this Jewish bread to its Christian neighbours. We go into the possible origins of berches, their past and present functions, as well as what might be called their after-life. We also examine a number of rituals connected with berches.

Over the past century, food-related special collections have gained mass appeal. However, what accounts for this phenomenon is more than just the fashion cycle churning among scholars and special collections librarians. The multitude of special food collections is symptomatic of information systems that have misclassified their contents from the beginning. In this paper, I contrast food information history with important moments in the history of information science and their correlative intellectual advancements. With this knowledge, we can better understand the intrinsic rules that govern food information and learn how to navigate them in pursuing food history.

Learning of a diabetes diagnosis is a moment of epiphany, one of learning a new body, realizing in a moment that ‘you don’t have what you thought you had’. Food habits change in specific ways disheveling the day’s meal order with a new diet deprived of starch and sugar. Managing diabetes thus requires reconstructing the eating experience as ingredients, cooking, and serving demand reconsideration. Mutual support, perseverance, and resilience are hallmarks of all rituals. In an uncanny similarity, diabetics and their caregivers are quickly folded into a new life of rules and rituals. Drawing upon the interviews and observations of my ethnographic fieldwork in China, India, and USA, this paper will examine and interpret the diabetic’s quotidian, as it were, in a format I have chosen to call gastro-ethnology. This paper will focus on how diabetics adapt their food habits and ritualize their meals and medications to keep their condition under control.

Three short stories and an essay are discussed with specific attention to the ways rice and rice-based rituals inform the narratives’ predominant symbolism. This discussion is situated within a larger context of the mythological and religious significances that rice carries in various (eastern and western) cultures, focusing specifically on rice’s association with prosperity, fertility, and collective harmony.

Persians love their food. They also have a great respect for the complex set of rituals, habits, and rules developed over millennia that govern their culinary practices. Such practices are deeply rooted in Iranian culture, associated not only to the country that today is known as Iran, but also to the Persian empire from which it is evolved. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, I explore an overarching, and as complete as possible, range of behavioral constraints (habits, rituals, protocols, guidelines, unspoken rules, explicit edicts) along with associated culinary practices (preparation, eating, feeding) in Persians societies. The second goal of this work is to present a generic categorization framework that is applicable not only to the study of the subject in Persianate societies but also in other food cultures around the world.

The law of hospitality is profoundly beautiful and embodies all that is good and decent about us. It is the spirit of human co-existence made visible and recognisable. It is also however impossible, unfeasible, infuriating to abide by, especially for those attempting to eke out a living from it. I will address the challenges associated with the rules and customs of hospitality, in a letter addressed to philosopher, Jacques Derrida.

The Elders of Tokunoshima have experienced successive changes in colonizers with accompanying changes to policies ruling life. I present new rules and regulations related to food production that became the catalyst for change in food rituals, festivities, and Indigenous identities on one island in the Amami Archipeligo.

Lughnasa, the Irish term for August and the third of the four quarter days in the Irish calendar, heralds the beginning of autumn. It marks the promise of the ‘first fruits’ of the harvest and a plentiful supply of food on the horizon to fill depleted larders. Lughnasa is inextricably linked to food production, storage and consumption, however, food-specific studies are in their infancy. Its connection to the harvest compels investigation into the rules, rituals and customs surrounding this celebration. This paper utilises a combination of food studies, folklore studies and archival research to highlight Irish food traditions.

The presence of blood as food in the cultural and social history of Ireland is a prism through which shifts in competing worldviews can be observed. In the practice, preparation and consumption of blood as food, it has been a food of high value and good economic sense, but also isolated by colonial propagandists to ridicule and intentionally misrepresent as a weapon of suppressive control. Blood, or black, pudding, the most familiar form of blood as food in Ireland, was once governed by a set of rituals and rules designed to bring a sense of community to its preparation through the formation of a seasonal meitheal. Roles were clearly delineated: men were responsible for slaughter and butchery, and women food preparation and preservation. Children were involved, minimally, to observe the rituals of pig slaughter and pudding making, learning through observation and communality. Blood pudding making was traditionally the output of women’s work on subsistence farms, the sale of which generated income and a way for women to assert autonomy in a patriarchal culture. Contemporary production of blood pudding is removed from the domestic sphere and the work of women into the commercial sphere and the work of men, a contextual change that enabled the elevation of blood as food from the ordinary to the extraordinary. In doing so, embedded, ruralised rituals around blood pudding making began to demise: the gathering of the meitheal, the communal experience, exchange of knowledge and recipes, the sharing of food, and feasting together. The present day ‘up sell’ of blood-based food products as a healthful ‘super’ food run concurrently with global issues of food poverty, wasteful systems of food and climate change. Such considerations have been re-labelled for modern times, but their essential messages of good food, good economy and food as a valuable resource would be recognisable to those who once relied on blood as food as an important part of a diet centred on self-sufficiency and good domestic economy.

A popular poster from Myanmar lists food pairings that should be avoided, sometimes at all costs. Coconut and honey taken together, for example, are believed to cause nausea, while pork and curdled milk will induce diarrhoea. Worst of all, according to the poster, many seemingly innocuous combinations that include jelly and coffee, beef and star fruit, or pigeon and pumpkin, are likely to kill the unwary consumer. But why are these combinations considered dangerous, even fatal? Our provisional answer, derived from the statistics of known cultural behaviour and supported by simple computer simulations, is that such food norms, along with many other social belief norms, are influenced, not just by actual risks, but also by strong forces of cultural learning that can drive and lock in arbitrary rules, even in the face of contrary evidence.

In a land with many arid desserts, water has earned its place in the cultural history of Saudi Arabia as a blessing, a symbol of good fortune and even the highest of holy elements. In the Hijaz region of the kingdom, three ritualistic practices celebrate the strong cultural and religious meanings that water embodied for the local community: cooking with rainwater; drinking the water of the holy well, Zamzam; and smoking water jugs with incense. The paper describes these three ritualistic practices in the Hijazi history and attempts to meditate upon their spiritual and cultural aspects. On the first rainy day of the year, women of the Hijaz region, which include cities like Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah, have traditionally been used to collecting rainwater in their yards and using it to make the local lentil and rice dish, maadous. This lunch meal became associated with celebrating rain communally, as families gathered in celebration of the auspicious bounties that rain represents. Cooking with rainwater was believed to transfer the sacred qualities that it represents (purity, forgiveness, and mercy) as mentioned in the Quran to the bodies of those who consume it. On the other hand, drinking holy Zamzam water, is linked to performing the ritual of Hajj in Mekkah. The water from Zamzam well is considered holy given the well’s location inside the Holy Mosque of Mecca, and according to the religious story, was a miracle that sprang up from the ground for the prophet Ismail and his mother Hagar. Hence, ever since the earliest period of Islam, drinking Zamzam water was performed with specific ritualistic elements that reinforce its spiritual and religious value. Moreover, distilled floral essences were traditionally used to flavour and scent water in the past, in addition to smoking the clay water pots and jugs with mastic gum incense. Relying on oral history, historical analysis and Arabic poetry, this research paper presents a study of how the most basic of elements, water, was used in rituals to embody its spiritual meanings and the relationship to divinity.

In The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday, historian Stephen Nissenbaum argues that Christmas rituals ‘reveal something of what we would like to be, what we once were, or what we are becoming despite ourselves’. This paper will explore this concept, examining the evolution of the Australian Christmas feast in the colonial period. It will trace how the maintenance and adaptation of traditional British festive fare played an important role in identity formation from the time of colonization (1788), through to the immediate aftermath of Federation (1901). Drawing on a range of sources such as journals, letters, memoirs, newspapers and illustrations of the period, it will show how through reference back to British culinary rules and rituals – either through faithful adherence or deliberate departures – the Christmas table became a place to annually debate, explore, create and experience the evolution of Australian identities and growing independence. The paper traces this story from the early years post colonization when food was scarce and pragmatic adaptation necessary, with abundance the key non-negotiable in the ritual, rather than a defined menu. It then looks at the evolution of the Australian feast in the first half of the nineteenth century when the growing prosperity allowed the still very ‘British’ colony to revel in traditional culinary norms and Christmas luxuries – however seasonally inappropriate. From the mid-nineteenth century on though, we witness an increasingly confident soon to be federated nation emerge in which experimentation, adaptation and subversion of rituals played a role in forging new Antipodean cultural identities. The paper will ultimately consider what the changing nature of the feast, and commentary surrounding it highlights about the negotiation of emerging identities in this critical period of Australian history in which a small penal colony grew into a prosperous federated nation. This examination of the Christmas feast in colonial Australia demonstrates that far from being static, food rules and rituals are living parts of culture that change and adapt in new contexts. Ritual feasts and dishes bring meaning from the past, but still have the capacity to adapt as part of an ever-changing gastronomy that reflects communities and identities in evolution.

In a world of changing tastes and incessant innovation, the requirement that red meat be served with red wine is the sole rule of pairing food and wine that remains essentially unchallenged. The rule allows few exceptions, yet is entirely unknown to those not privy to the implicit beliefs of those for whom consumption of red wine is either a serious endeavor or taken for granted. Following the rule is not a question of connoisseurship, social class, or one-upmanship: A true marriage, sustained by both history and chemistry, an imperative with, paradoxically, no consequences for violation other than raised eyebrows and scorn.

Climate change and industrial meat production position vegetarianism and veganism as potential regulatory frameworks for lower-carbon ethical living. However, the meanings of vegetarianism, veganism, and meat are culturally specific and often fraught with racial, religious, sectarian, and gendered tensions. This paper explores vegetarianism, veganism, and meat-eating as cultural signifiers in South Africa and India. I examine how these diets manifest in two climate fictions – Leila by Prayaag Akbar and Nineveh by Henritetta Rose-Innes – in dialogue with a 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat and a 2015 controversy at the University of Cape Town over banning animal products.

In this paper I examine the Liber Cure Cocorum. This fifteenth-century anonymous culinary recipe collection contains approximately 137 recipes and is found within a courtesy book, The Booke of Curtassye, in British Library MS Sloane 1986 alongside medical, behaviour, and household texts. From this brief description the collection appears quite standard – many medieval culinary collections are anonymous, are found alongside household and behaviour texts (Le Ménagier de’ Paris), and the Liber’s length is similar to other collections (The Forme of Cury and Ordinance of Pottage). Yet the Liber has been traditionally distinguished from the corpus of Middle English culinary recipe collections because of an unusual feature: it is in rhyming verse. Magdalena Bator recently applied linguistic analysis to the collection’s recipes, concluding that the collection was for use neither by a professional cook nor a trainee, but likely served some entertaining purpose – exactly what does she not specify. Building upon Bator’s study, this paper will dig further into the question, what is the Liber Cure Cocorum? Although I will explore the various theories of the Liber’s origin, I will argue that the author of the Liber, The Booke of Curtassye, and the compiler of MS Sloane 1986 sought to capture the culinary rules and rituals of wealthy households in one text. I will particularly emphasise the possibility that The Booke of Curtassye and Liber was produced for, or by, aspiring members of society that wished to understand and imitate the rules and rituals of wealthy households, or was compiled by a member of a large household to educate its members and preserve their culinary culture. Analysis of the relationship between the rhyming verse and the recipes is central to this conclusion, however I will go a step further and consider its form within the context of household and didactic literature more generally to reveal how this rhyme reinforces the authority and legacy of the culinary rules. All these findings lead to one conclusion: the Liber not only reflects a well-established culinary culture with complex rules and rituals worth recording in written form, but its binding alongside behaviour texts and the use of the same verse style sets culinary recipes firmly alongside texts that defined the elite culture of late medieval England.

The potluck meal is a ritual central to modern lesbian life, loved and loathed in equal measure. ‘Potlucks were community glue for lesbians,’ observes one political scientist. Other scholars agree that this form of dining was about social and political togetherness; ‘The potluck epitomizes the idea of how much more you can have when you grow together.’ The communal meal was a way for lesbians to make a place at a table, have a say about what’s on the menu, and then use that space to accommodate or adjudicate differences of diet, health and ethics. My paper will understand the potluck as an affordable, reiterative community ritual, establishing a relationship between dining and sexual orientation that enacts utopian visions of community and creates belonging in the face of erasure, censure and the daily threat of despair.

Vietnamese believe food is an intermediary between a person’s livelihood and fate. Eating, in other words, isn’t necessarily about sustenance so much as it is a set of quasi-ritual actions that have cosmic effects. Often accompanied by alcohol, friends or families feast on dishes commonly considered to induce misfortune at the end of the lunar month. By consuming ‘bad luck’, they believe their fortune will reset for the new month, bringing prosperity. This paper examines the feast of bad luck and how it has been villainised in Modern Vietnam.

Going to Tim Hortons in Canada (and in a few other places where Canadians need to feel, well, Canadian), involves ritualistic practices of place and consumption that are understood and embraced by Tim Hortons guests and devotees. I offer a brief history of the company and describe some of the cultural considerations implied when Tim Hortons Coffee is the topic of discussion. I explore how buying and consuming Tim Hortons coffee and other products is a marker of Canadian identity beyond the need for alimentary sustenance. It is a coming together to nourish and build culture and collective memory.