Food & Faith in Christian Culture (review)

Food & Faith in Christian Culture explores the straightforward notion that food has occupied a significant, though underappreciated role in Christian tradition. Although the editors’ assertion of scholarly neglect may be exaggerated, the eleven essays that they have assembled provide an illuminating inquiry into the manipulation of food for religious purposes. They investigate practices across a broad geographic expanse stretching from Europe to the Americas and far beyond to New Zealand. The chronological range is no less impressive; the studies span more than a half-millennium from the late Middle Ages to the present. Still, the principal value of this collection rests on its imaginative themes and innovative approaches.

Some subjects are familiar, even as the authors offer fresh insight. Thus, analyses focusing on the monastic experience bookend the volume. The opening chapter by Salvatore D. S. Musumeci surveys the dietary habits—both conventional and exceptional—among a group of fourteenth-century Florentine monks. Their account books indicate purchases typical of most Florentine households, but the monks consumed these foodstuffs in keeping with the Rule of St. Benedict. In the book’s final chapter, Richard D. G. Irvine probes the enduring significance of eating in silence for contemporary English Benedictines. Simply put, how does sharing a meal foster corporate piety?

The volume’s coeditor, Ken Albala, fastens on another key issue—the Reformation’s reconsideration of fasting—and concludes that fasting remained important for both Catholics and Protestants, although they refashioned its character considerably. A closely related aspect of the “reformation” of food and drink was sumptuary legislation. According to Johanna B. Moyer, French regulations, whether Catholic or Protestant, emphasized food discipline as a vehicle for reinforcing community. Antonia-Leda Matalas, Eleni Tourlouki, and Chyrstalleni Lazarou note a similar stress on the disciplinary dynamics of fasting in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Sydney Watts’s study of Lenten observances in France during the Enlightenment takes a slightly different tack. How did theology and new understandings in medical science converge to alter perceptions and practices surrounding Lent?

Turning to the recent American past, Heidi Oberholtzer Lee inquires into the ways that the Brethren in Christ promoted the love feast, a collective ritual with physical and spiritual dimensions, as a means to heal divisions and affirm communal harmony. The book’s other coeditor, Trudy Eden, discusses a related topic in American religious history—vegetarianism as a force for spiritual regeneration. She focuses on Charles and Myrtle Fillmore—founders of Unity, a church within the New Thought movement. The ongoing American preoccupation with health, beauty, body, and religion comes together in a delightful essay by Samantha Kwan and Christine Sheikh on Christian weight-loss programs.

Equally engaging and revealing are the chapters that treat Amerindian and Maori associations with and attitudes toward bread, that most basic of European foods. In one case, Heather Martel reflects upon a sixteenth-century Italian adventurer in New Spain who expressed disgust for the way in which indigenous women prepared maize bread and wine. His reaction was part of an attempt to avoid contamination of European Christian identity, here encapsulated in foods commonly associated with the Eucharistic meal. According to Hazel Petrie, missionaries in New Zealand discovered that the indigenous people welcomed the introduction of European wheat bread. Less understood perhaps was the manner by which the Maori incorporated the new staple into a precolonial religious matrix.

Altogether, the essays are topical, well written, and stimulating. They nicely capture the diversity, nuance, and complexity surrounding the place and role of dietary practices in Christian culture.