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41 Food is, with water, our most basic human need. It is a need all humans share. Food not only satisfies our survival needs by filling our stomachs but also has possibilities of delighting our palate and our eyes. Because it is so necessary, food is multivalent as a symbol . Historically many different kinds of food have taken on new meanings when they were shared, given, refused, or sacrificed in a variety of religious cultures and social contexts. Framing the Issues Many moderns today ask what value religious teachings on food should have—after all, they were composed so long ago, in such different contexts from ours. Some people think that value should only be attached to religious teachings on food if they continue to serve a clearly useful purpose in the postmodern world. There is an assumption that many of these teachings are outdated, based on insufficient or mistaken information, and are simply superstition. For others, religious teachings on food, like other teachings and practices in their religious tradition, are valuable in themselves both as instances of divine revelation and as connecting people alive today to ancestors and other fellow believers of the past. In this chapter we will look at some religious teachings and practices on food, the proposed purposes of such practices, and the impact of such practices today, in hopes of helping us decide on appropriate ethical approaches to food. Individual readers must, of course, decide for themselves the revelatory status of religious teachings on food. Religions seem to have been intimately bound up with food from the beginnings of humankind. Anthropologists have found prehistoric remains of food sacrifices that appear to have been offered to the gods in hopes of their granting successful hunts. In a number of indigenous religions, including, for example, those of Northwest natives in the United States, annual offerings were, and are, made to the Master of Animals and Mistress of the Seas, both in thanksgiving for allowing humans successful hunting or fishing in the past year and in hopes of persuading these powerful deities to allow continued success in the coming year.1 Similarly, prayers to the Rice Goddess (under many names) for good Chapter 2 RELIGIONS ON FOOD, FASTING, AND FEASTING comparative religious ethics 42 harvests are still commonplace among agricultural peoples throughout Asia. Many religions have also included among their ceremonies feasts of food to be either consumed by the religious community as a whole or offered by individuals to the gods or to dead ancestors. Feast days of the patron saint of village churches among Latin American Catholics have been traditionally celebrated with elaborate meals for the whole village, often supplied by a local wealthy family. Anthropologists have noted that such religiously based feasts, often centered on roasting one or more large animals, predated Catholicism in Latin America. In native religions around the world, such feasts were not only a way of distributing necessary protein to poorer members of the community who might otherwise have little access to meat, but were also a way of redistributing wealth, as the sponsorship of a feast day or other celebration could deplete the wealth of even the relatively rich.2 In many religions across the world, from Africa to China, family members “feed” the dead of the family, sometimes by taking elaborate meals to the cemetery on special days, such as the Mexican Day of the Dead,3 but at other times by simply pouring the first sip of a drink or the first bite of a meal into the ground to appease the spirits of the dead, so that the ancestors will lend their support to the ongoing efforts of the family to support life and prosperity. Religious Fasting and Food Taboos But societies and religions have not only been involved in the struggle of humans to find sufficient food for survival. They have also been concerned about what people eat, with whom they eat, and when they eat. Various societies have therefore tabooed some foods, either absolutely, as in the Muslim and Jewish ban on eating pork, or at certain times, such as the Catholic ban on eating meat during Fridays of Lent, or the food and tobacco bans that are part of the couvade imposed on expectant fathers in some indigenous cultures. Many religious cultures have also demanded of their followers periods of fasting —not eating any food, and usually not any drink, as in Jewish fasting on the Day of Atonement or Muslim fasting during the...

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