Religion, Food, and Eating in North America

BENJAMIN E. ZELLER

“FOOD IS MY religion.” So declares a participant in Shannon Hayes’s study of “radical homemakers,” women who defy consumer culture through intentionally and playfully subverting traditional gender roles.¹ Variants of this statement abound in food magazines, cooking shows, and food blogs, not to mention everyday conversations. People have declared chocolate, beer, and cheese their religions. So too with various types or approaches to food, such as vegetarianism or locavorism (eating food that one identifies as produced locally). The question is not whether people consider food and eating as something akin to religion. They do. Rather, what does this reveal, and what value is offered to us by thinking about food as something akin to religion?

There are several parallels between religion and eating, many of which have been developed throughout this book. But this essay looks to something somewhat different: food and eating as a religion, and the process of conversion that people undergo when they change foodways. Scholars have identified many cultural pursuits as things akin to religion, or what I call “quasi religions,” since they do not involve Gods, supernatural forces, teachings about the soul or life after death, institutions or churches, or many other elements of what people normally call religion.² Yet quasi religions are religious, since they share some of the qualities as other religions, notably rituals, conversions, central texts, and ideas about saving the individual and the world. There are many examples. Scholar of religion David Chidester has written of the religion of Coca-Cola, which he characterizes as a “global religious mission” and “supreme icon of modernity.”3 More recently, historian Gary Laderman has authored an entire book on American quasi religions such as film, music, and sports. Laderman explains that rather than envisioning religion as isolated in institutionalized forms such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, “religion is instead a ubiquitous feature of cultural life, assuming many expressions though tied to and inspired by basic, universal facts of life and fundamental biological phenomena in human experience: suffering and ecstasy, reproduction and aging, family and conflict, health and death.”⁴ I add eating to Laderman’s list.

This essay focuses on two foodways as quasi religions: vegetarianism—encompassing its more rigid variant of veganism—and locavorism. I have based my research on a series of twenty oral histories of vegetarians and locavores that I collected in 2009. During these oral histories, vegetarians and locavores discussed what they eat (and do not eat), why they eat it, and how they came to make these decisions and follow these quasi-religious food practices.

What does it mean to call these foodways quasi religions, and why does it matter? Certainly it replicates what practitioners of these foodways say about their practices, in both the oral histories and popular culture. Perhaps, similar to the theory of religion proposed by theologian Paul Tillich, vegetarians or locavores invest these practices with ultimate concerns and values. Therefore, calling these foodways quasi religions does justice to how their practitioners self-understand and describe their practices. But studying these foodways as quasi religions offers more than merely descriptive value; it offers real analytic traction. If we treat these food-ways like religions, we can use the scholarship of religion to understand what happens when people adopt and practice these foodways. Later this essay considers how and why people become vegetarians or locavores, using the sociology of religious conversion to understand these processes. By looking at these foodways as quasi religions, we can begin to understand why vegetarianism and locavorism represent far more than simple food choices for their practitioners; they are ways of life, systems of values, and symbols of meaning.

VEGETARIANISM AS QUASI RELIGION

Vegetarianism is one of the most commonly practiced alternative food-ways in North America and the contemporary West. A survey commissioned by Vegetarian Times in 2009 showed that 3 percent of the American population—over nine million people—identified themselves as vegetarian.5 Vegetarianism possesses strong analogs to religious practice, with its focus on control and purity. Mary Douglas has called attention to the intersection of food, religion, purity, and control in her analysis of pollution and taboos in world religions, explaining that “rituals of purity and impurity create unity in experience.”⁶ Keeping polluting impurities at bay removes sources of danger and allows groups and cultures to instill order. Vegetarianism, as a practice of excluding polluting foods, functions analogously. Vegetarians establish control over their eating, and therefore their bodies and social situations, by excluding foods deemed impure or inappropriate. This is especially true among vegetarians who oppose the eating of meat on health, aesthetic, or visceral grounds.

Yet vegetarianism functions on multiple levels, and not all vegetarians understand their food practices with reference to the ideas of control, purity, or pollution. Nor do all vegetarians adopt this diet for health reasons. In many cases, a quasi-religious sense of holism characterizes much vegetarian discourse, often combined with an ethics of animal rights or concern for the wellbeing of the earth. Such holistic vegetarianism is equally religious. For example, vegetarianism advocates Sharon Yntema and Christine Beard extol the holism of vegetarian family living, arguing that families that follow a vegetarian foodway innately possess superior ethical characteristics. “Feelings of love, trust, and honesty lie at the very heart of vegetarian families: love of life, and love of each other; trust in the ability of the planet to sustain and feed us, and trust in our ability to feed ourselves; and honesty about the damage we have done to that planet and the other animals and how the solution lies with us and the choices we make every day.” While Yntema and Beard do not explicitly denigrate omnivore foodways, their implication is clear: vegetarianism leads to a holistic morality emphasizing love, trust, and honesty. They explicitly link this to what they call a “healthy soul,” which they argue vegetarianism instills.⁷ The health of the soul and the development of holistic moralities certainly look like what scholars identify as religion, at least in the West.⁸

Other researchers have noted further connections between vegetarianism and religion. Food and nutrition sociologist Alan Beardsworth identifies the root of this in what he calls the life/death paradox of food, namely, “the fact that while eating is an absolute and unavoidable necessity for the maintenance of life, it frequently involves the dissolution of some other organism in the process of being consumed.”9 This gives rise to anxiety, a state that he has found in his study of vegetarianism. Vegetarians, Beardsworth discovered through the interview process, are particularly sensitive to anxiety and perceive the anxiety more acutely. He has also noted that the traditional means by which societies regulate such anxieties—notably mythological, religious, and ritual means—have declined in the modern era. Some people choose to adopt vegetarian foodways as a solution to such anxiety.

Journalist, writer, and ex-vegetarian Alissa Herbaly Coons invokes such a sense of paradox and anxiety in retelling her childhood memory of realizing the nature of meat. “I have carried a deep ambivalence about my place in the food chain since the summer I raised a flock of chickens at age thirteen,” she writes. Having named her chicks, Coons experiences a shock when her mother emerges from the freezer with a bag of frozen chicken. She frames this shock in explicitly religious terms: “I underwent a crisis of faith.” Coons became vegetarian in response to this crisis of faith. Yet she eventually spurned her youthful adoption of vegetarianism. Coons also describes the reversal of her vegetarian conversion process as cementing itself through cooking chicken stock, inverting the original moment of shock that catalyzed her crisis of faith. “For hours, I boiled the last nutrients out of the chicken, claiming the goodness of its skeleton for myself and for the soups of my future, a small act of faith in my slow reconversion.”¹⁰ Religious language predominates in Coon’s essay on “converting” to and then “reconverting” back from vegetarianism. Clearly numerous authors, journalists, and individuals refer to their vegetarian practice as something akin to religion. That is because it is in fact akin to religion.

LOCAVORISM AS QUASI RELIGION

Locavorism is a newer foodway than vegetarianism, at least if one judges by the propensity of people to explicitly claim it as a practice. Of course individuals and groups have eaten local food for eons, and local food eating long precedes consuming food that is not produced locally. But intentional locavorism as a phenomenon is quite recent, and only exists within and against the context of the globalized corporate food market. Scholars and participants disagree on the precise origin of the term, but they concur that it arose during the first decade of the twenty-first century as a way to describe a foodway predicated on eating local, sustainably produced foods. Sociologists Jeffrey Haydu and David Kadanoff argue that locavorism is rooted in what Marx would call an alienation from the production of food and the search for what they call “idealized community of face-to-face relations and tradition.”11 Locavorism centers on authenticity and the quest to reestablish authentic eating and social relations in a globalized world. It is primarily a middle- and upper-class attempt to reconnect to the land, a connection that has been severed as a result of the Industrial Revolution and twenty-first-century late capitalism. An effort to root identity, society, and meaning, locavorism possesses obvious religious parallels.

Based on the oral histories I recorded, nearly all its practitioners first encountered the phenomenon through two best-selling books promoting locavorism, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007). Since those books are the primary means of propagating locavorism, they merit extended consideration.

Pollan frames his subject—what he calls the omnivore’s dilemma—as a state of anxiety produced by the human ability, propensity, and need to eat a variety of foods without clear biological guidance. Pollan writes that we mentally construct what scholars of religious studies would call a Manichean or dualistic view of food, or in Pollan’s words, “The Good Things to Eat, and The Bad.” Our foodways help us decide what belongs where and how we relate to them. For Pollan, the omnivore’s dilemma becomes a fundamental cause of anxiety, tension, and bewilderment. Our foodways help us respond to this anxiety. Yet in the United States, with its admixture of immigrant foodways and postindustrial food production scheme, “the lack of a steadying culture of food leaves us especially vulnerable” to a crushing anxiety best met by leaping into a variety of competing food choices. Such examples include vegetarianism, locavorism, organic eating, low-carbohydrate diets, and raw foods.¹²

For Pollan, the solution to such anxiety lies in locavorism. Pollan leads his readers on a literary field trip to a sustainable farm at the center of the locavore movement in central Virginia, Polyface Farm. He uses explicitly religious language to describe this farm, calling it a form of “reformation” akin to the Protestant Reformation, a challenge to the corruption of American industrial foodways. Of the farm’s founder Joel Salatin, Pollan declares that “farming is his ministry, and certainly his four hundred or so regular customers hear plenty of preaching.” Pollan describes the customers as parishioners and the newsletter as a “jeremiad,” a strongly worded critique named for the prophet Jeremiah and usually associated with religious discourse.13 The religious language is clear, all the more so because the farm’s operator uses such religious language as well. Salatin considers his farming a form of ministry, and he invokes Evangelical Christian language as well as rhetoric drawn from political libertarianism and alternative foodway subcultures, creating a bricolage of quasi-religious locavore discourse.¹⁴

Pollan concludes his book with an explicit description of eating as religion. Having personally collected mushrooms, hunted boar, and grown vegetables in his garden, he creates a meal comprised of foods evocative of specific events, symbols, and teachings. He calls the meal “a wordless way of saying grace . . . a ceremony . . . a thanksgiving or a secular seder, for every item on our plate pointed somewhere else, almost sacramentally, telling a little story about nature or community or even the sacred.” In an explicitly Christian turn, Pollan (a nominally secular Jew) calls his meal a sacrament comprised of eating “the body of the world.”¹⁵ In identifying it as a seder, he also invokes religious imagery. A Jewish seder utilizes food to symbolize the story of the Passover, just as Pollan’s seder uses food to tell the story of his locavorism.

The religious parallels of Pollan’s project are obvious. In describing the omnivore’s dilemma as a root cause of anxiety and locavorism as a response to such anxiety, Pollan reproduces one of the fundamental approaches to understanding religion. As early as Sigmund Freud, scholars of religion have defined their subject as a response to anxiety and an attempt to overcome the anomie of human life. For Freud, religion allows humanity “to deal by psychical means with our senseless anxiety,” offering some sense of relief from overwhelming paralysis.¹⁶ Such psychological theories of religion emphasize religion’s role in offering solutions to basic human anxieties, often in the form of divine reassurance. More recently the rational choice school of sociology of religion has taken the same approach, envisioning religion as an exchange that offers “compensators” to assuage the various psychological needs of religious consumers.17

Yet Pollan roots his ultimate solution to the anxiety of the omnivore’s dilemma not so much in a theology of food but in actual practice; in his case a ritualized meal that he describes as akin to a thanksgiving or seder, two explicit examples of religious food practices. As the foundation of a religious practice, Pollan’s locavorism resembles what sociologist and theorist Pierre Bourdieu calls religious habitus, “a lasting, generalized and transposable disposition to act and think in conformity with the principles of a (quasi-) systemic view of the world and human existence.”¹⁸ Locavorism offers its practitioners a systemic view, in Bourdieu’s words, of how one can act and think in relation to the world around them. For Bourdieu, such a habitus hinges on the relation of individuals to capital, which includes social capital, monetary capital, and resource capital. Food, land, agricultural subsidies, grocery stores, and factory farms are all part of this network of capital that locavorism encompasses. As a quasi religion, locavorism offers its practitioners a means to navigate the field through quasi-religious practices.¹⁹

The second book that most locavores mention as bringing them into the fold is Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Despite its title, the book has little to do with religion and invokes the spirituality of eating and quasi-religious practices of eating less than does Pollan’s book. Yet the locavorism of Kingsolver’s book—a term she uses explicitly—nevertheless represents a quasi-religious relationship with food. In her book, Kingsolver sets out to record a memoir of and commentary on a year of eating locally and sustainably produced food alongside her family and friends. For Kingsolver, this attempt was an exercise in “one good year of food life.”²⁰ The nature and purpose of life, living beings, and the relational networks of life served as central themes in her recounting of the experience, and the creation and destruction of life as part of the food and eating processes represent the “miracle” of the book’s title. Food offers communion with the living and dead, and a means of forging connections with the natural world. Kingsolver muses on cooking as a form of remembrance, and the slaughter of food animals as an occasion for serious reflection on the nature of life and death and the morality of killing in order to eat. The religious relevance is clear: locavorism is a way to come to grips with the nature of life and death.

Kingsolver laments that the unsustainable nature of the industrial food project has become a “spiritual error” that steals from future generations in order to provide conspicuous consumption to the current ones. Her use of the rhetoric of spirituality must be read as intentional and situational. She notes that “our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity,” and that it is generally seen as culturally acceptable and legitimate to accept choices by Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists on religious grounds. “Is it such a stretch,” she asks, “to make more choices about food based on global consequences of its production and transport?”21 Here Kingsolver treats eating in a quasi-religious manner in order to harness the legitimacy of religious difference and religious practice, in effect arguing that if one permits Jews to keep kosher or Muslims to follow halal requirements, then one ought to at least take seriously the claims of locavorism.

Kingsolver’s locavore project can be subsumed under the notion of fighting what she calls “alimentary alienation.” Here Kingsolver tips her hat to Karl Marx, whose idea of alienation undergirds not only economic and social theory but also many approaches to religion as well. Americans have become alienated from our means of food production, and King-solver envisions locavorism as a means to alleviate this alienation and restore a cohesive social bond among people, community, animals, and the land. Fostering this web of relationships will create, in Kingsolver’s approach, a more sustainable, healthy, and moral world for current and future generations. Such an approach is implicitly religious, and Kingsolver recognizes it. “I feel like a Wiccan,” she admits, as she cuts and drains the curds of her homemade cheese.²²

Like vegetarianism, there are certain resonances between locavorism and religion. Since locavorism is a newer phenomenon—at least in its contemporary formulation—less scholarly work exists on it. Yet whatever else locavorism represents, it certainly functions as a means of investing one’s space with sacred meaning, since it ties together ideas of life, death, meaning, and practice with reference to space. Political scientist and food theorist Chad Lavin roots the locavore movement in space as well, specifically spatial anxieties. “In other words,” Lavin writes, “local foods is but one symptom of a broader concern with political space, when traditional notions of space would seem to be collapsing.” The decline of local autonomy and the nation-state in an age of corporate and imperial growth drives people to seek solace in what Lavin calls the “utopian fantasy of postpolitical reconciliation with neighbors and food.”23 Lavin dismisses locavorism as a retreat from the political and real into fantasy and nostalgia, yet in doing so he misses the profound spiritual meaning that locavorism offers its adherents. Locavorism roots its practitioners in space.

Scholars have long looked to religion as rooting individuals and societies in space. Mircea Eliade and Emile Durkheim wrote of this phenomenon, and Eliade made it central in his work on sacred space.²⁴ More recently, theorist of religion Thomas A. Tweed calls this property of religion dwelling and considers it one of the two fundamental properties of religion (along with crossing). “Dwelling, as I use the term,” Tweed writes, “involves three overlapping processes: mapping, building, and inhabiting. . . . In other words, as clusters of dwelling practices, religions orient individuals and groups in time and space, transform the natural world, and allow devotees to inhabit the worlds they construct.”²⁵ This property of religion, that of homemaking, reveals why locavorism functions as such an apt quasi religion. (Tweed would discount it as a true religion, since it lacks supernaturalism.) Locavores invest space and time with meaning and construct understandings of the world that allow them to inhabit meaningful and relational space. Locavores mark some space and spatial practices as good—growing food oneself, buying food from nearby farmers, visiting restaurants that serve local food—and other spaces and spatial practices as bad—convenience stores, the central aisles of grocery stores, buying and eating processed foods—thereby orienting practitioners within a web of meaning. In a Tweedian sense, locavorism is certainly a quasi religion.

FOODWAY CONVERSIONS

Having considered how the practitioners of two contemporary foodways use the language of religion, and how these foodways function in quasi-religious manners, one is left with an obvious question. So what? It is all very interesting that eating looks like religion, and that people describe their food practices as religions, but what is the relevance of this phenomenon? The answer lies in the utility of the tools of religious studies to understand religion as practiced. If food and eating look like religion, then we can study them using the tools of religion. One particular manner in which we can do so is to ask how the idea of conversion helps us understand the processes by which people adopt new foodways.

Scholars do not agree on any one theory of religious conversion. In fact, there are several competing theories. Putting aside those that assume particular historical or political contexts (e.g., mass conversions) or extremely unusual psychological conditions (e.g., coercion), scholars still debate why and how people covert. Yet there are two basic approaches to conversion, as sociologist James T. Richardson has argued: passive and active.26 Passive conversions “happen to you,” occurring outside the convert’s control. By contrast, active conversions are processes by which the convert seeks and affirms a new identity. These are best understood as two ideal types of theoretical conversions, often combined to one extent or another in actual life. But both help explain how and why people become vegetarians and locavores.

Sociologists John Lofland and Rodney Stark set out the earliest and most classic form of what Richardson calls the passive model of conversion, the “world-saver model.” Theorized in their 1965 article, “Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective,” Lofland and Stark’s model understands conversion as a multistep process beginning with a feeling of “relative deprivation”—anxiety, anomie, or discomfort—followed by an encounter with an outside force (person, book, advertisement, etc.) that results in a new religious affiliation and culminates in a completely motivated convert willing to proselytize on behalf of his or her new beliefs.²⁷ Key to Lofland and Stark’s approach, potential converts not only experience some sense of deprivation, but understand this deprivation in a religious sense and subsequently accept the religious solutions to their perceived problems offered by the outside force.²⁸ Converts generally describe the process as an inexorable draw toward their new faith.

Something analogous happens among foodway converts who recognize some sense of discomfort present in their lives, understand this discomfort as rooted in their food and eating patterns, and finally encounter people, texts, or movements that inspire them to reject their current foodways and follow new ones. Among the locavores who provided the oral histories, one of the more striking examples of such people is Madeline. Madeline explained that her parents had been overweight all their lives, and before they died, both her mother and father had “lost their digestive systems” from surgeries. Madeline had to feed her parents on a special diet during that time, and as a result she “became really interested in food.” Her sister had already adopted a macrobiotic diet, a health diet predicated on Japanese medical and spiritual teachings, and Madeline followed suit. She decided “not to end up like [her] parents, without digestive systems when they died.” After experimenting with macrobiotics, Madeline eventually went to culinary school and became a proponent of local healthy food.29

Many vegetarians described experiences akin to Madeline’s. Among the vegetarians whose oral histories I recorded, Gillian told an equally striking story. “Vegetarianism chose me,” she explained. “One night, I ate some fish or pork—I don’t remember which one—and for some reason I suddenly felt very ill. I nearly became ill and threw up. And then I gave up meat. I never questioned it.” Gillian’s conversion is reminiscent of the radical conversion account of Paul (né Saul) in the New Testament, who describes being struck down by the power of God and the Truth of Christianity. For Gillian, the Truth of vegetarianism literally made her ill when she ate meat. When I asked her about any experiences that may have prepared her for this radical disjuncture, she said that she had already read about the horrors of factory farming and the need for responsible eating. Immediately after this incident, Gillian’s partner suggested that they become vegetarians. Following her conversion to vegetarianism, Gillian became increasingly involved in the animal rights movement and eventually became a vegan. She described it as “an enlightenment, a waking up.”³⁰ Importantly, she noted that the conversion occurred not because she wanted it to happen but because it happened to her.

Madeline’s and Gillian’s stories are representative of many other conversion accounts included in the oral histories of locavores and vegetarians. In all such accounts, the person experienced a sense of anxiety and discomfort, what Lofland and Stark call relative deprivation, which culminated in a particular moment of distress. Such turning-point moments are keys to this model of conversion since it is at those points that the perceived anomie leads a person to reexamine his or her religious assumptions (or quasi-religious, in the case of food). The sources of anomie differed—for Madeline, her parents’ declining health and deaths, and for Gillian, her discomfort with factory farming that culminated in her nausea-inducing meal—but both experiences instilled in each of them a sense of anxiety and anomie. Both women understood this anomie as rooted in their food choices and framed the discomfort in those terms. Such a distinction is important since had Madeline understood her parents’ declining health in some other way, such as bad luck or genetics, or had Gillian framed her illness as the result of a virus or just random chance, neither would have looked to food-based solutions. But having done so, both Madeline and Gillian reexamined their food practices and decided to make changes. Both had already encountered an external authority that offered a foodway solution, namely, Madeline’s sister’s macrobiotics and Gillian’s books about the horrors of factory farming. Finally, both Madeline and Gillian adopted new foodways and became proponents of their newfound approaches.

Several commonalities stretch across these and other similar conversion narratives. Often a moment of crisis preceded the conversion, again akin to the classic Pauline conversion narrative. One vegetarian described a visit to a sausage factory and the vision of dead animals hanging on hooks as directly causing her conversion.31 A locavore described reading Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma as “an epiphany moment” that drove him to reject mass-produced corporate food.³² Such converts to locavorism and vegetarianism generally found friends and associates who shared their new foodways and could support them in their endeavors, but not always. One vegetarian described a lifetime of repeated conversions as he became vegetarian when around other vegetarians but then backslid into an omnivore’s diet when not supported by others.³³ Another vegetarian, Isabelle, explained that she “would have become vegetarian anyway” but joined a vegetarian eating group because it gave her “significant support” and “sped up” the process.³⁴

When I asked these foodway converts if the idea of conversion made sense to them as a means of understanding their trajectories into vegetarianism and locavorism, nearly all of them said that it did. Given the commonalities between their experiences and the typical Pauline view of conversion—based on the description of Paul’s conversion in the New Testament—that suffuses Western Christian culture, this is not surprising. After I mentioned the idea of looking at their experiences as conversions, the individuals I spoke with used terms like “born again,” “backsliding,” “fundamentalist dietary choices,” and “self-reflection.” While nodding her head, Harriet explained, “That comparison makes sense. It was definitely a conversion moment.”³⁵ Gillian and Madeline also made broader connections to food as a quasi religion, with Madeline explaining that “the spirit comes back into people who start to eat right . . . food and spirit and everything are connected through energy.”36

How and why is it that people become vegetarians or locavores? For those whose conversions align with what Richardson calls passive conversions, the process occurs because these individuals perceive some degree of tension or cognitive dissonance between their current eating habits and what they think is the correct, better, or true way to eat. They generally experience some sort of turning point, and through an encounter with a person, text, or group come to reexamine their food-way choices. In the most extreme of such examples, the process might be entirely passive. “It happened to me,” Gillian told me, in reference to her conversion.³⁷ In others, a combination of factors lead to the eventual shift from one foodway to another. Yet the theoretical approaches to conversion—approaches that we can use since food can be studied as a quasi religion—nevertheless help explain the process.

ANOTHER MODEL OF FOODWAY CONVERSIONS

By contrast to the world-saver model and its variants, a number of social scientists have developed what Richardson calls active models of conversion, all of which understand conversion as a religious practice that a person undertakes, rather than happening to them. Sociologists of religion Robert W. Balch, James Taylor, David Bromley, and Anson Shupe have all offered various forms of active conversion models. Balch and Taylor’s approach highlights seekerhood, or “conversion careers” during which individuals try out different religious approaches.³⁸ Bromley and Shupe have generally focused on people who make a decision to convert within the context of community.³⁹ All of them understand individuals as driving their own conversions. They see conversion as an active process during which a person converts himself or herself within a social setting. As such, they look to conversion as a long process that entails give-and-take from both convert and the group into which he or she converts.

One of the best examples of the active model of foodway conversion to locavorism is Jessica. Jessica described her food trajectory as “a long process” beginning with “typical Midwestern” eating practices and culminating several decades later in a locavore practice. After college Jessica sought a job at a living history farm and learned about historical cooking practices, which led her to take another job in museum education teaching about foodways and cooking. Several years after that, she moved to an eclectic southern college town, where she discovered farmers markets and “learned all about local food.” Later that decade she relocated to New England, joined a gardening community, and learned about the heirloom-vegetable and seed-saver movements. There Jessica again worked on a living history farm and taught children how to do eighteenth-century hearth cooking. Eventually she moved to North Carolina, where she became interested in rare local breeds of rice, traditional southern food-ways, and biodiversity. She also joined the Slow Food movement—an international group focused on local and intentional eating—and attended conferences sponsored by that group. “It just evolved,” Jessica explained of her foodway choices. “It is a many layered social side, shared, slow, and [based on] community.” In telling her oral history Jessica repeatedly used words like “process,” “experiment,” and “learning.”40

Among vegetarians the active model is also strong. Larry described his process as “a philosophical investigation, not an immediate change.” Larry became involved in vegetarianism in college, the same time that he also began questioning his religious and political upbringing. He initially considered becoming vegetarian after reading Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, which led him to “look more into it, read more and more.” Six months later he bought a package of vegetable burgers and “decided that [he] would either become vegetarian if they were good, or live as a hypocrite [if they were bad.]” At first Larry continued to eat fish, but eventually he decided that he should avoid that as well for ethical reasons. More recently Larry had become vegan after reading about “ethical, health, and environmental reasons [to do so].” He explained that “intellectual honesty is important to [him]” and that he “couldn’t deal with the unresolved cognitive dissonance” between his readings and practices. Unlike Jessica, Larry avoided food-based groups or communities. “They’re too New Age,” he explained. “Rationalism is the most important. I would change my mind if presented with a convincing argument.”⁴¹

Both Jessica and Larry exemplify active conversions to these quasi-religious foodways. Both saw their experiences as processes rather than moments and understood themselves as active agents choosing between different options. Larry had obviously analyzed his own experience, offering psychological and intellectual insights about the nature of his choices. His reference to the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance was not unusual. Several locavores and vegetarians also mentioned their experiences as predicated on exploring and resolving their cognitive dissonance, a remarkably self-reflective observation that is less surprising when one notes that all the individuals with whom I talked were college educated, and many had graduate degrees. Both of these quasi religions are most predominant among middle- and upper-class Americans, so awareness of psychological theories is not surprising.

Balch and Taylor emphasized the idea of “seekerhood” in their study of religious conversion, and this description seems apt when applied to the quasi-religious conversions of locavores and vegetarians. One locavore described his experience as “a journey.”42 Another called it “an evolution” spurred on by reading, experimentation with living in an intentional community, and her evolving sociopolitical views.⁴³ A vegetarian noted that her own ten-year experimentation with veganism and then vegetarianism resulted from her “obsession with purity” that she constantly balanced with “pragmatism and exceptions.”⁴⁴ The reasons for these converts’ seekerhoods varied, but all undertook intentional paths of experimentation, reading, study, cooking, or alternative living arrangements in order to discover what they considered the best foodway for them.

Like the foodway converts who underwent more passive processes, the active converts recognized religious conversion as apropos of their own experiences. (The one exception was a woman who hated religion and anything smacking of religion.) One locavore who had actually converted religions as well as foodways had an “a-ha moment” when I asked her about this possibility. “Oh yeah, it is parallel to my religious conversion! I am a pathfinder in both. . . . It took a long time. I had to experience it. Both conversions took a long time. But you really mean it that way,” she explained.⁴⁵ A vegan who ran a vegan cooking school even added her own evidence to the idea: “I’ve seen it happen. People have had conversion moments [in my classes].”⁴⁶ Particularly when I explained the theoretical approaches of active conversion processes, these locavores and vegetarians agreed that this was precisely what they had experienced.

Such conversations often elicited broader thoughts on the quasi-religious nature of food. The vegan cooking instructor noted that many of her new converts were “zealots and fundamentalists,” but that “faith does not equal facts.”⁴⁷ A locavore explained that growing and eating local food provided a sense of “ritual” that he imagined “primitive people” found in religion but that “modern primitives” such as himself found in food.⁴⁸ Patricia, who had also converted religions, explained that cooking and eating had “become a form of meditation and wisdom.”49 Larry, who frowned on anything nonrational, nevertheless understood food as somewhat religious, since both centered on “strong commitment.”⁵⁰ Finally, Betsy, a longtime vegetarian, used the idea of food as quasi religion as a way for her to understand her treatment of other people. “This definitely parallels my religious history,” she explained. “I’m a [religious] liberal. Don’t judge others. Do what you think is right. And I’m a foodway liberal too!”⁵¹

EXPLAINING FOODWAY CONVERSION

Looking at food as a quasi religion is helpful not only to Betsy and the other people with whom I spoke; it provides real analytic traction to explain how and why people adopt new foodways. Without the theoretical insights provided by the study of religious conversion it is difficult to study how and why people become vegetarians and locavores, but with the help of such approaches, scholars can begin to understand the processes. Becoming a vegetarian or locavore is very much akin to a religious conversion, and this is because vegetarianism and locavorism are very much akin to religion.

This essay began by noting examples of people who call food, food-ways, and eating choices their religions. I then asked why this is important, and what it shows. Food as quasi religion demonstrates the way in which eating choices and alternative foodways offer practitioners new ways to root their identities, practices, and choices in systems that appeal to something greater than mere personal choices. Contemporary eaters in the West have become alienated from food, and many experience anxiety because of that alienation. Like religious beliefs, practices, and membership in religious communities, beliefs, practices, and communities based on food help assuage such anxiety and root people in space and society.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Do you think that foodways like vegetarianism or locavorism are similar to religions? Why or why not?

2. How do different ways of defining or understanding religion affect our way of looking at food practices as akin to religion?

3. What sort of other food rituals and practices are comparable to religious practices? Why is this so?

4. What other ways are there of understanding conversion, and how might they help you understand people changing between foodways?

NOTES

The author wishes to thank the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, which provided him with a research fellowship that made this project possible.

1. Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture (Richmondville, N.Y.: Left to Write Press, 2010), 267.

2. Academics have many ways of defining religion, and by some definitions what I call quasi religions would be real religions. Here I use the terms in the sense of their common everyday usage, the way that people outside of colleges and universities talk about them.

3. David Chidester, Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 136.

4. Gary Laderman, Sacred Matters: Celebrity Worship, Sexual Ecstasies, the Living Dead, and Other Signs of Religious Life in the United States (New York: New Press, 2010), xiv.

5. Vegetarian Resource Group, “How Many Vegetarians Are There?” http://www.vrg.org/press/2009poll.htm.

6. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Collected Works ed. (London: Routledge, 1996), 2.

7. Sharon K. Yntema and Christine H. Beard, New Vegetarian Baby (Ithaca: McBooks, 2000), 244.

8. There are of course other ways of defining religion. See the conclusion of this chapter for a consideration of how studies such as this one actually challenge our definitions and assumptions about the nature of religion.

9. Alan Beardsworth, “The Management of Food Ambivalence: Erosion and Reconstruction?” in Eating Agendas: Food and Nutrition as Social Problems, ed. Donna Maurer and Jeffrey Sobal (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995), 120.

10. Alissa Herbaly Coons, “Tasting the (Animal) Kingdom,” in The Spirit of Food: Thirty-Four Writers on Feasting and Fasting toward God, ed. Leslie Leyland Fields (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2010), 89, 90, 95.

11. Jeffrey Haydu and David Kadanoff, “Political Consumerism, New and Old,” paper presented at the American Sociology Association Comparative and Historical Sociology Section Mini-Conference: Comparing Past and Present, Berkeley, 2009, 21.

12. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006), 4–9; also 295–96.

13. Ibid., 240–42.

14. Todd S. Purdum, “High Priest of the Pasture,” New York Times, May 1, 2005.

15. Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 407–8, 411.

16. Sigmund Freud, Future of an Illusion, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 20.

17. Rodney Stark and Rodger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

18. Pierre Bourdieu, “Legitimation and Structured Interests in Weber’s Sociology of Religion,” in Max Weber, Rationality, and Modernity, ed. Scott Lash and Sam Whimster (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 126.

19. “Field” is a technical term for Bourdieu. For more on Bourdieu’s approach to religion, see Terry Rey, Bourdieu on Religion: Imposing Faith and Legitimacy (London: Equinox, 2007).

20. Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp, and Camille Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 347.

21. Ibid., 67–68.

22. Ibid., 131.

23. Chad Lavin, “The Year of Eating Politically,” Theory & Event 12, no. 2 (2009): 4, 6.

24. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. William R. Trask (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1959) 20–67; and Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 141–66.

25. Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 82.

26. James T. Richardson, “The Active vs. Passive Convert: Paradigm Conflict in Conversion/Recruitment Research,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 24, no. 2 (1985).

27. John Lofland and Rodney Stark, “Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective,” American Sociological Review 30, no. 6 (1965).

28. John Lofland, ““Becoming a World Saver” Revisited,” in Conversion Careers: In and out of New Religions, ed. James T. Richardson (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1978), 874.

29. Madeline (pseud.), oral history interview with author, July 20, 2009.

30. Gillian (pseud.), oral history interview with author, July 3, 2009.

31. Harriet (pseud.), oral history interview with author, July 10, 2009.

32. Ronald (pseud.), oral history interview with author, July 25, 2009.

33. Charley (pseud.), oral history interview with author, June 24, 2009.

34. Isabelle (pseud.), oral history interview with author, July 10, 2009.

35. Harriet (pseud.).

36. Madeline (pseud.), Gillian (pseud.).

37. Gillian (pseud.).

38. Robert W. Balch and David Taylor, “Salvation in a UFO,” Psychology Today 10, no. 5 (1976); and Robert W. Balch and David Taylor, “Seekers and Saucers: The Role of the Cultic Milieu in Joining a UFO Cult,” American Behavioral Scientist 20, no. 6 (1977).

39. David G. Bromley and Anson D. Shupe, Jr., “‘Just a Few Years Seem Like a Lifetime’: A Role Theory Approach to Participation in Religious Movements,” in Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Change, ed. Louis Kriesberg (Greenwich, Conn.: Jai, 1979).

40. Jessica (pseud.), oral history interview with author, July 11, 2009.

41. Larry (pseud.), oral history interview with author, July 20, 2009.

42. Ronald (pseud.).

43. Olivia (pseud.), oral history interview with author, July 23, 2009.

44. Emily (pseud.), oral history interview with author, June 29, 2009.

45. Patricia (pseud.), oral history interview with author, July 23, 2009.

46. Fran (pseud.), oral history interview with author, July 2, 2009.

47. Ibid.

48. Ken (pseud.), oral history interview with author, July 17, 2009.

49. Patricia (pseud.).

50. Larry (pseud.).

51. Betsy (pseud.), oral history interview with author, June 14, 2009.

RECOMMENDED READING

Beardsworth, Alan. Sociology on the Menu: An Invitation to the Study of Food and Society. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Grumett, David, and Rachel Muers. Theology on the Menu: Asceticism, Meat and the Christian Diet. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Kingsolver, Barbara, Steven L. Hopp, and Camille Kingsolver. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006.