You can learn a lot about religion from food

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Highlights

  • Religions have a lot of rules about food and fasting, such as what foods are acceptable for which people to eat, and when.

  • Food practices can provide insight into religion, such as what it means to obey God, and the social order and worldview.

  • Thinking about religious food practices can generate testable psychological hypotheses, such as about class, hierarchy, and sex distinctions.

  • Food practices can aid theorizing about the evolution of religious cultures, and group and individual differences.

Religions’ food practices can illustrate a lot about religions, and can raise new research questions. I will give examples of ways in which religious food practices are reflections of broader religious ideals. Foods contain essences and are religiously symbolic; foods are a window into how people understand the necessity to obey God; food practices relate to health outcomes; and food practices reflect and inculcate social structures and worldviews. The article will go on to consider some broader questions raised including the origins and cultural evolution of food rules, and how food practices relate to group differences and individual differences.

Section snippets

Foods as sacred: essence, divinity, and religious symbolism

There are multiple possible versions of food having sacred significance. Meigs [1] explicated the rules regarding food among the Hua of Papua, New Guinea. The central notion has to do with nu, essence, which is transferred when touching and preparing food. Thus the Hua have an elaborate set of rules about who can prepare food for whom, and who can eat what foods. An example is that mature, initiated males cannot eat leafy green vegetables that were picked by their real or classificatory wives

Food and obedience to God

Certain religions seem to emphasize the notion of obedience to God (Judaism and Islam), The word ‘Islam’, indeed, refers to submission to God’s will. And particularly in traditional forms of Judaism, there is an emphasis on obeying God, and following tradition out of a sense of duty [5]. Other religions might be more comfortable with language like emulating God’s example, out of love and gratitude for God (Christianity). Of course these are not mutually exclusive.

Food may be an especially

Food and health

Many speculate that Jewish and Muslim food taboos have other functions. Given human omniverousness, the evolution of human cultures had the problem to figure out which foods were safe and not [9,10]. Many speculate that pork taboos were simply a response to the danger of trichinosis. Some modern Jews or Muslims choose to eat pork since this danger has largely abated, while others continue to adhere out of obedience to God and/or respect for tradition.

Those who adhere to religious food practices

Food, social structures, and worldview

Examining food can provide insights into how people see social structures. In Hinduism, social precedence in the food domain is based on age and sex, with primacy going to older and male members of the hearth group. Females cook for men, signaling the subordination of women to men. The husband’s relatives always rank higher than the wife’s relatives. Just by knowing the order in which people are served food, one can construct an exact map of the hierarchy of familial relationships. Outside the

Origins and cultural evolution of religious food rules

Food practices provide an interesting domain to think about how religions have been shaped at different levels of analysis by personal motivations, and by cultural and ecological factors [27••,28]. One proposal is that Hinduism and Judaism have more food rules than many other religions because both of these are religions of descent, in which religious membership is passed down by virtue of birth [29]. Perhaps there is something about looking to biological relatedness that attunes people to

Conclusion

There is not enough attention to food in psychology in general [36••]. As has been argued with regard to food and culture, studying food can provide deep insight into culture, and highlight how influences are bidirectional [37••]. The same can be said about food and religion. This article hopes to show a few ways in which studying food could enrich our understanding of religion and of individual and group differences in broad ways.

Conflict of interest statement

Author is also guest editor of the volume.

Paul Rozin and Jordan Moon provided comments on the manuscript.

Writing of the manuscript was supported by a grant from the US Army Research Institute.

Writing of this article was supported by Army Research Institute grant #W911NF-17-1-0175, ‘Broadening our View of Culture’. Thanks to Jordan Moon and Paul Rozin for comments on the paper.

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:

  • • of special interest

  • •• of outstanding interest

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