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Key points
- A relatively common–yet perhaps incorrect–hypothesis is that food practices are merely about staying healthy.
- Food is highly symbolic and often important in religion. It can symbolize a group’s shared history.
- Looking at food and eating can teach about religion. It can also be telling about social status and hierarchy.
I had the good fortune in graduate school to work with Professor Paul Rozin, who has done more to help us understand the biological, psychological, and cultural influences on our eating behavior than anyone in history. Nonetheless, it took me until this year to finally publish an article percolating in my mind for years. I guess it took years for all these ideas to gel, and I didn’t want to publish them half-baked.
The article is called You Can Learn a Lot About Religion from Food, published in Current Opinion in Psychology, in a special issue on religion, co-edited with my friend Vassilis Saroglou, the eminent cross-cultural psychologist of religion, at the Catholic University in Brussels, Belgium. (You really should check out that whole special issue.)
It has a set of amazing articles about psychology and religion. My article says that looking at religions’ food practices can teach broad lessons about religion in general.
Does Religion Help You Eat Healthily?
First, I want to discuss a relatively common–yet perhaps incorrect–hypothesis that food practices are merely about staying healthy. A lot of people believe that religions ban certain food products to protect people from disease. The most famous example is probably that Jews and Muslims don’t eat pork. Or the fact that Muslims cannot drink alcohol, but Jews can. A lot of people think these old, Middle Eastern religions prohibit pork because of the threat of trichinosis–though, as has long been pointed out, this would hardly explain the range of food restrictions in the Hebrew bible, which also prohibit ostriches, ravens, and ants–but not turkeys, or locusts.
Our ASU grad student Alexandra Wormley has taken the most rigorous look ever at disease threat and religious food taboos. She has largely found no relationship; religious food taboos are no more likely close to the equator (where there are more pathogens) than farther from it.
Symbolic Foods
Instead of pointing mainly to disease, I argue that foods are often highly symbolic and seen in essentialist ways. Foods, in some religious people’s beliefs, become the body of God. Foods can also symbolize the group’s shared history, as when Jews eat matzo on Passover to remind them of the exodus from Egyptian slavery.
Duty to God
Food can also remind us that we need to obey God. If Jews or Muslims are not avoiding pork to avoid disease, maybe they are simply doing it because they think it’s their religious duty: God said so. Some religions emphasize duty more than others (for some Christians, Christianity, for example, may emphasize emulating God out of love, more than a duty to obey). Food could be a tasty inroad to investigate this psychological stance people take toward their religions.
Social Food
Finally, food can tell you a lot about religion and the social world. In Hindu India, who cooks for whom (e.g., women cooking for men) is telling about social status and hierarchy, which are key concepts in that culture. Studying food can thus tell you how a religion sees the world.
Psychologists Should Digest What Food Can Teach About Religion
As I claim in the dessert section of my article, psychologists don’t think enough about how rich of a domain of life food is to understand people in general. I believe this is even more true when it comes to religion. Psychologists should take some time to chew over and digest this interesting area of life.
