Religion and Food Unit

This Group provides an opportunity for scholars to engage in the intersection of religion and food, foodways, and food ethics. We are interested in examining these topics across broad geographical areas, religious traditions, and historical eras. We seek papers investigating practices and beliefs related to food, drink, fasting, the production of food, the ethics of production and consumption, or on any aspect of religiously influenced foodways.

As always, we welcome general proposals on the topic of religion and food.

Mindful of the Annual Meeting theme on violence, non-violence, and the margin, we invite papers that consider religion and food within that context, for example sacrifice, harm, healing, and the prevention of harm. Papers addressing our location in California, and more broadly the Pacific and the borderlands, are also topically welcome.

We welcome papers on the topic of transformations in food practices, such as food substitutions or replacements.

For a possible co-sponsorship with the Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection Unit, we welcome papers on the sexual and religious politics of meat, food porn, food as resilience and nourishment in the face of violence and marginalization, and food in relation to embodied humans and an embodied ecological Earth.

For a possible co-sponsored session with the Religion and Ecology Unit: to respond to the overall meeting call, we welcome papers that consider in/justice and non/violence in human-made food systems linked to particular ecological territory. Examples might address extractivist economies and extractivist logic in various spaces for food, people, and land, relevant to resource conflict and food security in climate weirding, indigenous people and traditional ecological knowledge, variations in animal agriculture, and unjust working conditions among food producers: farmers, migrant workers, etc. We encourage papers offering critical-constructive work to both understand concerns and address them, intellectually and practically, through, for example, enabling religious/ethical efforts to reframe, redirect, restore, replenish, renew, strengthen, or rebuild communities and the living world at the intersection of food, environment, and religion.