Religion and Food in North America: Consumption, Race, Religion

Elaborate gelatin constructions of fruits and vegetables congealed in copper molds, the American Jell-O salad decorated tables for decades. This paper argues for a refiguring of the gelatin salad as not merely infamous midcentury food icon but, rather, as an articulation of white femininity, the intimate imperial, and Modernism’s project of bodily and racial control. In so doing, it brings critical food studies and design studies to trouble the nonfoodness of gelatin salads and the sensorial work that advertisers made them do in the production of the modern, scientific, Protestant Secular. What Jell-O salads do, I argue, is as much about a practice of consumption—an act of eating pure foods and becoming pure, mind and body—as it is a visual practice of ordering, a Wardian case of scientific logic and modern housewifery against the foodways and sensory practices of immigrants at the end of the Progressive Era.

This paper examines the entrepreneurial development of "purpose driven food," tracing its origins to the evangelical business models promoted by celebrity pastor Rick Warren and showing how it is connected to the biotech industry and its attempts to capture new markets for healthy eating. The paper argues that American evangelicalism plays a key role in sanctifying biotech as good science that feeds the world, even as many religious Americans resist corporate control over the food system. In doing so, it shows the continued significance of religion to influence health and nutrition policy in the public sphere in the United States.

This essay examines how something as subtle as a food label can work to uphold and legitimate settler colonialism. Through engaging various layers of reading a food label, I illustrate how food labels can convey authority, ambiguity, and even deception; shape our experiences and identities; and create worlds and frameworks through what they include and what they exclude, what they reveal and what they conceal. I argue that food labels can erase a violent, ongoing settler colonial history, particularly through claims of locality and wholesomeness. Moreover, food labels not only reinforce dominant narratives of White land possession and settler indigeneity but do so in an inconspicuous way through our everyday, unconscious, embodied encounters with these subtle texts, re/orienting us to the invisible grammar of settler colonial society.