Browsing by Subject "Food studies"

“American Manna: Religious Responses to the American Industrial Food System” is an investigation of the religious complexity present in religious food reform movements. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at four field sites. These field sites are a Jewish organic vegetable farm where the farmers begin their days with meditation, a Christian raw vegan diet center run by Messianic Jews, a Christian family that raises their cattle on pastures and sends them to a halal processing plant for slaughter, and a Jewish farm where Christian and Buddhist farm staff helped to implement shmita, the biblical agricultural sabbatical year.

The religious people of America do not exist in neatly bound silos, so in my research I move with the religious people to the spaces that are less clearly defined as “Christian” or “Jewish.” I study religious food reformers within the framework of what I have termed “free-range religion” because they organize in groups outside the traditional religious organizational structures. My argument regarding free-range religion has three parts. I show that (1) perceived injustices within the American industrial food system have motivated some religious people to take action; (2) that when they do, they direct their efforts against the American food industry, and tend to do so outside traditional religious institutions; and finally, (3) in creating alternatives to the American food industry, religious people engage in inter-religious and extra-religious activism.

Chapter 1 serves as the introduction, literature review, and methodology overview. Chapter 2 focuses on the food-centered Judaism at the Adamah Environmental Fellowship at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, CT. In Chapter 3, I discuss the Hallelujah Diet as prescriptive literature and as it is put into practice at the Hallelujah Diet Retreat Center in Lake Lure, NC. Chapter 4 follows cows as they move from the grassy hills of Baldwin Family Farms in Yanceyville, NC to the meat counter at Whole Foods Markets. In Chapter 5, I consider the shmita year, the biblical agricultural sabbatical practice that was reimagined and implemented at Pearlstone Center in Baltimore, MD during 2014-2015. Chapter 6 will conclude this dissertation with a discussion of where religious food reform has been, where it is now, and a glimpse of what the future holds.

On a planet with shrinking natural resources and a rising population, who will have enough to eat? This research studies the people and policies involved in an emergent citywide system of food waste recuperation in the E.U.’s capital of Brussels. It incorporates those who recirculate food—such as volunteers at the city’s largest food bank; workers at a culinary skills-training program; and activists in a soup kitchen with "zero food waste" weekly pop-up restaurant. It also includes those who benefit from their efforts—such as the E.U.'s growing immigrant and refugee population, some of whom strive to become citizens while others pass through on their way to larger dreams of European belonging.

The same policy drives these efforts, but distinct ethical frameworks guide them. Reflecting the city’s Catholic history, traditional hospitality is embodied in acts of sharing food—which adherents believe builds communities, brings individuals closer to God, and reinforces the belief that God will provide. Volunteers at the food bank strongly express this ethic. Elsewhere, acts of “giving back” become ways to recruit new citizens, expressing neoliberal politics that locate an ethic of caring within capitalism. For example, a job-training program is a restaurant that runs on donated food and offers internships to welfare recipients so that they might join the local labor force one day. Finally, an N.G.O. runs a social inclusion program aimed at recuperating not only abandoned food but also abandoned urban spaces. In this case, a mobile soup kitchen aims to revitalize urban blight through feeding the city’s hungriest residents—giving sustenance by means of scrappy collaborations between volunteers, citizens, and immigrants.

Through ethnographic observation, this dissertation explores sharing food as a way of caring for people that reflects moral beliefs about value and worthiness, both of food as well as of people. It asks: How do obligations of care square with social obligations that match cast-off food with cast-out humans?

“Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in Nineteenth-Century America” examines how daily practices of food production and distribution shaped the development of New Orleans’ public culture in the long nineteenth century, from the colonial era through the mid-twentieth century. During this period, New Orleans’ vendors labored in the streets of diverse neighborhoods where they did more than sell a vital commodity. As “Nourishing Networks” demonstrates, the food economy provided the disenfranchised—people of color, women, and recent migrants—a means to connect themselves to the public culture of the city, despite legal prohibitions intended to keep them on the margins. Those who were legally marginalized exercised considerable influence over the city’s public culture, shaping both economic and social interactions among urban residents in the public sphere. To the vexation of some elites, these vendors helped determine what New Orleanians ate, how much it cost, and how they ate it. More than that, they shaped the cultural meanings of food. Exploring key sites of public culture including the municipal markets and their surrounding streets, the dissertation situates New Orleans’ local food culture within broader changes like slavery and abolition at the national and even international level—a perspective that places the city’s vendors at the center of a much larger transformation in Americans’ relationship to food, which was always about much more than sustenance. In fact, food became a mode through which disenfranchised Americans participated in the political culture: those without the vote claimed a voice through their role in the country’s food culture and economy.