OA-week at DI: Sunday’s article

The relationship between food and religion is a lived activity formed by the dynamics of both tradition and adaption. Religious commitments to food are influenced by several different factors, ranging from personal spirituality and experiences to social patterns of belonging as well as ethical, political and doctrinal convictions related to food and eating. Today, this topic is receiving increasing scholarly attention and has become a relevant focus to a broad spectrum of researchers working with different religious traditions and contemporary spiritualities.

The article of the day, selected by assistant librarian Malin Fredriksson, is:

Zeller, B. (2015). Totem and taboo in the grocery store: quasi-religious foodways in North America. Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis, 26. https://doi.org/10.30674/scripta.67444

A court case over whether veganism is a religion; a confectionary where the owner refers to wheat gluten as a taboo; a lifestyle modelling the imagined foodways and folkways of Paleolithic hominids. These intersections between religion, food, and culture demand attention, if only because they blur the borders between those three categories. Each of these ‘quasi-religious’ foodways represents a manner in which individuals living in consumer- oriented late modernity have crafted meaningful identities and social worlds with reference to absolute and transcendent meanings.