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Bloomsbury Food Library is excited to once again take part in the 2023 Oxford Food Symposium being held at St Catz College, Oxford. You will be able find us in the exhibitor hall, and we will also have a host of information and special offers available online too. Whether you will be attending in person on virtually, we look forward to seeing you there.
To celebrate the 2023 Oxford Food Symposium, we have brought together a carefully curated collection of eBook chapters, encyclopedia entries, and digitised images from across the Bloomsbury Food Library. Explore a carefully curated collection of free content with this Topic in Focus on the theme of Food Rules and Rituals.
In this chapter from Food in Memory and Imagination (2022), Amir Sayadabdi investigates the relationship between food and memory and discuss how food-based rituals—and memories and imaginations associated with them—can be central to understanding the processes by which diasporic Iranians of Aotearoa/New Zealand build and feel at home, however far away from it. Amir argues that Iranians engage in several forms of memory registers that simultaneously remediate the negative aspects of the origin home by selectively highlighting the positive aspects in order to generate a better home in the diasporic present (and as part of an aspirational future).
In this chapter from Food, Faith and Gender in South Asia (2020), Parna Sengupta consider the themes of piety, food and gender through the lens of ritual. Rituals around food – either the consumption of or abstention from – are an especially generative space to explore the blurring of activities and their ritual significance. ‘True’ rituals ensure the transformation of ordinary food and everyday practices of consumption (or abstention) into meaningful acts that become spiritually powerful. Yet, there are a myriad of other food practices (often marked as ‘ritual’) that are regularly censured by those concerned with proper religious action and a fidelity to textual tradition.
Only a few studies have given explicit consideration to the intersection of food, memory and religious ritual. David E. Sutton argues in this chapter from Remembrance of Repast (2001) that ritual is a key site where food and memory come together, but that this should not blind us to the importance of everyday contexts of memory. One must avoid the temptation to oppose ritual as the time for the symbolic and everyday activities as the time for the practical. Indeed, in many cases ritual and everyday memory are mutually reinforcing, especially in the context of prospective memory, the idea that Kalymnians plan in the present to remember food events in the future.
In the Mediterranean world in the Hellenistic and Roman period, the transformation of religious practices and beliefs “led to the formation of boundary-conscious and knowledge-based religious groups that could be called ‘religions’”. These religions were trans-locally organized and needed to create other measures than geography to mark their space. One of these measures was the development of specific ritual meals and a type of commensality, which contributed to define religious identity. In this chapter from Commensality (2015), Ingvild Sælid Gilhus explores how meals, food, and commensality were used in polemics in the Roman Empire to create religious identities and sustain boundaries between groups, with an approach informed by structuralism and anthropology.
In this chapter from Eating and Believing (2008), David Grumett argues that it evidently cannot be assumed that every rule observed in a society is religiously motivated, even if religious motivations pervade that society. Once food rules are identified as existing in actual practice, an issue thus presents itself of whether and to what extent those rules can be interpreted in specifically Christian terms. This chapter will therefore perform two tasks. It will identify and describe the food rules in one particularly striking place in Christian history, namely Celtic Ireland, drawing evidence from penitential books. It will then consider expressly the theological significance of these food rules.
If you’ve enjoyed this taster of what the Bloomsbury Food Library has to offer, why not let your librarian know about this new collection? Recommend it to your librarian here.
