I have known Lynn Poland since we were in graduate school -- but only recently learned that she teaches about food and religion (ethics) at Davidson College where she is in the Department of Religion. It felt like only seconds between learning that -- and asking her to do this interview. I learned a lot from our virtual conversation and know you will too!
Bibliochef: When we reconnected recently, I learned that you have been teaching courses about food and religion for some time. Can you tell us about how you came to do so –and what drew you to this topic?
Lynn: I moved to Davidson after many years of urban life. Davidson was still fairly rural then, and so I renewed my childhood passion for horses. A longish stay in England with daily walks through fields, flocks, and herds, had already rekindled an early affection for farms and farm animals, and I have always been a nature lover. At Davidson and elsewhere I’ve always taught courses on women and religion, recently under the title “Woman and the Body in the Christian Tradition.” And I’ve had for a while an ever-changing course called “Christianity and Nature.” Food touches on all of these interests. I get to be an academic and play with theories—and I love theories-- about nature, culture, gender and religion without flying off into the ether like an untethered balloon.
Bibliochef: What sort of students take your classes? What is the most surprising thing you have learned from them? (I know you ask them to explore websites connecting food and religion. Any links we should explore?)
Lynn: I have 2 different courses on food—not taught in the same year. One is a freshman seminar—a discussion and writing course for 16 students. The other is a 200 level course with 30 students that usually contains all four classes (seniors, juniors, sophomores and first years). Students who sign up usually have some interest in food, and need to satisfy the college’s one-course-in-religion requirement.
Surprises. One happy discovery was that teaching about food and religion can get students otherwise uninterested in the environment to care. There is so little most people know about how their food is produced that reading a book like Fast Food Nation or The Omnivore’s Dilemma can be transformative. (For a review of the latter on Cooking with Ideas, click here.) Industrialized food production, they learn, is not only unhealthy for them, but for animals and the earth too.
Another surprise was just how surprising it is for students to discover that religions have to do with the most basic of human experiences—besides birth, sex, food, and death, what else is there, really? (Take back birth, actually. Off the top of my head I can’t think of a single religious ritual that celebrates being born of a woman—can you?) (Bibliochef's side comment: Okay, I cannot. Can anyone reading this? Leave us a comment!)
To help students see this, I like to begin with a unit on cannibalism, looking closely at the ritualized anthropophagy of the Aztecs. Since the Aztec practice is closely tied to their cosmology (David Carrasco wrote a terrific essay on them called “Cosmic Jaws: We Eat the Gods and the Gods Eat Us”), the topic is a great way to introduce students to some of the many roles religion plays in what, when, where, why, and how we eat.
Links: food and religion links there are in vast quantity. A memorable set resulted from the Google search question “Christian Diet.” I had no idea God could help one shed pounds until I saw these: www.God4me.com/weightloss; www.WeightLossGodsWay.com; www.weighdown.com
Bibliochef: Your course descriptions say that your focus is Judaism and Christianity (though you include some material on Hinduism and Buddhism, on occasion). Can you say why? And what you see as major connections/differences between these?
Lynn: I stick to Judaism and Christianity because my expertise has limits! I’m gradually learning more about Islam and Asian religions and so I add bits here and there. There are certainly food related ideas and practices that run through most traditions—fasting, feasting, sacrifice, gratitude, for example. There are also huge differences that nevertheless invite intriguing comparisons. For instance, we read some tales about the Buddha in his previous lives, where no matter what his station in life, he demonstrates supreme virtue. In a number of the stories he himself becomes food for needy others—generously hacking off a body part, or providing himself altogether. While the Buddha is not worshipped as a god, it’s still interesting to compare his deeds to those of Jesus Christ: take, eat, this is my body broken for you. My students also think again of Aztec cannibalism, where the captive to be eaten undergoes a lengthy process through which he becomes divine before he is consumed.
Bibliochef: Your courses include readings from both the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the New Testament. Can you reflect on why you include biblical texts? I am particularly interested in your inclusion of readings from Leviticus, since it is this book of the Bible that is often marshaled these days to limit some people’s rights – but of course the texts are important to the making of various religious communities.
Lynn: After we discuss cannibalism, we move to ancient Israelite dietary restrictions, which are, arguably, also connected to their creation myths. The creation story in Genesis 1-2, for instance, carefully organizes chaos into categories like water/dry land, light/dark, and earth, water, and heavens. Foods that are kosher fit neatly into these categories—sea creatures have fins, residents of the heavens have wings, and earth creatures have legs. Sea creatures with legs such as shrimp are therefore unclean, prohibited. These regulations are listed in Leviticus, along with lots of other purity laws—rules pertaining to what goes in and what comes out of the human body. I also like to read the instructions for sacrifice at the beginning of Leviticus—all about animals, blood, and power. I think that the way we read the texts proscribes the kind of proof-texting to which you refer. Since we also read Elizabeth Ehrlich’s Miriam’s Kitchen, a contemporary memoir about becoming kosher, students get a sense of how traditions “must change to stay the same.” (Bibliochef's side note: See here for a NY Times Review of Ehrlich's book.) In other words, Leviticus is ancient, and one cannot directly “apply” it to the present.
One of the startling results in early Christianity is that this young religion, whose first followers were Jews, comes to reject the practice of keeping kosher. In an article in The Christian Century, Garret Keizer noted that this form of Christian “freedom” succeeded only too well, in that most Christians today—at least Protestant Christians—completely disassociate religion and food. The only thing bodily still considered to be in the religious realm is sexuality. This is a great loss. One of my hopes for the course is that by seeing some of the more ancient ways that food was once vital to religion—the importance of table fellowship in early Christian communities, for example--students will begin to re-imagine their own food practices as sacred.
Bibliochef: One of the big challenges on college campuses these days is the epidemic of eating disorders – which some times involve not eating and certainly is gendered in particular ways. Your courses look at not eating – aka fasting –in religious traditions from various perspectives. Can you talk some about this sort of religious practice and what you make of them?
Lynn: You are certainly right about eating disorders on campus.
In the courses I teach, we read and discuss a number of different essays in an effort to look at both eating disorders and religious fasting from several perspectives. Carolyn Walker Bynum’s work on medieval women mystics and their food/fasting behaviors is important to me, and for the course. In Holy Feast and Holy Fast Bynum explores why, in the late medieval period, food-related miracles increased exponentially, and why they occurred mostly to women. Her answers are too complex to say much about here, but one of her insights is especially pertinent: for these women, suffering was religiously significant because through it they felt united with Christ’s suffering. They therefore sometimes prayed for the “gift” of illness; sometimes they ate only Christ, through the Eucharist; sometimes, while eating little or nothing themselves, they became food, by serving it to others. Contemporary eating disorders are often discussed as a question of control, of controlling the one thing—eating—one may feel one can control. While there is an element of this among the medieval women too, by connecting it to the broader issue of suffering Bynum shows how in their historical context, where there frequently may be not be enough to eat, food is about human vulnerability even more than control. We read in juxtaposition to Bynum a haunting contemporary piece called “Grateful,” in which the hospitalized, anorectic speaker ironically inverts Bynum’s saints. Not to need is for the speaker the highest spiritual state. Commenting on the “clear liquid in its transparent plastic tube” that sustains her, she says, “This is how the angels feed. Pure.” The students see, I hope, two remarkably different forms of spiritual practice.
Bibliochef: Aha. I will have to look for "grateful"! On an unrelated note, I have been struck by the representation of the American South in various foodie magazines lately, with the emphasis on Edna Lewis (is that her name?), an African American Southerner who wrote cookbooks. Based on the readings you include in your courses (wow), I wonder if you might comment on the relation of food, religion and the American South and/or matters of race, food and religion?
Lynn: Thanks for introducing me to Edna Lewis! I don’t do much with this topic in my courses. We read one essay arguing that Barbecue has a sacramental, even Eucharistic, function in the South, combining regionalism, folkways and religion. The students never buy the argument but they all like to talk about their own regions’ distinctive foods.
Bibliochef: Your Spring 2007 course focused on ethics and food and included student projects on specific topics. Can you tell us a bit about their projects and what students seemed to learn about ethics through their exploration of them?
Lynn: One year I tried a group project about genetically modified foods. Students chose different topics under this umbrella, from golden rice to the science of GMO. Those who focused on a specific geographical area could look at public policy, at all sides of the debate, and at the effect of whatever GMO scheme they studied on people of different social classes. In 2007 students chose topics emerging from the Omnivore’s Dilemma, which also led students to politics, public policy, and human welfare. To learn that it takes around 50 gallons of oil per acre (some estimates are higher) to raise an acre of industrial corn, for example—to power the machines, create the pesticides, insecticides, and fertilizer, to harvest, dry, ship and store the corn—certainly provides food for thought. These practices raise ethical questions—and for me, ultimately religious questions, about what it means to live a good life and to love one’s neighbor.
Bibliochef: I am jealous of the opportunity you –and your students – had to hear Alice Waters speak. Seeing what to me is the ultimate fantasy on your syllabus leads me to ask what you might do – who you might invite (living or dead, since this is a fantasy!), what field trips might you imagine – for your courses on food and religion if you had an unlimited budget?
Lynn: We would go to the biannual Slow Food International event: 5000 producers are invited to Terra Madre in Turin every two-years, from Korean fisher folk and Mongolian shepherds to Mexican farmers. Its purpose is to thank them for the work they do, and to encourage them to maintain their traditions and knowledge. A huge fundraising effort enables many to attend.
Then, perhaps, to the Feast of the Virgin in the North End of Boston.
Bibliochef: Wow. Those are great choices. I'd love to do both of those too! So, do you cook? If so, are you willing to share a favorite recipe?
Lynn: I do like to cook, although I am for the most part still tied to cookbooks. One thing I can cook without a book, though, is a favorite, easy summer meal. Marinate in olive oil chopped tomatoes, garlic, basil, salt and pepper, olives, and a soft cheese—brie, feta, fontina. Later, cook pasta and mix it into the other ingredients. The heat melts the cheese and it is delicious.
Bibliochef: Thanks. One of the themes of Cooking with Ideas has to do with women’s lives and/or feminism. How do you see this theme as relevant?
Lynn: Some of my earlier replies address this. I would add as a kind of summary statement that all positive valuing of bodies—men and women’s bodies, other animals’ bodies, the earth’s body—is congruent with, and partly a result of, feminism. The stereotypical Western gendering of nature as female and culture (reason, spirit) as male is subverted when one values and feels responsible for the care of all bodies. Mortality, vulnerability, and thus dependence on others characterize all living things.
Bibliochef: And now for some of the questions I ask all of the people I “speak” with! What’s the absolutely best meal you have ever had? What made it the best meal?
Lynn: I’ve had “the best meal I’ve ever eaten” many times. They were best not only because of the food but because they were in wonderful environments with beloved friends.
Bibliochef: What music, films, books related to food would you recommend? Why? (These could be about food and religion or otherwise!)
Lynn: There are so many—and the list of books and films is growing fast right now. I imagine my choices are already on your readers’ lists. I’ll list only a few films, two of which are classic food films: “Like Water for Chocolate” and “Babette’s Feast”. “King Corn” is a recently released documentary by and about two recent college grads who move to Iowa to grow an acre of corn. Along the way they, and the viewer, learn almost everything there is to know about planting and harvesting the stuff as well as where all the corn goes.
Books—everything by Michael Pollan. I also love cookbooks—lately I’ve been enjoying Deborah Madison’s farmer’s market cookbook and collections of Elizabeth David’s writings about French and Italian food.
Music—he could eat no fat and she could eat no lean? I’ve noticed that a lot of bands lately have food names: Smashing Pumpkins, for example. A local group is called “Poultry in Motion”.
Bibliochef: So, what do you eat for comfort food?
Lynn: Warm apple crisp.
Bibliochef: Have you ever been to the Finger Lakes region? If so, do you have a favorite restaurant there? If not, what restaurant do you recommend anywhere on the planet?
Lynn: No, I have not been to the Finger Lakes. On the planet: Auberge de l’Abbaye de Hambye. In Normandy, overlooking a river. A few bedrooms upstairs. Perfect.
Bibliochef: What am I not asking that I should? What question have you never been asked that you have always wanted to be asked? What's your answer?
Lynn: A colleague and I argue about whether food is, a metaphor for sex or vice versa. “I love you so much I could eat you up.” What do you and your readers think?
Bibliochef: Ok, hmmmmm. Readers?
