I "met" Philip Tite years ago when he was a student at Wilfrid Laurier and I was a faculty person at Hobart and William Smith Colleges appearing via videoconference (yes, it was well pre-Skype) in a class he was taking. My role: discuss Mary Daly. And voila -- a friendship was born. We met in person because he saw me wandering a reception or ballroom or something at the American Academy of Religion a few years later (at most) and . . . we have stayed in touch ever since. Phil is author of multiple books (including: ) and is currently Affiliate Lecturer at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle). He is author of multiple books including Conceiving Peace and Violence: A New Testament Legacy (2004), The Apocryphal Epistle to the Laodiceans (2012), and editor with Bryan Rennie of Religion, Terror and Violence (2008, truth in advertising -- I have a bit part in the book!). He is, and he is indeed my friend, thoughtful in both senses of the word and very good at the act of friendship.
Here is an interview with him, and I can say this: the most fun in ages tweaking this and adding links! Hurrah.
Bibliochef: So, I have known you for what seems like decades, and somehow I did not know that you were interested in food. I learned it in part by seeing your food comments on FB and . . . Could you say how that came about?
Phil: Ah, great to see I can still surprise my friends! Yes, we’ve known each other for ages and I’ve long admired you as both an academic colleague and a friend. It’s nice to see that we are both foodies! Food really is wonderful, not only because it meets our physical need for nutrition, but also because of its broader cultural impact on who we are and how we understand the world around us. For myself, the journey into food likely goes back to my graduate days at Wilfrid Laurier University. I was so afraid of cooking that when it was my turn to supply a snack for a class session, I was convinced that everyone was going to die horribly after eating what I had made (I think it was a soufflé). I had never cooked for another person (when I wanted to learn to cook, my mother would swoosh me out of the kitchen so she could get dinner ready). But my classmates (and even our professor, Ron Grimes) survived and even seemed to like the dish. I learned an important lesson: one of the greatest stumbling blocks for a cook is simply being afraid. We need to realize that cooking is always experimental and that means that a flop is okay. Fear is always our worst enemy.
But it was really when I was a doctoral student that I really fell in love with cooking. My then life partner, Colleen, is a real foodie. Her brother is even an amazing chef here in Seattle. We used to love cooking together, often taking turns cooking and reading classical literature to the other person. We were geeks. We were in love. And we were making awesome food. One of things I gained from that relationship was a passion for food, along with a set of culinary skills, and even a philosophy of food (i.e., experiencing food engage all five senses situated within commensal moments). We both loved to experiment with food, often using recipes only as beginning points or reservoirs for ideas. Eating out, we’d always try to brainstorm how we could adjust or change the dish and how such a change would impact the dining experience. Being lovers of ancient Rome, I still remember when she spent an entire day preparing a reconstruction of various dishes from a critical edition of Apicius that she was preparing a book review on. Through that relationship I developed a lot of confidence playing in the kitchen. And I found that I really loved cooking and playing with food and even thinking about food as part of our cultural identities.
Bibliochef: I can see the start of the answer to my next question but would love to hear more. So: how did this interest come to be connected to your intellectual – and pedagogical – passion/vocation in religious studies?
Phil: For years, I resisted linking my love of food with my love of religious studies.
Bibliochef: So did I!
Phil: Anyway, as a scholar, I’m more a social historian that focuses on textual analysis. So, food wasn’t a natural connection for me. I was also trying not to imitate one of my former professors, Michel Desjardins, who has had a huge impact on my life and my intellectual journey, but rather to be my own person in the academy. Michel had switched to “food and religion” as his main research topic years ago. I had already followed in his footsteps with the study of ancient Gnosticism and studies of religious peace/violence. And, Michel has always been a role model for me as to what a good teacher should be. So, I resisted following him into his love of food and religion. Imitation can be a great thing, but eventually we need to step out from our mentors on our own.
But my own journey eventually led me to an interest in the topic. Like I mentioned, Colleen and I loved to explore food together. And we are both academics and, to be honest, we embraced our inner geek on a very regular basis! Thus, thinking about food was just a part of my life. Back in 2010 or 2011, I did a little volunteer work for a local inner-city school, working in the after school program. I ran a weeklong thematic program that I called “pie camp”. I had about a dozen kids (roughly kindergarten to grade three) and, after first making our chef hats and aprons (they looked so adorable!), we made pies from scratch. There were glitches, flops, and successes. It was a fantastic week!
A couple years later, however, I was asked to design a course for a university core program (a general education requirement at the Jesuit university I was then teaching at) and the chair gave me complete freedom to design whatever course on whatever topic I wanted. A key goal, however, was to come up with something that would really appeal to students, especially students being forced to take a religion class that they really didn’t want to take. That evening I was browsing my collection of cookbooks while making dinner and I started flipping through my two world religions cookbooks. The thought hit me: why not use these as textbooks? It’s all cultural data and, just like other religious data, it’s open to being theorized beyond just the surface. Let’s design a course on food and religion! I found food-as-topic in religious studies ideal for shattering assumptions as to what is religion and how is religion played out (two interchangeable goals that underlie all my teaching). I’ve run the course a few times and it’s consistently been a hit with students, though, alas, I’ve not had a chance to run the course since leaving Seattle University
Bibliochef: Aha -- I now know you have done a course on religion and food. (And, I have to admit it was great to hear MIchel's name! I am out of touch. . . ) In any case, a few questions on the course; Can you describe it? Why do you think this is a worthy topic to explore? How does treating the topics together lead you (and/or your students) to see food differently? To see religion differently? Or am I wrong in these assumptions?
Phil: Sure. It was a fun course to design and, I like to think, for my students to consume. And I think your assumptions are dead on. The course description runs as follows:
This course offers a cross-cultural inquiry into the role of food within various religious traditions. Every culture shapes how food is produced, cooked, consumed, and symbolized by its members. Although often overlooked in religious studies, food serves as a focal point for the construction of religious identity as it is an integral ingredient for rituals, shaping social spaces (and roles within those spaces), social interactions both formally and informally, and a key element in marking sacred times and festivals. Human relationship with the gods or God is tied into both literal and symbolic uses of food: sacrifice, liturgical worship, martyrdom images, and even soteriological metaphors (e.g., in dietetic medicine). In this course students will be exposed to a range of ways that food, cooking, and consuming serve in establishing, shaping, and maintaining religious communities. We will explore such topics as dietary restrictions, gender roles and the demarcation of space, embedded values (as socialization process), celebration and feasting (including secularization of holidays), and the metaphoric image of food. The course is designed along key themes in order to facilitate comparative analysis of various religious traditions (e.g., Christians [Catholic, Protestant], Judaism, Jain and Buddhist traditions, Native American, Sikhism, Baha’i, and Hindu traditions). Our focus is global, both geographically and historically (though the focus is largely on modern cultures), with an emphasis on the lived, experiential role that food plays in religious communities. By taking a global perspective, it is hoped that students will develop an appreciation for the contingent, ever-changing nature of religious groups. Food plays a role in such identity negotiation, especially within diaspora communities (what is increasingly being studied as immigrant religions). Here food practices migrate with people, and, like those individuals, are transformed within their new context as they are used to preserve or modify identities. We will also look at the very construction of “religion” as a commodity, such as we find in tourist objects (e.g., cookbooks), a construction that reinforces and normalizes the “world religions” model that has dominated Western understandings of “religion” since the Enlightenment.
Let me highlight a few things that I think are central for this course and why it is so unique and valuable for students to study, especially perhaps students who are not religious studies majors.
(1) This is not a course on religious traditions in the typical sense of “the big five” or “the big eight”. [A comment from Bibliochef: this is, for those of us in religious studies, shorthand for various lists including some combination of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism, etcetera). In fact, much of what we do is to challenge the category “religion” as a self-evident category. Yet, we are not simply deconstructing “religion”, which is what I keep seeing in so many theory circles these days, but rather to look at how social actors (“people”) build and use religion in their cultural and social engagements. This course, therefore, is far more thematic than tradition oriented.
(2) Food is not treated as just an object, but rather as a site for cultural engagements and identity negotiation. A few months ago, a colleague and friend of mine from the University of Toronto, Aldea Mulhern (who is a religious studies specialist in the study of food and foodways), stressed to me that foodways encompass ideas and values along with processes and objects. It’s not just consuming food, it’s all the other stuff around food that we need to look at as well. The course was very much a cultural studies course rather than a typical “religion” course.
(3) The first time I taught this course I learned a lot about religion and food (and culture more broadly). One thing that come out for me was that there is an informal and formal use of food within religious contexts. I jokingly asked my students, “What is more important or central for people going, for example, to church on Sunday? Listening to a sermon on some obscure theological point or going for coffee and donuts afterward and complaining about the sermon?” And, to add to that question, is the recognition that often people will assign greater significance to the formal religious contexts and activities, but will really center their identities within the more informal moments of commensal interaction. Sometimes food does function (literally or metaphorically) in formal activities, such as in Buddhism, so it is worth looking at how social actors use food to define space, identity, and all that jazz.
(4) Food tourism, colonialism, and migration all came to the foreground in the study of food and religion. Again, I learn with my students—and in this course I kept learning day in and day out! How does food function in maintaining or challenging cultural self-understandings when one migrates to another place? Are stereotypes of diet more readily played out, resisted, or transformed? Does food link immigrants to both the host culture and the home culture? Is the effort to maintain such a link ironically a step in creating greater distance rather than proximity to the home culture?
Does “authentic cuisine” play a role that it wouldn’t in the host culture. For example, if I were to ask you to join me for lunch and we wanted to do Chinese, we would have particular ideas of what “authentic Chinese food” is. But if we were to qualify “authentic” as “what actual Chinese people eat”, then, as one of my students who had studied abroad in China noted, going for McDonald’s would constitute Chinese food.
And we talked about food tourism, both the tantalizing experience of food while traveling abroad and, perhaps for most of us on a more regular basis, eating “exotically” on the local level (e.g., going for Indian food at the restaurant just down the street). Exotic cultural experiences are a legacy of colonialism and a continuation of Orientalizing other cultures.
In other cases, immigrant communities would adjust foodways to fit new social and cultural contexts, yet still advancing the values that the community sees as central. We noticed this in both the langar meal among Sikh communities in Vancouver, BC and among charitable work by the Hare Krishna communities in London, England.
(5) One article we discussed looked at the question: who owns recipes and when does “plagiarism” of culture occur? Does it occur when a recipe is in print or does it occur when it is taken from people in the local cultures? Again, this is about power relationships played out through food and foodways. Food can be a site for cultural appropriation and cultural assimilation due to the negotiation of social boundaries. It’s really very fascinating.
(6) Power relationships and social roles are central in the study of food and religion, at least in my course. Gendered roles were particularly significant in our discussions, in part due to the course readings we worked through. What I gained from that was the insight that people would use food to shift centers of community power, sometimes while challenging patriarchal structures and, more often, in affirming those structures yet shifting power to kitchen from the sanctuary (i.e., the sites where “real religion” takes place). Again, food is more than food. It’s part of broader socialization processes: we learn how to be gendered and what values and behaviors are expected of use through food and things related to food. I’m reminded of Emily Bailey's wonderful study of American Victorian cookbooks and Pamela Klassen’s fascinating article on Russian Mennonite women’s use of cooking to establish authority within a patriarchal context. And let me repeat: the informality of food, I think, adds greater influence to food for religious identity than perhaps some other, more formal, aspects of a religious community (such as sacred texts, theological debates, etc.). I think the fact that with food people just do it as an everyday thing, that it becomes an inscribe part of who they are and how they see the world around them.
Bibliochef: I love the way you set up the themes in your course -- wow -- and also around restrictions, life transitions etc. Do you have a favorite theme? A favorite reading?
Phil: Thanks! As I mentioned above, I really didn’t want to teach this course along a tradition-by-tradition approach, but rather around themes. I think teaching thematically allows us to tackle more theoretical and interesting questions about religion, food, and human communities. Doing this not only helps shatter the world religions paradigm, but it also helps students see the relevance of the course beyond just the compartmentalized discipline of “religion” or a given religious tradition. And doing that both helps motivate students to learn and encourages them to think more critically about the world around them, seeing people, communities, policies, etc. in a new light and with new eyes.
My philosophy of education, as I put it on my personal website, is: Access to knowledge – Freedom to think – Empowerment to Choose. I tried to design this “Cooking Religion” course to follow that pedagogical philosophy.
As for a favorite theme or reading, that’s a tough one! Most of them were awesome to work and each time I ran the course, new themes and ideas would grab me. I guess one key theme that has resonated with me is commensality, the “eating with”. The article we read dealt with both hierarchal and egalitarian social relations through commensal moments. But it also touched on health (on the issue of obesity), comparing European and North American contexts. Often in North America we focus on healthy eating as biological or physical, whereas Europeans tend to stress social moments as part of healthy eating. As someone who sees himself as a social historian, I love that idea: we are social creatures and how we eat—in isolation or in social interactions—will shape how we are impacted through food.
Bibliochef: Nicely put. And now, for something more speculative -- you can invite anyone living or dead to a meal that you cook. And, you are unconstrained by budget. Who would you invite? On what might you dine?
Phil: That is such a tough question! Hmm… one idea is Jesus. I’d like to host the last supper and spike the punch just to see what happens. But likely I’d be bored. I think there would be other historic figures that would be more interesting. Oscar Wilde definitely. I’d love to spend an evening listening to his voice, hearing his amazing words flow as I keep refilling the wine glasses and we dine on roasted goose with a maple glaze, served with caramelized shallots and carrots (with diced dill and rosemary along with sprinkled roasted pine nuts), pickled pears, and pumpkin polenta, preceded by a rabbit noodle dish that had been slow cooking all day, with either a caramelized apple tart or rich chocolate mousse with a lovely Ontario ice wine for dessert. He’s one of the most beautiful and eccentric figures of history.
But if I were to go “ancient”, then I think I’d like to meet (someone I mentioned before) Apicius—if, that is, he even existed. I have a feeling we’d end up experimenting in the kitchen, reworking many of his collected recipes. Being a good Roman, we’d have lots of dipping sauces, with lots of lovage for seasoning, and I’d like to cook ahi for him with a delicious balsamic vinegar reduction poured on top. I might even get one of my ad hoc roasted duck recipes into his cookbook for all time! Ah, if only I could time travel, how I would change culinary history. 😊
But if I chose someone living, then I think I’d love to cook for Ina Garten as part of a larger dinner party (you’d be invited!). I love her cookbook, Barefoot in Paris: Easy French Food You Can Make at Home (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2004). I think I’d take some of her recipes, tweak them, and see what she thought of the new dish.
Bibliochef: My answer on the invite: yes! Now: You can travel anywhere in space/time for a religious event focused on food. Where/when/why?
Phil: Another tough one! Thinking about it, I think (if the legend is true) that I would love to be there when the Mughal emperor, Akbar, in the late 16th century lowered himself to the status of the common person to participate in the langar feast. What an amazing moment that must have been not only for him but for his subjects. That in this context, in this moment of commensality, through this meal, all were seen as equals—as human beings tied together through eating. I admire the four basic Sikh principles embodied in the langar: equality, hospitality, service, and charity. And seeing those principles at play in that historic moment, if the legend is true, would have been an awesome moment and a powerful comment on humankind.
Bibliochef: Ok, I had to look this one up; I had no idea what langar feast referred to! (Readers: you can click the link for some background, but do know I went further than Wikipedia and you should too!)
So: from events to texts. If you were creating a cookbook, focused on one ingredient what would it be? Why?
Phil: Hmmm… In kicking this one around, I keep coming back to basic ingredients I like to use or wish I could use. My passion for garlic (yes, I’m madly in love with garlic!), my strawberries (I grow seven kinds of strawberries on my balcony), quail eggs (I raise quail on my balcony—yeah I’m weird. 😊 ), lovage (a standard Roman seasoning now very hard to find), duck (seriously one of my favorite meats), rhubarb (I do wonderful things with rhubarb), or even beer (living on the west coast I have access to amazing beer! Wouldn’t it be cool to develop an entire cookbook on beer recipes?) all come to mind. And “fat” would be a good one, but there’s already an amazing book out there on fat (yes, fat is actually a good thing).
Yet, as I consider the option, I find myself thinking of one of my favorite scents: lavender. Lavender, rosemary, and roses are my favorite scents—and they all grow in abundance here in Seattle. But wouldn’t it be cool to learn more about different types of lavender? To figure out how to work it into sauces, drinks, teas, etc. Yes, I think that if I were to do a cookbook—a cookbook with lots of background research focused on one ingredient—it would be lavender. 😊
Bibliochef: I love the various answers here and that you rise strawberries and QUAIL!!! I have to admit as I edited and added links, I tried to imagine a dish with many of the ingredients you mentioned!
So: if you were recommending one essential gadget for everyone to own, what would it be? (I leave it ambiguous re religion or food?)
Phil: There are so many things I could list! I think of my cast iron pans, my collection of Le Creuset pots, my mixing boils, my various cutting boards (wood and bamboo), and my favorite wooden spoon (silly but true; I actually develop emotional ties to my kitchen tools). But I think that the most important thing for me is a good, well-sharpened chef’s knife. I love my knives. I have a few Mac knives, but my favorite knife is my Wüsthof chef knife. This is the most versatile of the knives and it is the one that a person (myself at least) develops the closest relationship. I used to have a Dick chef’s knife, which I think is an even better knife, but that went with Colleen. I spent a long time choosing a new knife. The key is not to select what another person likes, or even to follow the price tag (as if cost equals quality), but rather to find a knife that works for you. The chef’s knife should be an extension of your arm. Finding a knife that fits your own style of chopping or cutting is important. I tend to do a lot of rocking cuts, so my knife (an Epicurean style Wüsthof knife) is perfect for me. I remember when I bought this knife. Although I’d already made my decision, on a whim I tried a very high-end Japanese knife. It was gorgeous, but it wasn’t for me. After accidentally slicing deep into my thumb, and the store personal rushing around to stop the bleeding and find a band-aid, I realized that this was not the knife for me. Don’t get me wrong, it was an amazing knife. But I didn’t have the feel for it.
Oh, and beyond second to chef’s knife, the most important thing to have in a kitchen is a playlist of Queen music! Seriously, I love cooking and dancing to Freddie Mercury while getting tipsy. Who doesn’t?
Bibliochef: Well, that was wonderful. I may have to pursue you for the questions that I always ask everyone -- but for now -- loads of food for thought. Thanks Phil. Lovely to meet you -- again!
For a much earlier interview on Cooking with Ideas with a scholar of religion, Lynn Poland, on teaching about religion and food, click here.
