Title: Whitebread Protestants – Food & Religion in America
Author: Daniel Sack
Genre: Nonfiction/Food History
Not being any particular flavor of Christian myself, I must beg the Reading Public’s indulgence, because I’m relying on an outsider’s perspective and limited knowledge…when it comes to religion anyway. Food, now, that’s something I know a thing or two about.
Daniel Sack, himself a whitebread Protestant, has deliberately taken a narrow but deep look at the American Protestant relationship to food, from Communion wine (or not) to the churchs’ involvement in hunger politics. Church and food are inextricably intertwined in American practice, and he goes on to discuss the how and why of it in great detail.
The first essay dicusses the Communion debate, and the transition in the United States from wine in a single chalice to grape juice in individual cups. I have no idea how common one is versus the other these day, as I’m not in the habit of partaking, but anyone familiar with the temperance movement of the 1800s wll find some familiar names in this essay. This particular debate within the various churches provides an excellent example of how people can rationalize anything if they try hard enough, including the notion that Jesus lived a life informed by the values and perspectives of a white, middle-class, nineteenth-century American Protestant. (Who knew?) As for the debate around individual versus shared Communion cups, the theological implications inherent in the use of individual cups were left in the dust by my germophobia…and apparently also by the germophobia of the aforementioned white, middle-class, nineteenth-century American Protestants. Communion thus becomes an individual event, and personally, I love a good oxymoron, especially when it’s so neatly presented. It also explains how Welch’s got a commanding piece of the juice market.
Subsequent essays discuss, in similar detail, social food namely, coffee hours, potlucks, church suppers); emergency food, which describes the role of deep-rooted Protestant social responsibility and its expression in the development of soup kitchens and their successor institutions; global food, which is the analysis of hunger politics within the church; and finally, moral food, which traces the evolution of what a Christian diet really is, and the moral context of of food within it. Sylvester Graham (of Graham cracker fame) and the Kellogg brothers are mentioned in this particular, as they had a great deal to do with the nineteenth-century wave of religious vegetarianism.
The five separate essays stand alone, and each one sems thoroughly researched and well-written, and if it’s a bit academic…well, so much of what I read is that academic writing that’s engaging is much appreciated. Nothing in the book seems particularly controversial to me, but it is interesting to take a look at some of the assumptions inherent in religious practice and tease out their development over time.
So now you can relax and have some latkes!