The Centrality of Food
Within The Christian Tradition
A Review of
Food and Faith in Christian Culture.
Ken Albala and Trudy Eden, eds.
Paperback: Columbia UP, 2012.
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Reviewed by Alden Bass.
Why is fish not considered a meat during the Lenten fast? This is just one of the questions about food practices which is answered in the new collection of essays entitled Food and Faith in Christian Culture. Unlike Norman Wirzba’s recent volume by the same name, these essays survey Christian attitudes toward food in the early modern and modern eras. As Ken Albala, one of volume’s editors, observes: in the early modern period, “[f]ood…was at the core of the average person’s concept of religiosity” (44). Although the essays are quite diverse, the collection is unified by four major themes, which Trudy Eden names in her Introduction: “commensality, fasting, the sacrament, and bodily health” (5). The essays are ordered chronologically, beginning with the eating habits of fourteenth century Florentine monks and concluding with the fasting practices of contemporary English Benedictines. Despite the monastic bookends, the essays investigate practices in a wide range of Christian communities, from Greek Orthodox to Brethren in Christ, from Lutheran and Reformed groups to the bizarre sect of the Unity Society of Practical Christianity.
In the introductory essay, Albala presents an excellent summary of Christian food ideologies from the apostolic age to the present. In this essay and his later one on Reformation era ideologies, Alabala explains the premodern medical assumptions which determined fasting practices even to the present day. Until the Enlightenment dietary knowledge in western Europe relied heavily on the Galenic principle of the four humors. Certain foods promote certain bodily humors which led to either illness or health. Generally, foods were thought to resemble the humor they produced: for instance, cold and dry foods were believed to produce black bile, the excess of which led to the condition of melancholia. Albala writes: “The body becomes overtaxed by excessive feeding, the humors become corrupt, and the spirits surrounding the brain foul and thick. Thus the thoughts are disturbed. Moreover, an overly nourished body, especially one fed with meat, was thought to produce a plethora of blood, which would be subsequently converted into sperm (in both males and females), signaling the libido and thus readying the body for procreation” (14). Thus, the church prohibited sin-inducing red meat during Lent, and permitted fish – which being a cold, moist food was much safer. Moreover, since medieval Christians believed that the body should be physically weakened during a fast, foods such as red meat which were considered most nutritious were restricted, while less-nourishing foods such as fish and green vegetables were permitted. Sydney Watts chronicles the shift away from the Galenic dietary paradigm by tracing two schools of medical thought which sprang up among Catholics in the early modern period; the two schools mapped neatly onto two schools of religious thought, one wanting to enforce the traditional austere fasts and the other representing an accommodationist position which was much more lax in its fasting practices. In a later essay, Samantha Kwan and Christine Sheikh show how medical models continue to dominate Christian rhetoric about diet in the twenty-first century in their investigation of Christian diet plans such as the Maker’s Diet, Hallelujah Diet, and the 3D Plan Diet.
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