Religion, Food, and Eating in North America

Let’s begin by saying that every kid in the USA has learned the Thanksgiving story. Do they know that the Pilgrims came here because of religion? Maybe not, but they all know the menu they served, and they’ll all associate pumpkins, turkey, and cornbread with Thanksgiving.

It seems, according to this book, that religious people put more “soul” into the food. Jewish Shabbat lunches, Muslim Iftars, and traditional Christmas foods (each country has its own custom) all reflect this theory. In the USA, Protestants have always been at the forefront of the health crazes. If you need proof, look at the Kellog brothers, devout Seventh Day Adventists who ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and tried to invent new foods to replace the less healthy cooked breakfasts that Americans ate. There’s also the Hallelujah Acres, an evangelical ministry, that encourages raw food diets.

The chapter “Dreydel Salad” is not entirely accurate. Traditional Jewish foods in the USA are all Ashkenazi from Lithuania and Poland. KTAV, cited as the dominant supplier of Jewish cookbooks, stressed how Jewish people could impress the nation on how they could be the perfect American minority. It promoted typically dull American ingredients, like canned pineapple and coconut, typical 1950’s chintzy stuff.  Non-European Jewish foods, like tagine, shish kebab, and couscous, I imagine would have led to stares, sniggers, and xenophobia if they’d been served in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era. Israeli foods would’ve gotten the same reaction, because until the 1970’s most Jewish Americans had never visited Israel. Typical Ashkenazi fare, like blintzes, kuggel, and latkes, were considered “traditional” until the 1980’s. Today a lot of Jews won’t eat kuggel.

More chapters follow, with the same ethnic-religious connection to food. The movie Annie Hall is an example, where the wasp versus Jew dinner scene highlights the cultural difference. By the 1950’s, Yom Kippur was no longer a fast day to non-religious Jews, but a feast day! Borscht Belt hotels celebrated the “high holidays” with huge dinners and comedians. Orthodox Jews would blanch at the idea of feasting and comedy on Yom Kippur, but the likely humorous anecdotes are missing from this book. Most of the material is from second hand sources. Beef was abundant in the USA in the early days, so there was plenty of opportunity for Jewish, Irish, and southern cuisines had the chance to bulk up.