Food Faiths: Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating (Religion and Science as a Critical Discourse)

Food Faiths explores how individuals use scientific concepts about food and diet as the basis for a spiritual practice. The book examines how science filters through popular culture to affect the spiritual inclinations of individuals and investigates the influence of science, biomedicine, and nutrition on contemporary spirituality. Food Faiths: Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating explores how individuals internalize scientific knowledge regarding health and diet, and then incorporate that information into their lives as the basis of a personal spiritual practice. In this book, Catherine L. Newell examines how science is used to justify a dietary lifestyle and investigates the world of “spiritual eating,” which is comprised of practitioners who identify themselves not by a religion but by their diet. These diets are based in diverse sciences such as anthropology, ecology, systems biology, nutritional studies, biomedicine, and physiology; adherents view their diet as a lifestyle, a path to enlightenment, and a nebulously defined point of “health.” This, in turn, enables the practitioner to locate themselves in relation to other members of their community, to older traditions suffused with religious practice, and to understand their praxis in relation to the entire biosphere. While on one level this project explores how food, health, and diet can be a source of spiritual fulfillment, on another level'Food Faiths'illustrates how science and religion are subsumed into a culture and merged to form the basis of an individual's lived spiritual practice. Contents Series Introduction: Science and Religion as a Critical Discourse Introduction The Theory and the Theology of Diet, Science, and Religion Health Reformers, Vegan Farmers, and the Nineteenth-Century Religious Roots of Scientific Diet Culture The Twentieth Century and Beyond Converting to Food Faiths Sacred Ancestors Virtue Community Conclusion Bibliography Index About the Author