Religion and Food Unit

Call for Proposals

We seeks papers investigating practices and ideas related to food, drink, fasting, feasting, food production, the ethics of production and consumption, or any other aspect of religiously-influenced foodways.

We also welcome panel proposals on topics in religion and food.

Considering religion and food in relation to the Annual Meeting theme on freedom (and un-freedom), we invite papers that consider, for example: 

• the relationship of food to freedom, constraint, or lack of freedom; 
• “freedom fries” and other cultural/linguistic redefinitions of foods;
• freeganism, dumpster-diving, garbage, afterlives, the trashy, compost, generativity, rot, futurity, toxicity, religious/cultic consumption of nonfoods, indigestibles, cyborg-, and drug-foods. 
• critical investigations of “free eating” and “free range” and attendant concepts, including of non-human animal and/as food. 

Especially in connection with Black and Indigenous ideas of freedom, we welcome investigations of decolonial diets, as well as those around orthorexia, gastronationalism, and allegations of transgressive eating, eg. of Hatian Americans “eating the ...pets.” 

Finally, we welcome geographically-relevant papers, addressing AAR 2025’s location in New England, home to a rich heritage of Native American cultures, early European colonization, and also more recent immigrant communities.

Co-Sponsorships (2):

1)For possible co-sponsorship with the African Diaspora Religions Unit…

Kitchen Table Conversations. 

“My childhood breakfast table memories amalgamated aromas  of coffee brewing, bacon frying, and burning hair from overheated hot combs” – Scott Alves Barton

Today we recognize that along with other knowledge systems, foodways, and faith traditions traveled with Enslaved Africans, as they do within every individual or group in migration, immigration, or as refugees. Yet, we need to ask, “Who sources, cooks, and preserves our foods, and holds our culinary cultural traditions, whether sacred or profane, in feasting or in famine?”  Who do we need to be thankful for that placed this food on our table?” In 1990, MacArthur Genius Carrie Mae Weems created her iconic social documentary “Kitchen Table” a photographic series imagining engagements of kith and kin at table. In addition to potential skirmishes, the kitchen table is always already foundational as a locus of commensality; particular ways of knowing, and intergenerational teaching and learning. Our foodways stories share how we are who we are, and what we hold dear, by lauding sacred rites of communion, sacrifice, and succor. Kitchen tables are also sites of homework, needlework, memorialization, putting food by, flirting, healthcare and beauty practices, gossiping, sharing grace, and prayer. Our tables are centers for healing and mourning, strategizing revolutionary change, or starting a radical feminist press…Quoting poet Joy Harjo, “The world begins at a kitchen table, perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing, crying, eating the last sweet bite…” We welcome folks to submit materials for this roundtable discussion.

Potential co-sponsorship with African Diaspora Religions: Kitchen Table Conversations

2) For possible co-sponsorship with the Anthropology of Religions Unit...

Anthropology of Food. We are especially interested in papers addressing theoretical, methodological, and ethical innovations that come from engaging with food and foodways. 

Potential co-sponsorship with the Anthropology of Religion Unit: Anthropology of Food