The intertwined realms of motherhood and food practices shape religious communities, identities, and imagined futures. Food is a central site through which religious meaning, ethical formation, and cultural continuity are enacted, and mothers often act as the primary religious enculturators, through feeding, withholding, preparing, cultivating, sharing food, and passing on culinary and dietary traditions to maintain the continuity and future of the community.
From maternal cannibalism in the Hebrew Bible inverting the maternal role of nourisher, to state positioning of dairy cows as suffering mothers who nourish humans with milk extracted largely by men, to rural Ethiopian Orthodox women preparing bread and coffee for St. Mary's day during a fast, to an interfaith donation garden providing culturally- and religiously-appropriate food as maternal care for the community, this panel shows how foodways, implemented by those who perform mother work, are powerful arenas of regulation, resistance, risk, and hope.
This paper argues that depictions of maternal cannibalism in the Hebrew Bible (2 Kings 6 and Lamentations) intentionally invert the usual maternal role as provider and nourisher. In contexts where women were typically responsible for food processing and preparation, siege-induced famine tragically reverses the maternal task of feeding children. These texts therefore portray starvation not only as physical suffering but also as the catastrophic collapse of maternal roles. The paper combines three data sets. First, it examines ANE siege warfare and its deliberate use of starvation as a weapon. Second, it explores modern cognitive and sociological research on starvation to understand how prolonged hunger affects moral judgment and maternal behavior. Lastly, it analyzes the siege scenes in 2 Kings 6:24–31 and Lamentations 2:20 and 4:10. Taken together, these perspectives demonstrate how the Hebrew Bible depicts famine as a devastating collapse of maternal provision and human dignity.
This paper analyzes the United States government’s reliance on Christian patriarchy in restructuring twentieth-century dairy farming. It argues that the state positioned dairy cows as mothers through religious logics of cisheteropatriarchy and agribusiness, conceptualizing both the role of cattle and human motherhood as mechanically extracted resources on the family farm. Milk’s historical trajectory from a dangerous beverage to “nature’s perfect food” relied on religious productions of cows as suffering mothers who labored for and nourished their Christlike human husbands, masculinizing milk as extracted by men from women. Just as twentieth-century home economics sought to industrialize housewives’s unpaid domestic labor as the home’s spiritual core, cows similarly became mechanized and spiritual mothers. Analyzing state reports and propaganda pieces, this paper argues that American family farmers conceptualized cows as mothers only in relation to themselves as patriarchal fathers petitioned by God to violently, yet affectionately, oversee their multispecies family.
In this paper, I explore everyday food practices in a rural Ethiopian Orthodox community in northwestern Ethiopia, focusing on women preparing and sharing bread and coffee for a day dedicated to St. Mary during a fasting (ts’om) period. In the afternoon, when eating resumes, neighbors gather. The food is not extraordinary, nor does the occasion produce intense emotion, yet a modest joy is shared. Children watch, sometimes help, and join the meal, gradually internalizing modes of reverence through bodily and sensory experience rather than formal instruction. While studies on religion and food often highlight abstention or ritual meals, this paper turns to cooking and eating in ordinary time and space—practices not always explicitly recognized as religious—while attending to the balance between fasting and feasting. Women’s labor quietly mediates this balance, unfolding alongside ecclesiastical structures and sustaining religious life in ways rarely articulated but vital to the community’s ongoing devotion.
How do religious and cultural practices shape food needs, and how might thoughtful people and organizations better respond to food scarcity, including using the lived experience of mothers to better provide food for households? This paper takes up one organization as a case study, situating it in the larger landscape of the urban agriculture and food access ecosystem of a mid-sized Midwestern American city. The garden analyzed in this case study is a robust, interreligious, multicultural volunteer-run donation garden that provides fresh produce for a wide variety of recipient organizations. The principles it relies upon include attention to providing culturally and religiously appropriate food for recipients, and employing skills developed through maternal care in caring for the community.