Tending Devotion through Everyday Food Practices: Women’s Preparation and Sharing around a Saint’s Day in a Rural Ethiopian Orthodox Community

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.