Role of Religion, Spirituality, and Faith in Food Choices - Adequate Food for All - page 35

Beyond satisfying physical hunger, a given food practice may:
1. initiate and maintain personal and business relationships
2. demonstrate the nature and extent of relationships
3. provide a focus for communal activities
4. express love and caring
5. express individuality
6. proclaim the separateness of a group
7. demonstrate belonging to a group
8. cope with psychological stress
9. reward or punish
10. signify social status or wealth
11. bolster self-esteem and gain recognition
12. wield political or economic power
13. prevent, diagnose, and treat disease
14. symbolize emotional experience
15. display piety
16. represent security
17. express moral sentiments
fIguRe 3.1 This list is based on research reported in Community, Nutrition, and Individual
Food Behavior, M.A. Bass, L.M. Wakefield, and K.M. Kolasa, 1979.
In that brief excerpt is found what one might describe as a spiritual meal, full of
ritual (requisite wine, hand-holding, and personal testimony) and communion, yet
by no means a formal religious feast as defined by doctrine or commanded by law.
While the context of that particular meal may have been “secular,” the elements of
food and fellowship provided an experience that fed the spirit as well as the body.
Before exploring the relationship of food and formal religious practice, law, and
ritual, it is appropriate to first explore the broad and expansive territory of spiritu-
ality , a term that is embraced by both the religious and nonreligious. In Mortimer
Ostow's Spirit, Mind, and Brain: A Psychoanalytic Examination of Spirituality and
Religion (Ostow, 2006) , the author reminds us that the very word spirituality has no
clear-cut meaning. The term infers transcendence, a sense of awe, including what
Freud referred to as “oceanic feeling,” and finds expression in one's appreciation of
beauty, music, art, poetry, humor, even math and logic. Free of credo, spirituality “is
neither strictly related to religion or even to belief in God.” It has to do with mean-
ings and values, ideas and ideals, the belief and ethics that a person holds, and as one
psychologist suggests, “deliberately lived concern of the transcendent dimension of
life” (Helminiak, 2008).
Culturally speaking, it is common to refer to “team spirit,” “school spirit,” or the
“human spirit.” It is the last that is nourished by what is often referred to as comfort
food , that is, food that brings comfort, pleasure, security, reward, or a sense of con-
nection to a special time, place, or person. From pizza to a favorite cheese, from ice
cream to anything chocolate, certain foods feed the spirit.