Transcript: "American Minority Religions and Their Foodways" with Kate Holbrook
Chris: Food sustains physical life and as such is of critical importance to us. Some in the country have an abundance, hunger gnaws at others, in which group we find ourselves determines much of our current existence. What we eat also touches on other aspects of our lives besides need. Celebrations, emotional comfort, health, family traditions, religious traditions and connections are breaking bread with others. For the purposes of this podcast series, we are interested in uncovering and understanding the connections between religion and food in the United States. What are they? What do they mean and how significant are they?
To do a deep dive into just one slice of this fascinating and meaningful subject, we have as our guest Kate Holbrook ,currently managing historian in the church history Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Dr. Holbrook received her Master's degree at Harvard Divinity School and PhD in religion and Society from Boston University in 2014. She was the author of many articles and chapters and co-editor of several books including: At the Pulpit, 150 years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women, Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives and The First 50 years of Relief Society. For our discussion today, we are looking at her chapter she wrote in the book: Religion, food and eating in North America, edited by Benjamin Zeller, Marie Dalum, Reid Nelson and Nora Ruble.
Chris: Today's episode will help us better understand what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion and we trust that as a result, listeners will see how indispensable the idea of religious freedom as a governing principle is to the United States and its ability to fulfill its purposes in the world. We encourage our listeners to visit storyofamericanreligion.org and register for future podcast notifications under the sign up tab. Kate, thank you so much for being with us today.
Kate: Oh, it is a pleasure. Thanks for the invitation.
Chris: I would like to ask a few introductory questions, which I think will be helpful to provide a framework for what our listeners will hear today. First, can you tell us why you have this interest in the intersection of food and religion in the United States?
Kate: Most of my writing now has to do in some way with the study of women in religion and food represents a substantial contribution that women make to strengthening religious communities, to nurturing the practice of religion at home and even to the practice of religious ritual. Today this can mean Friday night dinners in Judaism, religious holiday meals in many traditions, communal meals at church, funeral meals, refreshments that attract young people to religious activities, caring for indisposed community members and more. Historically, women baked the bread that was used for the Lord's supper or the sacrament. So drawing attention to food and religion is one way to draw attention to the ways that women contribute to flourishing religious life, but have not received much attention. I care a lot about invisible work. It is not a coincidence that 50 years ago, in the 1970s, the women's movement in this country began impacting the academy and that is also the decade that historians began writing about food. I am also interested in the intersection of religion and food because I find the religious thinking and experiences of everyday people to be compelling and meaningful. What seems like a simple decision about what to eat or what to cook actually represents a prioritizing of values that are often influenced by religion among many other factors. In many ways, I think home is a more telling context for the meaning of religious life than even a mosque or a temple or a church.
Chris: Wow, okay. Did this come to you when you were in college or is this predate that or did it come to you after you graduated and started working full time?
Kate: Uh later... actually in graduate school. Um, so I graduated from college and then I worked for a couple of years at the University and then while getting my Master's degree in studying world religion, um, that is when these episodes of what women were doing in a kitchen or what they were doing with food in a religious building really became meaningful to me.
Chris: Okay. Well, that is a fascinating Genesis there. Thank you. Could you share with us what religion's influence on the nation's food tells us first about food and second about religion?
Kate: To answer the first part of that question, I think I would have to make so many generalizations that whatever I would say would be mostly false but-but what I can say is that my-my study of religion and food has shown that in religious groups that are looked down on, members of those groups often really want to be thought well loved by the people outside of the groups and-and food is commonly a site where they negotiate their desire for acceptance. So let us see... um, an example would be my colleague Nora Ruble has shown in her study of the Settlement cookbook, which was a cookbook often given to Jewish women, especially if they were just immigrating to the United States, um, that there were recipes in the cookbook for seafood, pork and other items that were considered Haram which means prohibited - so interesting that this very popular cookbook that was seen as a way to help people adjust to United States included forbidden, prohibited foodstuffs or members of the Nation of Islam were not supposed to eat traditional southern foods, things like [inaudible] greens, chitlins, black eyed peas, corn bread because their leader wanted them to distance themselves from negative stereotypes about black people. And those part of the stereotype was that people, the black people ate those foods.
Chris: Right.
Kate: But-but then they-they made their own versions of those foods just without the prohibited substances. So instead of sweet potato pie, they made bean pie, but they were quite similar in flavor and appearance and I-I want to give you one more example because it is in my head.
Chris: Yes.
Kate: And-and that is the Latter-day Saints had non-alcoholic versions of items that traditionally contain alcohol. Um, so again, they are wrestling with what can make them look respectable to other people, at the same time they are trying to figure out how to honor their own food ways. So-so they would have... my favorite example is of rhubarb iced cocktail, which is called a cocktail even though it does not have any alcohol and it is made from rhubarb which flourishes in the climate in Utah, um, but it was called a cocktail because cocktails are sophisticated.
Chris: Wow, and we are going to get into some of these stories in greater depth. So I, uh, so thank you for mentioning them here at the outset to give us a framework here. You mentioned the term called foodway, explain to our listeners what that is because it will come up I think again and again in our interview.
Kate: Uh, yeah, so we have this academic jargon-jargon and a lot of the words are really, um, counterintuitive or they-they include parts of other languages or it is kind of hard to keep track of and foodway is actually a pretty good one because it is what it sounds like. It is the way to obtain food. So it deals with how people grow food or how they obtain food, how they prepare food, how they eat food and that is not just, um, about recipes but also, you know, do they sit on the floor, do they sit at a table, what implements do they eat with? All of those things are referred to as foodways.
Chris: Okay, good. Now, before we-we get into the-the chapter, last intro question, uh, the title of your chapter is Good to Eat: Culinary Priorities in the Nation of Islam and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, what moved you to write about those two groups and food?
Kate: Initially, I was looking for a dissertation topic and initially, I wanted to write about people who grew food for religious reasons and I had five and my committee said, "You cannot write a dissertation about five, you will never finish it and it would not hold together." Um, so then I had to narrow it down to two and the reason I chose to stick with Latter-day Saints and the Nation of Islam is because the groups are so... on the surface different from each other. One in the middle of the 20th century was primarily white and lived in a more rural environment, lived in the Western United States. And the other was primarily African-American, uh, and lived in cities; Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, sort of the fact that they looked so different that way but then they have been... um, religious impulses in common, things like storing food, things like kind of dressing up your missionaries, um, really intrigued me. So I wanted to get to the bottom of that and figure out what was behind those similarities.
Chris: Okay. So first group that you deal with and that we will talk about is the Nation of Islam. Uh, but before I get to that, I guess you label both as American outsiders, minority American religions with differences and commonalities which you just discussed. Can you give us a brief description of each of these groups, uh, their dietary rules and focusing on those which are important in your study. So real brief description of these two minority religions.
Kate: Yeah. Well, so Nation of Islam started around 1930 in Detroit. A man was selling things and also teaching people, the tenants of this new religion and then he had a lot of bad luck, just thrusted by the FBI and so his successor Elijah Muhammad is the one who really-really grew the religion and solidified the basic tenets. And as I alluded to earlier, a lot of their food practices were about not-not eating the things that were associated with slave life so no pork and that is true of regular Islam as well, but no Fried Chicken, no color greens, no... all those things that you think of as Southern foods, they stayed away from. And then the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints started under a related but slightly different name hundred years earlier. I guess maybe you should could date it to 1835 and it was in upstate New York and that founder was Joseph Smith, a young man, and he... only a couple of years after the founding of the tradition or actually I should have said 1835... but only a couple of years into the founding of the tradition, he recorded a revelation from God that he called the Word of Wisdom and that had positive things to it saying; eat things in season, eat lots of grains and fruits and vegetables, only eat meat in times of winter. And then it also had prohibitions; do not drink alcohol, do not drink hot drinks and then oh, and do not use tobacco and then by the time, a hundred years later when the leader of the church that, 'we are really going to take this seriously now, you all need to obey it' they-they did not focus as much on that positive rules, but they defined the negative ones for everybody since the language was not particularly clear in the Revelation and they said what it means to obey this is it means 'you do not drink alcohol, you do not partake... you do not take into your system tobacco in any way..." um, what am I missing? Alcohol, tobacco.... anyway, and then as time has gone on, say as recreational drugs have come along, those have been adopted in as also, um, you can obey the word of wisdom and partake of you know, smoke pot or whatever.
Chris: Right. Okay. All right. Let us see. You write this, Kate, "Even when groups purport to reject American culture or when popular culture rejects them, religious groups born in America are deeply influenced by American sensibilities." What were these American sensibilities you found impacted both groups approach to food, and how did they compare to the religious priorities?
Kate: Uh, well, the first one that comes to mind is self-sufficiency, both groups encouraged farming and gardening. And of course, if you are-if you are in an urban environment, that looks different and it is much more difficult to achieve. So for the nation, they bought... and 'the nation' is short for the Nation of Islam, they bought land in Georgia and had one of their members be in charge of farming that, hoping eventually to figure out how to raise enough food for the whole community should there be an emergency. And they also stored food for times of emergency and the thing they sort of did most often as they would get clean new large garbage cans like the kind that you take out to the-to the corner on garbage day and they would fill them with beans because beans have a long shelf life and they provide really good nutritional value. So-so a Nation of Islam apartment might have one or two of these cans full of beans in it. And then Latter-day Saints were encouraged to farm and then when people finally gave up on many people farming because throughout the country, people were moving from rural to urban environments then they start to focus on foods storage and the Nations have their beans and Latter-day Saints have their wheats. They would have large containers of wheat that they would store, again because it had a long shelf life and it was something that was nutritionally rich that they could serve up, do a lot of things with it and survival food for a long time.
Kate: But just to name briefly a few others respectability, they wanted to be presentable, the Nation of Islam members, and dressed very well, you know, I earned their [inaudible] at a focus on physical fitness. They used to weigh the men, um, as part of their meeting. It is the beginning of the meeting that they make them stand on a scale and they had to pay a tax if they gained weight. For-for Latter-Day Saints, they focused on things like music lessons and dance lessons and being culturally aware. A lot of... this is still part of their community, a lot of Latter-day Saints will show up on like Dancing With the Stars or The Voice or those kinds of shows and the reason is because this 'develop your cultural talents' is still a value, at least in the United States for a lot of members of the community. Another example is the first pamphlet for young people came out in 1965. It was called 'For the Strength of Youth' and think about the middle 60s, you know, people are experimenting with letting their hair grow and growing beards and not bathing as often and having loose clothing and For the Strength of Youth pamphlet talked a lot about keeping your hair short and men were not to wear beads, um, beards and people were to bath regularly and it advised women not to leave the house if they had curlers in their hair and you know, always to look presentable. So those are, those impressed the broader community kind of things. Even when the broader community was changing that, um, were alive in both traditions and-and they both prioritized frugality too and prosperity. Frugality as a means to become prosperous and as a means to save enough money that you can help other people in your tradition.
Chris: Right. So you write this, that is-that is interesting. I think what you are emphasizing is that these, both of these minority religions looked out and grabbed onto certain characteristics that both satisfied their religious tenants, but also made them more acceptable to mainstream culture and this-this includes food stuff, we will get there more.
Kate: Yeah, absolutely.
Chris: So you write this, "Muhammad significant emphasis on health and I will add here beauty..." you emphasized both, "...is important because the attainment of good physical health and beauty was a priority of mainstream American culture." So you mentioned this a little bit. Is there anything else you want to add to the nation of Islam's? Well, I guess their use of... well, their-their layering on top of their foodways, that idea.
Kate: Well, maybe I just mention another example and-and just because people are not reading the whole chapter so they do not have the context. So I want to make sure they realize that the Mohammed in that quotation was not the prophet Muhammad, it was Elijah Muhammad, well, who is also considered a prophet but...
Chris: Not the...
Kate: Not the old one, yeah. Um, there is this wonderful, I am blanking on the name of it. But this wonderful book, a little... I think it is called 'Little X' written by Sonseeahray Tate where she talks about her experience being a child in the Nation and the-the way her grandma mentored her in that faith, and she remembered her grandma if they were riding the bus and they would see a woman come out of her house with curlers in her hair or a house dress on or something, her grandma would think badly of that and instruct her not to do that because that, you know, that is not putting your best foot forward. And so she learned to differentiate... Sonseeahray learned to differentiate herself from other members of the black community with what they were thinking about in this particular context is not doing any crazy 1960s things like having a... I do not think this is crazy. They were thinking it was crazy; a really large afro, or looking in any way slovenly. They-they wanted to be presentable, respectable, sort of traditional and conservative in that way.
Chris: Right. You write of the foods... you mentioned it earlier the foods that they try, that they would avoid, tell us a little bit more about that and why they did it and what the ramifications were in like the home of a Nation of Islam member.
Kate: The ramifications are... I mean in a way, it was a little, it accomplished something important in the fact that they started to define themselves in a new way, which means they were defining themselves as having made this choice to be a part of this newer tradition and that is always a part of boundary maintenance that can make a real difference for religious communities. But as I studied, I also saw some pain there or at least I attributed them to experience pain I did on their-their behalf that these dishes that your-your family had eaten for a few generations at least, things that your grandma had made for your mother and then your mother had made for you, you could no longer make and eat and and so they-they had these really interesting ways around that. I mentioned bean pies instead of sweet potato pie and the bean pie recipe that became particularly famous, it sort of set the standard, it was developed by the... oh, I hate that I cannot remember her name, um, the cook for Muhammad Ali. Mohammed Ali was a member of the Nation and so she would make meals that would help him be healthy and also help him eat the way he was supposed to as a member of the community. And then it-it had a custardy texture and it is reminiscent of sweet potato pie or at the restaurants, Sonseeahray remembers carrot fluff being one of the things she particularly liked and this was a lot like a sweet potato casserole. And so they just found their way to not use the sweet potatoes that were forbidden but to create something that looks like it and still fulfill the emotional needs and desires that you could no longer get from sweet potato soufflé or sweet potato casserole, but-but you could get with carrots and carrots were possible to eat, even the same color.
Chris: So in your analysis of Nation of Islam recipes, so you analyzed a bunch of recipes, you write that, "The most revealing aspect of these recipes is how Nation of Islam menus incorporated what came to be known in the 1960s as Soul Food." What did this reveal that is so important?
Kate: Maybe I have covered this a little bit, what I was trying to convey was how when people love a particular food experience, especially when it has become important to them through family, through family history, through generations, they will find ways to maintain it even when the rules of conversion might at first glance threatened to... or at first glance threaten it.
So this is why we had, you know, the carrot fluff and a sweet potato casserole.
Chris: Okay, that makes sense. And you have told us... I wanted to ask a question about the bean pie which is fairly famous in the Nation of Islam culture but also, perhaps the wider American religious culture. I was not super familiar with it, although it rang a bell. You did tell us about this. Is there anything else you want to mention about bean pie? It came up several times in the book. It has come up a couple of times already here. What is so emblematic about it?
Kate: Well, one thing is when male members of the Nation would stand on street corners and hand out pamphlets, they would also sell bean pie and often, it was a small version of a pie. So it was something that you could eat as an individual not-not needing to serve it to a number of people or if you say you are a member of the Nation and you had not been able to bring lunch to work, you could run out to the corner and buy a bean pie and take it back and eat that an- and be obeying the... well, actually I was about to say obeying the rules but-but for the people who really took the foodways seriously, one thing that surprises a lot of people as members of the Nation only ate one meal a day. So-so the lunch example is a false one. They sold the pie... you can buy the pie even if you are not a member of the Nation, but they more likely would have bought the pie to eat later if they were doing it in the middle of the day because you only ate one meal a day and you could choose when you wanted to eat that meal. Elijah Muhammad thought that between 4 and 6 p.m. were the optimal hours but... and I think it is convenient to do it later. I think most people would have it later in the day meal, but that was the... that was cool.
Chris: Okay, been selling bean pies on the corner.
Kate: Yeah.
Chris: That is a great picture to have in your head. We are talking with Kate Holbrook, managing historian in the church history Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and author of a chapter about culinary priorities in the Nation of Islam and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the book Religion, food and eating in North America. Dr. Holbrook received her Master's degree at Harvard Divinity School and her PhD in religion and society from Boston University in 2014. Kate, you mentioned this early on but just to remind our listeners, give us a brief description of the culinary habits of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as we get into that second part of your chapter, that would be helpful I think.
Kate: Yeah. So-so the rules that today most people take very seriously and-and follow are no alcohol, no tobacco, no drugs, no coffee, no tea; it took about a hundred years from the time this word of wisdom was first talked about for people to consistently take it more seriously. There are other aspects to the word of wisdom and a lot of people... it comes in waves according to what is going on in the broader society too. In the 60s, a lot of people took it really seriously. They said this promises help for us so we should be vegetarian or at least only eat meat every once in a while and only in winter. But-but those other things... eat foods when they are in season, eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Those are seen as wise but not required of in orthodox member.
Chris: Okay. You write that the welfare program of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints adopted in 1936, "....has shaped Mormon cuisine even more than the word of wisdom, which is a canonized part of scripture." Would you tell us this story including what the welfare program is and including the relevance of two of America's most intrinsic and related values, which you mentioned earlier as well.
Kate: Yeah. Well, the welfare program, it started in 1936. But even before that, the Latter-day Saints were trying to figure out how to feed each other especially, you know, if people did not have a lot of money and they traveled all the way from England in the 19th century. By the time they arrived, they really had nothing left. So there was a big need to take care of each other and it was also seen as a spiritual mandate that you take care of people in need. So they try different things and met these needs as they could in different ways over the years but in 1936 , in the thick of the depression, an official Church welfare program was started and this encouraged people to be frugal so that they could have enough to share and also so they could be self-sufficient, so they could take care of their own needs. And that-that mandate to share and to take care of other people, it means that popular recipes have not included expensive ingredients. It means that frugality is an important value. Popular things have been easy to transport, popular recipes. So you could take them to a public dinner at the church or you could drop them by the house of someone who had a new baby or who had a family member who is ill, so they tend to... the popular recipes were not pretentious. They were not expensive. They were not the sort of fancy things desserts that are, you know, where they are sort of a [inaudible] like this popular food in the 80s and restaurants in the 80s. There were things that were simpler, that would appeal to a broad range of pallets and that were easy to transport.
Kate: Most of all the welfare program encouraged food storage, which meant that there were more shelf-stable items in people's pantries and because people were frugal, they had to eat the items in their panties. They could not just say, "Oh we have have our food storage and now we have run out of it..." or "It is expired and we will throw it out and buy some more..." they had to rotate it into their daily food storage. So as a result in recipes, you get items made with powdered milk, that if somebody else was making, they would probably put fresh milk in so Latter-Day Saint would have a recipe that included powdered milk instead or canned milk, some sort of shelf stable form of milk. And then I mentioned before, more than anything, they stored whole wheat and if people went... in the 70s and 80s, some people just did not have the energy to have a wide variety of food products in their food storage, but they would still store wheat. So you see whole wheat flour showing up. You see whole wheat cookbooks. You see whole wheat flour showing up in zucchini bread or banana bread or a carrot cake, pancakes, waffles. It was easy to buy, easy to store. A lot of Latter-day Saints also aspire to eat in ways that they thought of as healthy and of course the definition of what is healthy and what is not in some ways has changed over the years. Back in the 80s before everyone had celiac disease, the whole grains were particularly considered to be healthy, the staff of life, but some people had trouble figuring out how to rotate wheat into their regular cooking. Maybe they did not like to cook and did not want to pull out the wheat grinder every time they wanted to bake or maybe they did not like the flavor of whole wheat flour. I have neighbor who told me she... I get a lot of good stories when people know what I study and she told me that she stored and vacuum sealed 6 really large containers of whole wheat, but then she never ended up using them while raising her six children and when the youngest child turned 18 and left home, she decided she did not need this stuff in her house anymore. And she got somebody to help her move it out onto the street as in, you know, one step towards disposing of them and while they were out there, another neighbor who was a full-time homemaker saw those. She was a church member so she thought, "That is probably full of wheat..." and she was having a hard time feeding her family because her husband was in a long period of unemployment and so she called the woman who owned the wheat and she said, "Is that wheat out there?" and the woman said yes, and she said, "Do you think we could have it?" and she said, "Yes, absolutely." So they came and it took them a couple of trips to move all this wheat to their house and when they opened it, they found it was still in good condition. So they took every barrel and they were thrilled and they called the original owner of the wheat, and she was thrilled to hear that it was still in good condition. And I think talking to her, I think it provided for her a kind of redemption because even though she had not incorporated the wheat into her family's regular diet, it had gone to a very good use. It did help these people who were in need, probably a better use than if she had used it herself.
Chris: That is a great story. The next question I have relates back to something you just said in your explanation of the welfare program versus the word of wisdom. In your chapter you mentioned a particular Mormon cookbook written by a Mormon lady who is fairly well-known in circles out in Utah who-who worked for newspaper out there and wrote a column I think on food and Mormon culture and in your chapter, you-you talked about how this particular author addressed inconsistencies between dietary doctrine and community recipes. Can you give us a little taste of that? I mean, you you gave us some background on that but how did this lady talk about that?
Kate: It just came up in a few places and the one that I most remember is she has a chapter on egg dishes and she starts up. She has a little page at the beginning of each chapter and the page on the beginning of this chapter explains how Latter-day Saints are not supposed to eat very much meat and even though, you know, the meat chapter has a lot of recipes in it because Latter-Day Saint did eat a lot of meat but she says that these egg recipes are a good way, inexpensive to feed your family and give them the protein they need on those days when you are cooking without meat.
Chris: Interesting. Do you think that she felt like she had to address that?
Kate: Yeah. Yeah, she... 'cause she... this woman was, you know, she descended from founding church leaders. She sang with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, she had been on the board that was the head of the organization for young women for a long time and the newspaper for which she wrote her column was a church-owned newspaper. So she was really devout and I think it bothered her a little bit when recipes and habits did not completely match up with what the word of wisdom said. She was also a loving woman. So she tried to find loving gentle ways to steer people... to mirror what people liked but also steer them a little bit more toward the word of wisdom.
Chris: Sure. Kate, towards the end of your chapter you explained that, "In some respects, the word of wisdom was marginalized to better attain American values like the economy, independence and self-sufficiency.". What is the significance of this finding?
Kate: Well, so an example is in the late... so Latter-Day Saints came to Utah in 1847 and they were hungry. They had been hungry, they had been kicked out of a few places and they would just start getting their crops growing and just start getting things working and then they would have to leave again. And Brigham Young was the leader of the church at this point and he did not want them to be hungry anymore. So he was feeling aware of all the intense suffering and hunger that had gone on and so he encouraged people to store food and he also wanted the Latter-day Saints in Utah to be self-sufficient economically. And so he encouraged them to farm silkworms and make their own silk, just all of these different modes for being self-sufficient and this included... there were vineyards for making their own wine. It included sugar beets for providing their own source of sweetness for baked goods. So even if something was counter to the word of wisdom and he preached often about the word of wisdom wanting people to pay attention to it, he still thought the lesser evil was having them grow their, you know.... grow their own... make their own coffee instead of getting it from other people so [inaudible] money would be going out of the community.
Chris: Okay. All right. Thank you for that. Here as we conclude, I have two last questions. You share in your book at the end of your chapter, "Watching Nation Muslims and Mormons cook and eat provides important new insights into the ways participants in American society negotiate the paradoxes of fitting in and intentionally failing to fit in; a potent reminder of the importance of the perception and practice of [inaudible] plays in the construction of American society." We need you to unpack that a little bit for our listeners.
Kate: Yeah, maybe the easiest part to kind of use as a way in here is fitting in and intentionally failing to fit in. I think of the... in America, how many movies do we have throughout the history of the film industry in which there is this loner and he bucks the system and he goes against what the majority are doing and he is the hero, he saves the day in some way and yet
everybody wants to be the loner. So if everybody is a loner, he is no longer the loner; so I just see that at work in some American society all the time. We want to be different. We want to be our own people. We want to be unusual and unique but the ways that we want to be unusual and unique and even the fact that we want to be unusual and unique means we are not unusual or unique. You can see that sort of tangle, that sort of paradox, people working on it in social media a lot or else they do not work on it and they are just sort of ignorant of it. So-so in the case of Latter-day Saints and the Nation of Islam, they are also doing both things at the same time. They are trying to be, in some ways, even more American than the Americans in the ways we have talked about; look good, be clean, be slender, be self-sufficient, be good bootstrappers and-and prosperous. Those things are all about fitting in but on the other hand, both groups also worried that the outside society, in this case American society was evil, was a threat and they needed to step away from it, not let it infect them. S-so in the Nation during the 50s when Malcolm X perhaps the most the most famous of their preachers became very popular, he and his colleagues would speak out boldly against white devils and by white devils, they meant white people. And during about that same time, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were concerned about the changes in sexual behavior that had developed during World War II and then continued into the 50s. People were a lot freer about extramarital sex including adultery that came out of the war and they were worried about that. The Kinsey report on sexuality came out in the 50s, so they were rejecting everything about American culture and they still wanted to be accepted by Americans. But even though there were things they admired or aspire to in American culture, there were also things they found dangerous and they really needed to be a part from.
Kate: Food habits is one of the major ways that they were set apart, you know, if you tell somebody, "You cannot have lunch with them because you only eat once a day" or if somebody offers you a drink and you cannot accept it, then that sets you apart.
Chris: Right. So-so food is quite-quite a utensil or quite a...
Kate: Yeah.
Chris: ...for people and religious groups to do this, to make this negotiation process, right? It finds its way into food very easily.
Kate: Yeah.
Chris: That is what you are saying, right?
Kate: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: And since people are intimate with their food, we make it, we buy it then it becomes... maybe that is one of the reasons it becomes such a useful thing to express these negotiations perhaps. Is that what you are saying?
Kate: Yes. Yep, exactly.
Chris: As we conclude Kate, do you want to share any lessons besides the ones you shared with us? But take this time at the end, do you want to share any lessons or takeaways from the chapter either in terms of important historical transformations that you [inaudible] or in terms of helping us better understand our present moment. I guess, I should say or emphasize our present religious moment in time, I guess in the United States. What are some things you might share as we conclude that might be important to our listeners.
Kate: Well, one of the reasons that I-I find this topic so fascinating is because when-when people decide what to eat, meaning what to grow or shop for, how to prepare it, who is going to eat it and when, they are going through all of the religious priorities in their mind as well as their practical circumstances to make those decisions. So it is a way to look at the everyday theologizing, you know, the theological work that-that people do and-and what they end up deciding, what they end up buying and making and serving and sharing that says a lot about what priorities they are making top priorities because there are always competing priorities in life and in religion. So-so looking at food, your own food habits and the food habits of a religious tradition is a way to see, "Well, I am making on the ground decisions here and what do they say about the way I am prioritizing my values..." and we have been talking this whole interview about religion, but people tend to have religious fervor about food, even when they do not identify with a particular tradition. One example... oh, gosh it was almost 20 years ago, PBS had a special about Alice Waters, um, who is one of the people who really contributed to the local food, organic food, eat delicious food movement that took off in our country and in this documentary, they said to a woman... they were talking to her at farmer's market and she said, "You know, going to Alice's Restaurant for me is like going to church." and another person said, "For me going to the farmer's market is like going to church. This is my church." and it is it is fun to unpack that because I think one of the things they mean is: My values are represented in the food options here the way where the food comes from, the way it is grown, the way thinking about those things will have a positive impact on society. So this is very much about religion, but it is also about values outside of the realm of organized religion.
Chris: We have been talking with Kate Holbrook, managing historian in the church history Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and author of a chapter about culinary priorities in the Nation of Islam and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the book Religion, food and eating in North America. Here at the conclusion of this podcast episode, we trust that listeners understand a little bit more about what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion and have a deeper appreciation of religious freedom as a governing principle in the United States. Seeing to its protection as an indispensable part of the fragile American experiment in self-government.
Do not forget to visit storyofamericanreligion.org and register for future podcast notifications under the sign up tab.
Kate, thank you for being with us today and doing the hard work of researching this fascinating area, which helped us all understand America a bit better. That is very enlightening and I hope you have enjoyed the time with us as well.
Kate: Very much and thanks Chris. I want to thank you for this podcast series. It is about such an important topic and we will help more of us to understand these dynamics about religion and America
To do a deep dive into just one slice of this fascinating and meaningful subject, we have as our guest Kate Holbrook ,currently managing historian in the church history Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Dr. Holbrook received her Master's degree at Harvard Divinity School and PhD in religion and Society from Boston University in 2014. She was the author of many articles and chapters and co-editor of several books including: At the Pulpit, 150 years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women, Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives and The First 50 years of Relief Society. For our discussion today, we are looking at her chapter she wrote in the book: Religion, food and eating in North America, edited by Benjamin Zeller, Marie Dalum, Reid Nelson and Nora Ruble.
Chris: Today's episode will help us better understand what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion and we trust that as a result, listeners will see how indispensable the idea of religious freedom as a governing principle is to the United States and its ability to fulfill its purposes in the world. We encourage our listeners to visit storyofamericanreligion.org and register for future podcast notifications under the sign up tab. Kate, thank you so much for being with us today.
Kate: Oh, it is a pleasure. Thanks for the invitation.
Chris: I would like to ask a few introductory questions, which I think will be helpful to provide a framework for what our listeners will hear today. First, can you tell us why you have this interest in the intersection of food and religion in the United States?
Kate: Most of my writing now has to do in some way with the study of women in religion and food represents a substantial contribution that women make to strengthening religious communities, to nurturing the practice of religion at home and even to the practice of religious ritual. Today this can mean Friday night dinners in Judaism, religious holiday meals in many traditions, communal meals at church, funeral meals, refreshments that attract young people to religious activities, caring for indisposed community members and more. Historically, women baked the bread that was used for the Lord's supper or the sacrament. So drawing attention to food and religion is one way to draw attention to the ways that women contribute to flourishing religious life, but have not received much attention. I care a lot about invisible work. It is not a coincidence that 50 years ago, in the 1970s, the women's movement in this country began impacting the academy and that is also the decade that historians began writing about food. I am also interested in the intersection of religion and food because I find the religious thinking and experiences of everyday people to be compelling and meaningful. What seems like a simple decision about what to eat or what to cook actually represents a prioritizing of values that are often influenced by religion among many other factors. In many ways, I think home is a more telling context for the meaning of religious life than even a mosque or a temple or a church.
Chris: Wow, okay. Did this come to you when you were in college or is this predate that or did it come to you after you graduated and started working full time?
Kate: Uh later... actually in graduate school. Um, so I graduated from college and then I worked for a couple of years at the University and then while getting my Master's degree in studying world religion, um, that is when these episodes of what women were doing in a kitchen or what they were doing with food in a religious building really became meaningful to me.
Chris: Okay. Well, that is a fascinating Genesis there. Thank you. Could you share with us what religion's influence on the nation's food tells us first about food and second about religion?
Kate: To answer the first part of that question, I think I would have to make so many generalizations that whatever I would say would be mostly false but-but what I can say is that my-my study of religion and food has shown that in religious groups that are looked down on, members of those groups often really want to be thought well loved by the people outside of the groups and-and food is commonly a site where they negotiate their desire for acceptance. So let us see... um, an example would be my colleague Nora Ruble has shown in her study of the Settlement cookbook, which was a cookbook often given to Jewish women, especially if they were just immigrating to the United States, um, that there were recipes in the cookbook for seafood, pork and other items that were considered Haram which means prohibited - so interesting that this very popular cookbook that was seen as a way to help people adjust to United States included forbidden, prohibited foodstuffs or members of the Nation of Islam were not supposed to eat traditional southern foods, things like [inaudible] greens, chitlins, black eyed peas, corn bread because their leader wanted them to distance themselves from negative stereotypes about black people. And those part of the stereotype was that people, the black people ate those foods.
Chris: Right.
Kate: But-but then they-they made their own versions of those foods just without the prohibited substances. So instead of sweet potato pie, they made bean pie, but they were quite similar in flavor and appearance and I-I want to give you one more example because it is in my head.
Chris: Yes.
Kate: And-and that is the Latter-day Saints had non-alcoholic versions of items that traditionally contain alcohol. Um, so again, they are wrestling with what can make them look respectable to other people, at the same time they are trying to figure out how to honor their own food ways. So-so they would have... my favorite example is of rhubarb iced cocktail, which is called a cocktail even though it does not have any alcohol and it is made from rhubarb which flourishes in the climate in Utah, um, but it was called a cocktail because cocktails are sophisticated.
Chris: Wow, and we are going to get into some of these stories in greater depth. So I, uh, so thank you for mentioning them here at the outset to give us a framework here. You mentioned the term called foodway, explain to our listeners what that is because it will come up I think again and again in our interview.
Kate: Uh, yeah, so we have this academic jargon-jargon and a lot of the words are really, um, counterintuitive or they-they include parts of other languages or it is kind of hard to keep track of and foodway is actually a pretty good one because it is what it sounds like. It is the way to obtain food. So it deals with how people grow food or how they obtain food, how they prepare food, how they eat food and that is not just, um, about recipes but also, you know, do they sit on the floor, do they sit at a table, what implements do they eat with? All of those things are referred to as foodways.
Chris: Okay, good. Now, before we-we get into the-the chapter, last intro question, uh, the title of your chapter is Good to Eat: Culinary Priorities in the Nation of Islam and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, what moved you to write about those two groups and food?
Kate: Initially, I was looking for a dissertation topic and initially, I wanted to write about people who grew food for religious reasons and I had five and my committee said, "You cannot write a dissertation about five, you will never finish it and it would not hold together." Um, so then I had to narrow it down to two and the reason I chose to stick with Latter-day Saints and the Nation of Islam is because the groups are so... on the surface different from each other. One in the middle of the 20th century was primarily white and lived in a more rural environment, lived in the Western United States. And the other was primarily African-American, uh, and lived in cities; Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, sort of the fact that they looked so different that way but then they have been... um, religious impulses in common, things like storing food, things like kind of dressing up your missionaries, um, really intrigued me. So I wanted to get to the bottom of that and figure out what was behind those similarities.
Chris: Okay. So first group that you deal with and that we will talk about is the Nation of Islam. Uh, but before I get to that, I guess you label both as American outsiders, minority American religions with differences and commonalities which you just discussed. Can you give us a brief description of each of these groups, uh, their dietary rules and focusing on those which are important in your study. So real brief description of these two minority religions.
Kate: Yeah. Well, so Nation of Islam started around 1930 in Detroit. A man was selling things and also teaching people, the tenants of this new religion and then he had a lot of bad luck, just thrusted by the FBI and so his successor Elijah Muhammad is the one who really-really grew the religion and solidified the basic tenets. And as I alluded to earlier, a lot of their food practices were about not-not eating the things that were associated with slave life so no pork and that is true of regular Islam as well, but no Fried Chicken, no color greens, no... all those things that you think of as Southern foods, they stayed away from. And then the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints started under a related but slightly different name hundred years earlier. I guess maybe you should could date it to 1835 and it was in upstate New York and that founder was Joseph Smith, a young man, and he... only a couple of years after the founding of the tradition or actually I should have said 1835... but only a couple of years into the founding of the tradition, he recorded a revelation from God that he called the Word of Wisdom and that had positive things to it saying; eat things in season, eat lots of grains and fruits and vegetables, only eat meat in times of winter. And then it also had prohibitions; do not drink alcohol, do not drink hot drinks and then oh, and do not use tobacco and then by the time, a hundred years later when the leader of the church that, 'we are really going to take this seriously now, you all need to obey it' they-they did not focus as much on that positive rules, but they defined the negative ones for everybody since the language was not particularly clear in the Revelation and they said what it means to obey this is it means 'you do not drink alcohol, you do not partake... you do not take into your system tobacco in any way..." um, what am I missing? Alcohol, tobacco.... anyway, and then as time has gone on, say as recreational drugs have come along, those have been adopted in as also, um, you can obey the word of wisdom and partake of you know, smoke pot or whatever.
Chris: Right. Okay. All right. Let us see. You write this, Kate, "Even when groups purport to reject American culture or when popular culture rejects them, religious groups born in America are deeply influenced by American sensibilities." What were these American sensibilities you found impacted both groups approach to food, and how did they compare to the religious priorities?
Kate: Uh, well, the first one that comes to mind is self-sufficiency, both groups encouraged farming and gardening. And of course, if you are-if you are in an urban environment, that looks different and it is much more difficult to achieve. So for the nation, they bought... and 'the nation' is short for the Nation of Islam, they bought land in Georgia and had one of their members be in charge of farming that, hoping eventually to figure out how to raise enough food for the whole community should there be an emergency. And they also stored food for times of emergency and the thing they sort of did most often as they would get clean new large garbage cans like the kind that you take out to the-to the corner on garbage day and they would fill them with beans because beans have a long shelf life and they provide really good nutritional value. So-so a Nation of Islam apartment might have one or two of these cans full of beans in it. And then Latter-day Saints were encouraged to farm and then when people finally gave up on many people farming because throughout the country, people were moving from rural to urban environments then they start to focus on foods storage and the Nations have their beans and Latter-day Saints have their wheats. They would have large containers of wheat that they would store, again because it had a long shelf life and it was something that was nutritionally rich that they could serve up, do a lot of things with it and survival food for a long time.
Kate: But just to name briefly a few others respectability, they wanted to be presentable, the Nation of Islam members, and dressed very well, you know, I earned their [inaudible] at a focus on physical fitness. They used to weigh the men, um, as part of their meeting. It is the beginning of the meeting that they make them stand on a scale and they had to pay a tax if they gained weight. For-for Latter-Day Saints, they focused on things like music lessons and dance lessons and being culturally aware. A lot of... this is still part of their community, a lot of Latter-day Saints will show up on like Dancing With the Stars or The Voice or those kinds of shows and the reason is because this 'develop your cultural talents' is still a value, at least in the United States for a lot of members of the community. Another example is the first pamphlet for young people came out in 1965. It was called 'For the Strength of Youth' and think about the middle 60s, you know, people are experimenting with letting their hair grow and growing beards and not bathing as often and having loose clothing and For the Strength of Youth pamphlet talked a lot about keeping your hair short and men were not to wear beads, um, beards and people were to bath regularly and it advised women not to leave the house if they had curlers in their hair and you know, always to look presentable. So those are, those impressed the broader community kind of things. Even when the broader community was changing that, um, were alive in both traditions and-and they both prioritized frugality too and prosperity. Frugality as a means to become prosperous and as a means to save enough money that you can help other people in your tradition.
Chris: Right. So you write this, that is-that is interesting. I think what you are emphasizing is that these, both of these minority religions looked out and grabbed onto certain characteristics that both satisfied their religious tenants, but also made them more acceptable to mainstream culture and this-this includes food stuff, we will get there more.
Kate: Yeah, absolutely.
Chris: So you write this, "Muhammad significant emphasis on health and I will add here beauty..." you emphasized both, "...is important because the attainment of good physical health and beauty was a priority of mainstream American culture." So you mentioned this a little bit. Is there anything else you want to add to the nation of Islam's? Well, I guess their use of... well, their-their layering on top of their foodways, that idea.
Kate: Well, maybe I just mention another example and-and just because people are not reading the whole chapter so they do not have the context. So I want to make sure they realize that the Mohammed in that quotation was not the prophet Muhammad, it was Elijah Muhammad, well, who is also considered a prophet but...
Chris: Not the...
Kate: Not the old one, yeah. Um, there is this wonderful, I am blanking on the name of it. But this wonderful book, a little... I think it is called 'Little X' written by Sonseeahray Tate where she talks about her experience being a child in the Nation and the-the way her grandma mentored her in that faith, and she remembered her grandma if they were riding the bus and they would see a woman come out of her house with curlers in her hair or a house dress on or something, her grandma would think badly of that and instruct her not to do that because that, you know, that is not putting your best foot forward. And so she learned to differentiate... Sonseeahray learned to differentiate herself from other members of the black community with what they were thinking about in this particular context is not doing any crazy 1960s things like having a... I do not think this is crazy. They were thinking it was crazy; a really large afro, or looking in any way slovenly. They-they wanted to be presentable, respectable, sort of traditional and conservative in that way.
Chris: Right. You write of the foods... you mentioned it earlier the foods that they try, that they would avoid, tell us a little bit more about that and why they did it and what the ramifications were in like the home of a Nation of Islam member.
Kate: The ramifications are... I mean in a way, it was a little, it accomplished something important in the fact that they started to define themselves in a new way, which means they were defining themselves as having made this choice to be a part of this newer tradition and that is always a part of boundary maintenance that can make a real difference for religious communities. But as I studied, I also saw some pain there or at least I attributed them to experience pain I did on their-their behalf that these dishes that your-your family had eaten for a few generations at least, things that your grandma had made for your mother and then your mother had made for you, you could no longer make and eat and and so they-they had these really interesting ways around that. I mentioned bean pies instead of sweet potato pie and the bean pie recipe that became particularly famous, it sort of set the standard, it was developed by the... oh, I hate that I cannot remember her name, um, the cook for Muhammad Ali. Mohammed Ali was a member of the Nation and so she would make meals that would help him be healthy and also help him eat the way he was supposed to as a member of the community. And then it-it had a custardy texture and it is reminiscent of sweet potato pie or at the restaurants, Sonseeahray remembers carrot fluff being one of the things she particularly liked and this was a lot like a sweet potato casserole. And so they just found their way to not use the sweet potatoes that were forbidden but to create something that looks like it and still fulfill the emotional needs and desires that you could no longer get from sweet potato soufflé or sweet potato casserole, but-but you could get with carrots and carrots were possible to eat, even the same color.
Chris: So in your analysis of Nation of Islam recipes, so you analyzed a bunch of recipes, you write that, "The most revealing aspect of these recipes is how Nation of Islam menus incorporated what came to be known in the 1960s as Soul Food." What did this reveal that is so important?
Kate: Maybe I have covered this a little bit, what I was trying to convey was how when people love a particular food experience, especially when it has become important to them through family, through family history, through generations, they will find ways to maintain it even when the rules of conversion might at first glance threatened to... or at first glance threaten it.
So this is why we had, you know, the carrot fluff and a sweet potato casserole.
Chris: Okay, that makes sense. And you have told us... I wanted to ask a question about the bean pie which is fairly famous in the Nation of Islam culture but also, perhaps the wider American religious culture. I was not super familiar with it, although it rang a bell. You did tell us about this. Is there anything else you want to mention about bean pie? It came up several times in the book. It has come up a couple of times already here. What is so emblematic about it?
Kate: Well, one thing is when male members of the Nation would stand on street corners and hand out pamphlets, they would also sell bean pie and often, it was a small version of a pie. So it was something that you could eat as an individual not-not needing to serve it to a number of people or if you say you are a member of the Nation and you had not been able to bring lunch to work, you could run out to the corner and buy a bean pie and take it back and eat that an- and be obeying the... well, actually I was about to say obeying the rules but-but for the people who really took the foodways seriously, one thing that surprises a lot of people as members of the Nation only ate one meal a day. So-so the lunch example is a false one. They sold the pie... you can buy the pie even if you are not a member of the Nation, but they more likely would have bought the pie to eat later if they were doing it in the middle of the day because you only ate one meal a day and you could choose when you wanted to eat that meal. Elijah Muhammad thought that between 4 and 6 p.m. were the optimal hours but... and I think it is convenient to do it later. I think most people would have it later in the day meal, but that was the... that was cool.
Chris: Okay, been selling bean pies on the corner.
Kate: Yeah.
Chris: That is a great picture to have in your head. We are talking with Kate Holbrook, managing historian in the church history Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and author of a chapter about culinary priorities in the Nation of Islam and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the book Religion, food and eating in North America. Dr. Holbrook received her Master's degree at Harvard Divinity School and her PhD in religion and society from Boston University in 2014. Kate, you mentioned this early on but just to remind our listeners, give us a brief description of the culinary habits of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as we get into that second part of your chapter, that would be helpful I think.
Kate: Yeah. So-so the rules that today most people take very seriously and-and follow are no alcohol, no tobacco, no drugs, no coffee, no tea; it took about a hundred years from the time this word of wisdom was first talked about for people to consistently take it more seriously. There are other aspects to the word of wisdom and a lot of people... it comes in waves according to what is going on in the broader society too. In the 60s, a lot of people took it really seriously. They said this promises help for us so we should be vegetarian or at least only eat meat every once in a while and only in winter. But-but those other things... eat foods when they are in season, eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Those are seen as wise but not required of in orthodox member.
Chris: Okay. You write that the welfare program of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints adopted in 1936, "....has shaped Mormon cuisine even more than the word of wisdom, which is a canonized part of scripture." Would you tell us this story including what the welfare program is and including the relevance of two of America's most intrinsic and related values, which you mentioned earlier as well.
Kate: Yeah. Well, the welfare program, it started in 1936. But even before that, the Latter-day Saints were trying to figure out how to feed each other especially, you know, if people did not have a lot of money and they traveled all the way from England in the 19th century. By the time they arrived, they really had nothing left. So there was a big need to take care of each other and it was also seen as a spiritual mandate that you take care of people in need. So they try different things and met these needs as they could in different ways over the years but in 1936 , in the thick of the depression, an official Church welfare program was started and this encouraged people to be frugal so that they could have enough to share and also so they could be self-sufficient, so they could take care of their own needs. And that-that mandate to share and to take care of other people, it means that popular recipes have not included expensive ingredients. It means that frugality is an important value. Popular things have been easy to transport, popular recipes. So you could take them to a public dinner at the church or you could drop them by the house of someone who had a new baby or who had a family member who is ill, so they tend to... the popular recipes were not pretentious. They were not expensive. They were not the sort of fancy things desserts that are, you know, where they are sort of a [inaudible] like this popular food in the 80s and restaurants in the 80s. There were things that were simpler, that would appeal to a broad range of pallets and that were easy to transport.
Kate: Most of all the welfare program encouraged food storage, which meant that there were more shelf-stable items in people's pantries and because people were frugal, they had to eat the items in their panties. They could not just say, "Oh we have have our food storage and now we have run out of it..." or "It is expired and we will throw it out and buy some more..." they had to rotate it into their daily food storage. So as a result in recipes, you get items made with powdered milk, that if somebody else was making, they would probably put fresh milk in so Latter-Day Saint would have a recipe that included powdered milk instead or canned milk, some sort of shelf stable form of milk. And then I mentioned before, more than anything, they stored whole wheat and if people went... in the 70s and 80s, some people just did not have the energy to have a wide variety of food products in their food storage, but they would still store wheat. So you see whole wheat flour showing up. You see whole wheat cookbooks. You see whole wheat flour showing up in zucchini bread or banana bread or a carrot cake, pancakes, waffles. It was easy to buy, easy to store. A lot of Latter-day Saints also aspire to eat in ways that they thought of as healthy and of course the definition of what is healthy and what is not in some ways has changed over the years. Back in the 80s before everyone had celiac disease, the whole grains were particularly considered to be healthy, the staff of life, but some people had trouble figuring out how to rotate wheat into their regular cooking. Maybe they did not like to cook and did not want to pull out the wheat grinder every time they wanted to bake or maybe they did not like the flavor of whole wheat flour. I have neighbor who told me she... I get a lot of good stories when people know what I study and she told me that she stored and vacuum sealed 6 really large containers of whole wheat, but then she never ended up using them while raising her six children and when the youngest child turned 18 and left home, she decided she did not need this stuff in her house anymore. And she got somebody to help her move it out onto the street as in, you know, one step towards disposing of them and while they were out there, another neighbor who was a full-time homemaker saw those. She was a church member so she thought, "That is probably full of wheat..." and she was having a hard time feeding her family because her husband was in a long period of unemployment and so she called the woman who owned the wheat and she said, "Is that wheat out there?" and the woman said yes, and she said, "Do you think we could have it?" and she said, "Yes, absolutely." So they came and it took them a couple of trips to move all this wheat to their house and when they opened it, they found it was still in good condition. So they took every barrel and they were thrilled and they called the original owner of the wheat, and she was thrilled to hear that it was still in good condition. And I think talking to her, I think it provided for her a kind of redemption because even though she had not incorporated the wheat into her family's regular diet, it had gone to a very good use. It did help these people who were in need, probably a better use than if she had used it herself.
Chris: That is a great story. The next question I have relates back to something you just said in your explanation of the welfare program versus the word of wisdom. In your chapter you mentioned a particular Mormon cookbook written by a Mormon lady who is fairly well-known in circles out in Utah who-who worked for newspaper out there and wrote a column I think on food and Mormon culture and in your chapter, you-you talked about how this particular author addressed inconsistencies between dietary doctrine and community recipes. Can you give us a little taste of that? I mean, you you gave us some background on that but how did this lady talk about that?
Kate: It just came up in a few places and the one that I most remember is she has a chapter on egg dishes and she starts up. She has a little page at the beginning of each chapter and the page on the beginning of this chapter explains how Latter-day Saints are not supposed to eat very much meat and even though, you know, the meat chapter has a lot of recipes in it because Latter-Day Saint did eat a lot of meat but she says that these egg recipes are a good way, inexpensive to feed your family and give them the protein they need on those days when you are cooking without meat.
Chris: Interesting. Do you think that she felt like she had to address that?
Kate: Yeah. Yeah, she... 'cause she... this woman was, you know, she descended from founding church leaders. She sang with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, she had been on the board that was the head of the organization for young women for a long time and the newspaper for which she wrote her column was a church-owned newspaper. So she was really devout and I think it bothered her a little bit when recipes and habits did not completely match up with what the word of wisdom said. She was also a loving woman. So she tried to find loving gentle ways to steer people... to mirror what people liked but also steer them a little bit more toward the word of wisdom.
Chris: Sure. Kate, towards the end of your chapter you explained that, "In some respects, the word of wisdom was marginalized to better attain American values like the economy, independence and self-sufficiency.". What is the significance of this finding?
Kate: Well, so an example is in the late... so Latter-Day Saints came to Utah in 1847 and they were hungry. They had been hungry, they had been kicked out of a few places and they would just start getting their crops growing and just start getting things working and then they would have to leave again. And Brigham Young was the leader of the church at this point and he did not want them to be hungry anymore. So he was feeling aware of all the intense suffering and hunger that had gone on and so he encouraged people to store food and he also wanted the Latter-day Saints in Utah to be self-sufficient economically. And so he encouraged them to farm silkworms and make their own silk, just all of these different modes for being self-sufficient and this included... there were vineyards for making their own wine. It included sugar beets for providing their own source of sweetness for baked goods. So even if something was counter to the word of wisdom and he preached often about the word of wisdom wanting people to pay attention to it, he still thought the lesser evil was having them grow their, you know.... grow their own... make their own coffee instead of getting it from other people so [inaudible] money would be going out of the community.
Chris: Okay. All right. Thank you for that. Here as we conclude, I have two last questions. You share in your book at the end of your chapter, "Watching Nation Muslims and Mormons cook and eat provides important new insights into the ways participants in American society negotiate the paradoxes of fitting in and intentionally failing to fit in; a potent reminder of the importance of the perception and practice of [inaudible] plays in the construction of American society." We need you to unpack that a little bit for our listeners.
Kate: Yeah, maybe the easiest part to kind of use as a way in here is fitting in and intentionally failing to fit in. I think of the... in America, how many movies do we have throughout the history of the film industry in which there is this loner and he bucks the system and he goes against what the majority are doing and he is the hero, he saves the day in some way and yet
everybody wants to be the loner. So if everybody is a loner, he is no longer the loner; so I just see that at work in some American society all the time. We want to be different. We want to be our own people. We want to be unusual and unique but the ways that we want to be unusual and unique and even the fact that we want to be unusual and unique means we are not unusual or unique. You can see that sort of tangle, that sort of paradox, people working on it in social media a lot or else they do not work on it and they are just sort of ignorant of it. So-so in the case of Latter-day Saints and the Nation of Islam, they are also doing both things at the same time. They are trying to be, in some ways, even more American than the Americans in the ways we have talked about; look good, be clean, be slender, be self-sufficient, be good bootstrappers and-and prosperous. Those things are all about fitting in but on the other hand, both groups also worried that the outside society, in this case American society was evil, was a threat and they needed to step away from it, not let it infect them. S-so in the Nation during the 50s when Malcolm X perhaps the most the most famous of their preachers became very popular, he and his colleagues would speak out boldly against white devils and by white devils, they meant white people. And during about that same time, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were concerned about the changes in sexual behavior that had developed during World War II and then continued into the 50s. People were a lot freer about extramarital sex including adultery that came out of the war and they were worried about that. The Kinsey report on sexuality came out in the 50s, so they were rejecting everything about American culture and they still wanted to be accepted by Americans. But even though there were things they admired or aspire to in American culture, there were also things they found dangerous and they really needed to be a part from.
Kate: Food habits is one of the major ways that they were set apart, you know, if you tell somebody, "You cannot have lunch with them because you only eat once a day" or if somebody offers you a drink and you cannot accept it, then that sets you apart.
Chris: Right. So-so food is quite-quite a utensil or quite a...
Kate: Yeah.
Chris: ...for people and religious groups to do this, to make this negotiation process, right? It finds its way into food very easily.
Kate: Yeah.
Chris: That is what you are saying, right?
Kate: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: And since people are intimate with their food, we make it, we buy it then it becomes... maybe that is one of the reasons it becomes such a useful thing to express these negotiations perhaps. Is that what you are saying?
Kate: Yes. Yep, exactly.
Chris: As we conclude Kate, do you want to share any lessons besides the ones you shared with us? But take this time at the end, do you want to share any lessons or takeaways from the chapter either in terms of important historical transformations that you [inaudible] or in terms of helping us better understand our present moment. I guess, I should say or emphasize our present religious moment in time, I guess in the United States. What are some things you might share as we conclude that might be important to our listeners.
Kate: Well, one of the reasons that I-I find this topic so fascinating is because when-when people decide what to eat, meaning what to grow or shop for, how to prepare it, who is going to eat it and when, they are going through all of the religious priorities in their mind as well as their practical circumstances to make those decisions. So it is a way to look at the everyday theologizing, you know, the theological work that-that people do and-and what they end up deciding, what they end up buying and making and serving and sharing that says a lot about what priorities they are making top priorities because there are always competing priorities in life and in religion. So-so looking at food, your own food habits and the food habits of a religious tradition is a way to see, "Well, I am making on the ground decisions here and what do they say about the way I am prioritizing my values..." and we have been talking this whole interview about religion, but people tend to have religious fervor about food, even when they do not identify with a particular tradition. One example... oh, gosh it was almost 20 years ago, PBS had a special about Alice Waters, um, who is one of the people who really contributed to the local food, organic food, eat delicious food movement that took off in our country and in this documentary, they said to a woman... they were talking to her at farmer's market and she said, "You know, going to Alice's Restaurant for me is like going to church." and another person said, "For me going to the farmer's market is like going to church. This is my church." and it is it is fun to unpack that because I think one of the things they mean is: My values are represented in the food options here the way where the food comes from, the way it is grown, the way thinking about those things will have a positive impact on society. So this is very much about religion, but it is also about values outside of the realm of organized religion.
Chris: We have been talking with Kate Holbrook, managing historian in the church history Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and author of a chapter about culinary priorities in the Nation of Islam and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the book Religion, food and eating in North America. Here at the conclusion of this podcast episode, we trust that listeners understand a little bit more about what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion and have a deeper appreciation of religious freedom as a governing principle in the United States. Seeing to its protection as an indispensable part of the fragile American experiment in self-government.
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Kate, thank you for being with us today and doing the hard work of researching this fascinating area, which helped us all understand America a bit better. That is very enlightening and I hope you have enjoyed the time with us as well.
Kate: Very much and thanks Chris. I want to thank you for this podcast series. It is about such an important topic and we will help more of us to understand these dynamics about religion and America