Fit for Food: "Eating Jewishly" and the "Islamic Paradigm" as Emergent Religious Foodways in Toronto

Abstract This project is about Jews and Muslims who participate in the food movement in Toronto, about how and why they do, and about what challenges and opportunities this presents to contemporary understandings of kashrut and halal as religious dietary laws. In early twenty-first century Canada, food is a site where consumer ethics and religious diversity intersect. The two groups I focus on are Shoresh Jewish Environmental Programs, a charitable organization running Jewish environmental practices at multiple satellite sites, and Noor Islamic Cultural Centre, a mosque where community members gather regularly for religious ritual and political and cultural events. Both are intentionally non-sectarian religious communities that invite pan-Jewish or pan-Muslim participation, have norms viewed as progressive by the wider religious community, and run considerable food-related programming that actively connects religion with alternative foodways. Both advocate for more “conscious” food practices, including local, organic, sustainable, humane, and social-justice-oriented food choices. They develop religious foodways that are, on the one hand, fundamentally connected to traditional religious food law, and on the other hand, significant departures from typical understandings of kashrut and halal. The foodways that emerge in this milieu are “eating Jewishly,” in relation to kashrut, and an “Islamic paradigm” for eating, in relation to halal. The aim of this comparative project is to show how religious communities do the work of constructing religion through material practices at once economic and symbolic. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork conducted with Noor and Shoresh from 2012 to 2015, I show how both organizations develop their religious foodways: as ethical interventions, as means of invigorating community, and as means for resisting industrialized orthodoxies. People at Noor and Shoresh bring religious life to bear on public lives, tying together social justice, environmentalism, and eating in a practice for recalibrating market values. Constructing religion as a domain of practical ethics, participants at Noor and Shoresh draw on religion for resources to develop emergent religious foodways that cut across and re-inscribe boundaries between insider and outsider, moral value and market value, and even Muslim and Jew.

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