Food Faiths: Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating

Food Faiths: Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating explores how individuals internalize scientific knowledge regarding health and diet, and then incorporate that information into their lives as the basis of a personal spiritual practice. In this book, Catherine L. Newell examines how science is used to justify a dietary lifestyle and investigates the world of “spiritual eating,” which is comprised of practitioners who identify themselves not by a religion but by their diet. These diets are based in diverse sciences such as anthropology, ecology, systems biology, nutritional studies, biomedicine, and physiology; adherents view their diet as a lifestyle, a path to enlightenment, and a nebulously defined point of “health.” This, in turn, enables the practitioner to locate themselves in relation to other members of their community, to older traditions suffused with religious practice, and to understand their praxis in relation to the entire biosphere. While on one level this project explores how food, health, and diet can be a source of spiritual fulfillment, on another level "Food Faiths" illustrates how science and religion are subsumed into a culture and merged to form the basis of an individual’s lived spiritual practice.