Does God have a recipe? That’s the first line of the blurb of Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat: An American History by independent food historian, Christina Ward. Ward’s survey of American religious groups and cults through the foods they grow, source, and prepare leads into an in-depth discussion about cults and high-demand groups that use food, and food restrictions, as a method for control.
That’s not all she tells Derek—they also discuss the ritual of sharing a meal. Matthew and Julian offer their own reflections on food in high-demand settings before Christina joins to discuss her excellent book.
Show Notes
Holy Food
Christina Ward
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As much as some spiritual practitioners may assume that you can give it up and just live on air, we can't.
We need the food.
And so it becomes a really easy control mechanism to control people who are in the group, out of the group, people who are misbehaving in the group, people who are not following directions.
So it becomes very symbolic and as well as a useful tool.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today, we can add to that tagline that sometimes the strongest clues about the flavor of a high-demand group can be found in the ashram kitchen.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
We are on Instagram and threads over at Conspirituality Pod.
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American Spirituality 198, Holy Food with Christina Ward.
Does God have a recipe?
That's the first line of the blurb of Holy Food, How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat in American History, and that was written by independent food historian Christina Ward.
Christina is also the vice president and editor of Feral House, an independent publishing house that has published thousands of books since 1989.
And check out their website.
They cover a fantastic range of nonfiction topics.
But Christina reached out to me a few weeks ago presenting a couple of books that might be of interest to Conspiratuality, and she was definitely right.
But the first that I chose happened to be hers because it's really good.
I love stories about how religious groups form, and she does deliver that information.
She talks about the Shakers, Seventh-day Adventists, the Mormons, all the way through to back-to-the-land communes like Hog Farm, the Neo-Zen Buddhists who created the famous Tassajara in Northern California, radical feminists like Bloodroot Collective, she even gets into the atheistic and overtly political anarchists, the Motherfuckers.
Yeah, and just that shortlist gives a sense of how broad her project is here.
And I don't think the three of us are surprised by the ultra-purity fetishists or the neo-Luddites trying to learn how to farm or like religious artisanal bread makers.
Like, I think we are familiar with the ideological dietary constrictions and the eating rituals, but that's not all high-intensity groups.
So, yeah, like in the book we read about how the motherfuckers, these are guys who in the 1960s are out flinging shit at public officials or dumping trash into the Lincoln Center fountain, but they loved cooking up Quebec-style baked beans with salt pork, although with molasses instead of maple syrup.
And by the way, that was one of the names we were gonna have for the podcast, but then we found it was taken, right?
Right.
Then, so she talks about the shaker fish and eggs recipe.
Very old-timey, classic in shaker communities.
And in it, they use very cheap salted cod.
So, Christina covers these stories about religious ideals, but also about how class identities and revolutionary sentiments can take on a spiritual dimension that gets expressed through food.
And I just want to offer an observation very broad off the top that the groups that allow for more salt and animal fat in their menus seem to generally be more politically engaged in the world around them.
Uh-oh.
And for people who are interested, Christina enrolled her friends when she was researching this book and offers 75-ish recipes in the book from all these traditions.
They cooked and tried each meal at least twice before it made the final cut.
Very, very brave.
She does note that she did update some of the recipes because a lot of them are vegetarian and there are better vegetarian products on the market now, just easier to source tempeh and things like that.
So she did update some of the recipes, but she tried to stick to the true intention of them.
And I will say, as someone who cooks at least three nights a week and really enjoys the ritual food, some of these recipes are pretty bland, but that's actually kind of the point.
So cults and high-demand groups sometimes use food and often food restrictions as a method for control.
And that's why this book is perfect for our beat.
We've talked a ton about the methods that cult leaders and charismatic figures use to control their followers, but we've never devoted an entire episode to looking at the exact foods that they've used.
So Christine and I get into that a bit during an interview, but you'll really want to read the book to see just how pervasive food is in these groups.
Yeah, I would say method of control in some ways, but sometimes also it's just as simple as, you know, we all have to eat the leader's comfort food or special num-nums, so there can be this accidental quality as well.
Yeah, true.
Now, to be clear, food isn't only a method of control.
So, back-to-the-land groups had limited options for what they could grow when they were starting their communes, so their crops became a part of their identity.
Some American Muslim groups like the Moors and Nation of Islam follow Islamic dietary methods when they were scaling their operations to feed their communities.
You have the Source family.
They were covered in a great Netflix docuseries.
They opened one of Los Angeles' first vegetarian restaurants and really helped to lead that movement.
You have Sunburst Farms and the Hare Krishnas who scaled through cookbooks that appealed far beyond their groups.
So, Christina's book reminded me of how much food is part of our individual identities, as well as how many identities there are in America.
So while food rules may have started to distinguish edible foods from poisonous plants going back thousands of years here, food today is both a political and health statement.
And as we know well on the podcast and as she covers, food is often subject to mysticism and pseudoscience.
Yet, Christina generally lands where I do with food.
If you can afford to eat well on a daily basis or basically eat it all, that's wonderful.
But remember that sharing meals with your family, friends, and loved ones is a ritual that strengthens bonds and that food is something to be enjoyed.
I'm with you on the bonding, Derek, but it also holds a bitter irony because, you know, every high-demand group experience I've had trades on this basic, primal, like, family-friends economy, most groups, I think, earnestly want to share and they want to recruit.
And for many spiritual seekers, food will be the touchstone for comfort.
You go to the prayer meeting, and then you wonder about the snacks afterwards.
You're probably thinking about them during the lecture.
You go to the retreat center, you wonder about lunch.
Whatever the program is, food will be the break, the resting point, the time to chat, time away from the weird or intense or exhilarating content.
But then things change when you get deeper in, and we'll talk more about that.
Yeah, I thought I'd tell a story about food and spirituality.
I remember being at university in South Africa and on the library lawn where we all congregated en masse during lunchtime, the Hare Krishnas would set up their tables serving free food.
Buttery, carb-heavy, pungently flavored Indian food that was all vegetarian, And carried the aroma of otherworldly spirituality.
And then, of course, there was the incredibly sugary dessert, as sweet as the welcoming smiles of the Krishnas themselves in their robes, playing their distinctive drums and the harmonium with that unique, almost punk to us haircut shaved, except for that long piece at the back, right?
No, wait, but Julian, was the food really pungent?
Was it pungent?
Yeah, maybe they did it differently in Johannesburg, or maybe it was just in comparison to the food that I was used to, right?
That it just, it had this very distinctive flavor and smell that, you know, was noticeable.
It wasn't just sort of completely neutral.
Yeah, no, I want to say, you say buttery.
I'm guessing that it was like vegetable ghee, though, because that's a famous substitution in Krishna temples.
That's right.
Anyway, I asked about pungency because maybe they had an apostate in the kitchen because they're supposed to be all about the sattvic flavors, which are sweet and bland and floral.
So, there are long chapters in the Bhagavad Gita about how if you eat garlic or onions, you'll be rajasic or frenetic and you'll want to have sex.
Or if you eat leftovers or mushrooms, that's tamasic and you'll just be lazy and indolent.
And I always, like, well now anyway.
I didn't.
I used to really like that sort of schema, but I find it to be one of the sillier parts of religious food theory at this point, because it seems that people are just taking things that they just like or don't like and then giving them bio-spiritual meaning.
And with ISKCON, you really saw that with the sweets.
And, you know, for listeners who don't know much about Indian sweets, Basically, you boil milk and ghee down with jaggery or another form of sugar and ground pistachios into this paste, and then you thicken it with something like farina, and then you wind up with this dense, chewy log that's like a million calories per cubic inch.
It's like being hit in the head by, like, Willy Wonka wearing a dhoti or something.
And then if you add... It's intense.
If you add rose water to it, then they call it sattvic, right?
It will bring you closer to your pure nature.
And I'm like, come on, just eat the candy.
You do not need God's permission to eat the candy.
Yeah, those desserts are super intense.
And that's fascinating, the alchemy of how we sort of somehow make up for the fact that this is so incredibly sugary and stimulating with the rose water.
So yeah, it was a package deal, like entering into this rich cultural mist right there on the library lawn, and then hey, wouldn't you know it, here's a colorful illustrated book about reincarnation that you can buy for just a couple bucks!
Yeah.
So, I didn't really buy the book, but I bought into the idea that eating vegetarian was emblematic of being on a spiritual path, breaking the karma of killing animals and energetically consuming their fear, but also purifying myself, running on cleaner fuel.
And for me, that lasted about 20 years.
I would eventually become vegan for six of those 20 years.
But I think as my spirituality and my critical thinking evolved and as I confronted my diagnosis with Lyme disease and tried everything I could to heal and recover, including starting to eat meat again, and later as my faith in all natural supplements and cleansing products waned, My relationship to food and what it meant changed too.
And I'm so sorry to all of our sincere and dedicated philosophical vegans and activists out there.
I respect you.
I'm very familiar with your positions, but I eat an omnivore diet now and I've never been healthier by every measure.
You know, I think the best part about food restrictions, especially cultish food restrictions, is breaking them.
I will never forget the moment when after about five or six years of not touching meat or alcohol, I had a sip of red wine.
The sweet sin.
And a bit of medium rare steak and it was electric.
Like almost Almost mystical, and I think that experience was kind of a clue for me that when we're talking about radical changes in daily life having big impacts, I think a lot of the time we're just talking about novelty.
I remember I had tried the Master Cleanse when I was in that phase.
And on day four, I almost passed out in Equinox because I was working out.
And I was also teaching during that time.
And that was the last time I ever tried to fast or cleanse.
And I immediately went next door and got a slice of New York City pizza.
And man, that pizza will always be remembered.
And I will never do that to my body again.
Yeah.
You know, I wanted to give one positive story about ISKCON Dining because, you know, here in Toronto, there's an ex-Hare Krishna devotee who had lived at the temple downtown and worked in the kitchen for Govinda's Cafe.
I think she left because the poverty and the neglect and the authoritarianism was just too much.
But later in life, she developed this massage business informed by Ayurvedic principles, and she also hosted the local Sanskrit pundit whose name was Mantri, and he was this old guy.
He was the teacher of Robert Svoboda, if you know that name.
Mantri held classes at her little apartment two times per week.
He was a really good teacher.
And she cooked all of the best Hare Krishna dishes for those evenings, but with better ingredients.
And she owned the kitchen, of course.
And so, it felt like continuous with her old life, but it was also hers, like she'd been able to take some of the good stuff with her.
Well, on a related but completely different note, I also want to mention Ellen G. White, who in the 1860s co-founded the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which Christina actually mentions in the interview and in the book.
I've always found White fascinating for a few different reasons.
One is that she is one of the case studies that I've come across that supports my theory, and I'm not alone in this, that many prophets and founders of religions likely have Temporal lobe epilepsy, more specifically a related condition called Gershwin's syndrome.
That's like L. Ron Hubbard is in there, right?
Yeah, probably.
Probably.
I actually haven't looked into him too much in that regard.
Ellen, as it turns out, you'll see why this is relevant, was struck in the face By a large stone as a child and she was never the same again.
She spends a long time recovering in her bed and she began having religious visions.
She wrote endless pages about what God wanted humanity to do and not to do and she became increasingly disgusted by sex.
So, I've mentioned before, I think I had a mild and now resolved case of that following a number of seizures in my 20s.
But luckily, I became a podcaster.
I didn't get disgusted with sex or found a religion.
But I do write way too much.
But definitely, definitely this period of seizures was completely coincident with my writing just going through the roof in a really obsessive way.
Yeah, so interestingly, the sex piece seems like it can go either way.
So it's either intensely positive or intensely negative in an obsessive sort of way.
There's something, it seems, about how the temporal lobe seizures amplify and overload specific connections between the sensory and emotional centers that then link, when it's really pronounced, the hyper-religiosity, hypergraphia, or the preoccupation with writing a lot, and the hyper-focus on sex.
But related to this for Ellen G. White was that she got very focused on food.
She wrote several books giving advice on what to eat and what not to eat in order to enact what she called health reform.
And in one of those books she wrote that fruit, nuts, and vegetables constitute the diet chosen for us by our creator.
So she was an advocate of vegetarianism.
She believed that meat and caffeine and spicy food inflamed our emotions and our sexuality.
Not unfamiliar here.
And that all of that runs counter to living a godly life.
Now, one historical oddity I came across is that Ellen founded some of the earliest spiritual retreat or health resort centers in the US.
And in order to do so, she hired an inventor, physician and businessman named John Harvey Kellogg, who you may have heard of, to help create the menu and the practices at her Battle Creek Sanitarium.
Visitors there enjoyed yogurt enemas because he was an early proponent of the importance of intestinal flora.
You know, it sounds like he was serving them, man.
You have to rephrase that.
They also enjoyed sunbathing, hydrotherapy, and exercise, and of course they abstained from alcohol, tobacco, and sex.
They ate the earliest forms of breakfast cereal that would become associated later with the Kellogg name, and these were developed by him so as to curb masturbation and sexual desire.
Yep.
And I should add, he also believed that natural health would remove the need for smallpox vaccination.
And he was devoted to segregation and the race realism of eugenics for decades.
So he probably would have been a frequent guest on Joe Rogan if he was around today.
You know, there has to be a scholar of Kellogg out there who knows whether he got the cornflakes idea from Indian sources because in Ayurveda, corn is known as a cooling diuretic.
And if you eat enough of it, you cool down your passions and dry up your balls.
But I also think we should point out the psychoanalytic obvious here that religious groups obsessed with suppressing sex end up having to talk about it incessantly.
And I think that that is actually their pornography.
That is how they have Yes.
sex while also rejecting it.
Yeah, very, very focused on sex as a way of not, not being sexual.
Yes.
Derek, I really enjoyed listening to this interview.
It's such a fantastic topic.
I particularly liked her observations that we are incredibly complicated biological machines and basically anyone trying to sell you a simple solution to bodily health is probably not worth your trust.
She also mentions a couple of times how newer religious movements like the ones we cover a lot have to work harder to establish the barrier between in and out groups and what is deemed authentic in this newly invented context.
She also talks about how high demand groups will use various restrictions as ways of establishing control.
And so food is often part of that, of course, along with sex and sleep and how you dress and how you cut your hair.
Yeah, I mean, it's a common subject for us, control and high demand groups, but sometimes control can look like chaos.
I mean, groups will restrict sex or they might encourage you to partner swap.
Guru Jagat wants everyone to wear pseudo-sick turbans, but you better also look fashionable.
When I was at Endeavor Academy, the menus were often dictated by whatever the leader, Charles Anderson, was obsessing over at the time, like sweet corn, tofu dogs, popcorn.
Or it was determined by whatever was on sale through Cisco, which is the industrial bulk food distributor we ordered from whenever we could pay the bill.
So if five kilo bags of mac and cheese were on special, then mac and cheese was suddenly like a sacramental food.
Yeah, like you said, there's an accidental quality to it.
There's also this intense identification with the leader in such a way that if they like something, well, then it must be chosen somehow divinely that we all are supposed to eat it, right?
Yeah, especially if it's naughty.
Especially if it's transgressive, I think.
And I think you see that with everybody from Adi Da to Amy Carlson, right?
Yes, I was going to say, I noticed that Christine in the interview mentions Adi Dan.
That's exactly right.
Just like following him through his different obsessions and addictions.
I think that the appeal of belonging to immersive religious groups and cults is that they provide answers, right?
At an existential level, the promise is that the uncertainty, the anxiety, The confusion will be resolved and transcended via structure, faith, devotion that covers sort of every aspect of life.
And then instead of serving as a support for our lives, the particular spirituality takes our lives over and there's an all-consuming commitment and obsession to every aspect having to be in alignment with the belief system.
Setting ourselves aside from the sleepwalking, impure, unenlightened masses has to be symbolized not only by how we pray or meditate or dress or wear our hair, but also how we abstain from sex or intoxicants, how we cleanse toxins and reject low vibration food.
Yeah, so I alluded to this before, which is that the food of the high demand group can draw you into the group, but then the tricky thing is that food rules and austerities will come later.
Like if you go to that vegetarian feast at ISKCON here in Toronto, You will get all-you-can-eat sweet rice, mung gruel, chana dal, lightly curried vegetables, and tapioca pudding flavored with flowers.
But if you take vows and you start living at the temple, you won't be eating off the buffet anymore.
and your dessert rations will go way down.
So this friend that I have that I referred to before, you know, she talked about people in the group
who suffered from malnutrition.
And there's this idea out there that this can be a conscious strategy
by the group admins to create compliant members.
But I think it's a lot more about avarice and budgets than anything else.
And just sort of plain old cruelty.
I think you'd have to be a real sociopath and a dietician to figure out how to reduce a person's calories enough to make them placid, but not so much as to make them sick.
And you definitely don't want your occult members to be sick, because then they're more of a burden to take care of.
But I also wanted to share a couple of clear memories about mealtimes and cults and to ask you if they resonated with you, Julian, from your memories hanging out with forest yoga people.
There was initially a cheerfulness at mealtime that eventually gave way to a kind of feeling of Malaise by the time I was fully in the group.
Like if you sat down with fellow members, you know, later on when you were fully involved, it wasn't like the early days because the small talk was over.
You had little to talk about beyond the content of the cult itself.
If you brought up random worldly stuff, your fellow members wouldn't know about it or they would think it was, you know, gauche or something.
So you couldn't talk about your real life, which is what we do over food, because the agreement you shared was that you'd left your real life at the door.
And so the irony is that you've come to this place to seek community, and you might find it for a little while, but then the halo starts to wobble, and you're way more isolated before.
So there was a lot of, like, sad and pious chewing in silence.
Does that resonate at all, Julian?
Yeah, I mean there's this way that all subjects get rolled into one, right?
To kind of appropriate that term.
that essentially there's only one thing to talk about and it's how we're sort of, you know,
we're working on this very particular practice that is supposed to have these milestones
and these ways in which we're having breakthroughs and we're healing and we're coming to realize
the ultimate truth experientially in each of our lives.
And so everything devolves to that.
Any topic you bring up is gonna come back around to that.
And as you said, a lot of topics, there's just gonna be no resonance whatsoever
because people are not focused on the outside world as much.
Or there'd be this like tyranny of happiness where like I would sit down across
from like an old timer lady every day and she would beam at me like this,
like skeletal Stepford wife and say, isn't it wonderful dear one?
Like, isn't it wonderful that we're here?
Aren't we so blessed by these miracles every day?
And, like, I don't know how I avoided losing it, like, throwing my tray across the room.
But then something else can happen in the ashram dining hall because There is bland food, there is the exhaustion of small talk, there's the platitudes people repeat.
But, you know, if you get involved in cleaning up, or even cooking, you can change the channel with your fellows.
And I found that some of my best cult experiences were in the kitchen, actually, cooking for 300 people.
And I learned from these Italian guys from Australia.
And there was that one time that I tried to scale up a recipe from the mediocre Moosewood Vegetarian Cookbook.
It was a recipe for cheesy beans, and it just turned out terribly.
Like, we wound up serving these undercooked, crunchy red kidney beans with, like, squeaky mozzarella cheese.
But for the most part, it went really well.
And being in the ashram kitchen, you get to see how the ashram sausage is made.
Like, that is real work.
Maybe it's the only real work that goes on at the ashram, because food either turns out or it doesn't.
Like, it has nothing to do with the cult leader's teaching.
You've got the raw materials, you've got the stove, you've got big stainless pots, cutting boards.
You can see how you're only as good as your ingredients.
Like, it's material. You can see that mantras won't remove too
much salt. You can see that the ashram kitchen is like a reality principle, a hub for reality in a
spun-out world.
And so I'm not surprised that I formed my only friendships there, based in part on being able to talk openly about how full of shit the place was.
And that came naturally during the experience of working, of making something real.
I think that had I not worked in the kitchen, I might have actually stayed for longer.
So, let's step back and tell me, how did that idea first come into your mind?
For me, the connection to food and religion was always there.
I grew up in kind of a mixed household.
My dad was pretty atheistic and my mom was a Catholic.
I also spent summers on my grandmother's very rural farm where most people were pretty Protestant, that's North Central Wisconsin.
So you've got a lot of Minnesota Lutheran, Wisconsin Lutheran, that kind of vibe going on.
And so seeing just all of the different ways that people used food to express both their belief and also to kind of define their beliefs became like incredibly fascinating to me at a very young age.
And it's one of those obsessions that just never left.
One of the aspects of it that I'm particularly interested in is how entwined morality and food is.
We see this all the time in the wellness influencer space.
It is how a lot of the people that we cover sell supplements or diet plans because this idea that you are a better person if you eat a certain way, but this has a long religious history and you do get into that a bit in the book.
Yeah, it does have a very long history.
Aristotle talked about the kind of right behaviors, especially surrounding food.
And he really outlined what became the seven deadly sins and then Thomas Aquinas further defining what gluttony is.
And it had that real moralistic take on it.
Because I think where it all stems back to in the Seventh-day Adventists really, really hammered in on this point was your body does not belong to you.
It belongs to God.
And so there's some text throughout the New Testament that really speaks of, and people will probably be familiar with that, your body is a temple.
But that notion that it doesn't belong to you, your carcass, and so you have to treat it like a godly thing.
And that you are somehow not just immoral, but also irreligious if you're polluting that temple.
And so, with that just as the undercurrent, that is, I think, the genesis of so much of the moral compunction about eating and not eating and how we view what our bodies are supposed to be.
And it's kind of amazing because it just transferred from, I mean, America is generally a less
religious country, but there is a lot of spirituality here.
I mean, this goes back centuries in some ways, but even now that impulse to assign morality
still exists.
I mean, where did you see it strongest in all of your research?
Everywhere.
That morality is, especially if we think about the origins of the United States for as spiritually
evolved, especially as many kind of modern Americans will say, oh, I'm not religious.
I'm spiritual.
But if you start picking away a little bit about what they actually believe and practices, it very Calvinistic.
It goes back to this like Calvinistic idea, which is again, very Protestant, very fundamental, very restrictive in practice.
And so it, People are unaware of that influence in the United States.
And so, I think that's like, of course, there's little spikes throughout time, but I think that's a through line throughout American history is how we view the morality and the food issue.
And it just matters how we kind of publicly proclaim that.
A lot of times, I'm sure your work uncovers that too, there is a lot of moralistic judgment going on in the modern wellness community as well.
Yeah, and I've always found that spiritual but not religious connotation pretty funny because you're essentially still talking about a metaphysics regardless of what the specific belief system is.
And it is interesting in the ways that human psychology and at times I would say when it comes to food, neuroses around food manifests regardless of the belief.
There needs to be a sort of metaphysics behind it.
Would you agree with that?
I would.
Absolutely.
I think because food becomes a real tangible thing.
We need it.
We cannot give it up.
As much as some spiritual practitioners may assume that you can give it up and just live on air, we can't.
We need the food.
And so it becomes a really easy control mechanism.
To control people who are in the group, out of the group, people who are misbehaving in the group, people who are not following directions.
So it becomes very symbolic and as well as a useful tool for controlling people.
And we'll get into some specific instances that you bring up in your book, but you also note a connection between food cultures and the American obsession with authenticity, and I want you to tease that apart a little bit.
Sure.
I find that humorous to me, the contradictions in being American and who we are.
And part of that is that notion of authenticity.
We all have a personal history, right?
We all, you know, it's in the great words of Bill Murray from the movie Stripes.
You know, we got kicked out of every other country in the world.
We're mutts.
And yet, because of that amalgamated identity, we cling to an ancestral identity.
And that plays into this idea of authenticity with food.
From the earliest days of cookbook history, people coming over from European countries, and then later the enslavement, bringing food from the West African countries, It was looking for a connection to something that never really existed.
It's a form of nostalgia, which is, again, if there was a national religion for the United States, it's nostalgia.
And so that authenticity plays Am I guilty of it?
Of course.
My paternal relatives came over to the United States for the most part, on bulk, in the late 1600s and 1700s.
Do I have a great-grandmother who's Irish on my maternal side?
I do.
Am I Irish?
Yeah, a little bit.
Because of just that culturation and what does that purity mean?
And so it's that search for identity that causes us to look for authentic expression.
And that really plays out in these new religious movements, both in how they're going to interpret the food traditions and the actual spiritual traditions as well.
About who is more authentic on something that was just recently invented is Silly, but it happens all the time.
My wife laughs because she says she's never seen someone eat as many potatoes in as many different formats as I do.
And I am 98% genetically Eastern European.
So, there is something, whether it's the upbringing or that comfort food, but we can't escape our biology, that's for sure.
Yeah.
And it's funny because if we think about just, I mean, from the food history point of view, potatoes, they're a new world food.
They're not specifically thousands of years ago related to any European type of tuber.
And yet so identified with my husband's, you know, ancestrally Polish, like second generation.
So again, lots of potatoes, Irish, lots of potatoes, English, lots of potatoes.
All of these foods become part of that identity, whether it is a pierogi or, you know, colcannon.
There are foods that get associated with who we are, and more so with some of the religious practices, especially in the United States, because it speaks to authenticity.
I've eaten many people's worth of pierogis in my life, and I'm still going.
And I make no apologies.
Pierogies are fantastic.
I love in looking and investigating in some of the cookbooks published by these cult and new religious movements is one of my favorite recipe was in the Rajneeshee cookbook.
They had a recipe for pierogies.
They served pierogies at Rancho Rajneeshee.
I am not far from there.
I mean, Portland's not that close, but it's not that far from there.
I was just talking to someone the other day about how people from the city of Portland got indoctrinated into that cult as well.
You kind of view it, as the documentary did, as this sort of mountainous place removed from everywhere, but there were plenty of people flocking from this area into that as well.
That is what I have to ask because you bring in so many recipes in this book as well, which is fantastic.
You write that every recipe was tested at least twice before you published it.
You updated some of it with ingredients, of course, and such.
But what is the most bizarre food that you found in your research?
There's a few from the late 60s period and then the early 1900s, when in the early days of vegetarianism, people are really trying to figure it out.
The Seventh-day Adventists, the Mazdaznans, the Rosicrucians, all kind of give up meat based on their interpretation of their various holy scriptures, but they're still looking to try to get protein.
So those are the recipes that are the weirdest of trying to figure out how do you mash together beans with a couple of other things and make it taste like something familiar.
Because as a recruitment tool and trying to get people to adhere to a specific diet, you wanted to try to have things taste as similar to the kind of original familiar food.
And so then later in the 60s, I call out in the book, the true light beaver commune of Of Woodstock, New York, because they were making some just vile things.
I'm still half convinced that some of those recipes were just a joke.
I have a sort of agreement, I don't know, with my wife.
We split cooking duties.
She is a fantastic cook.
I'm getting better.
But three nights a week, we switch off and then we go out and whatever.
But I've been using the New York Times cooking app for the last three months.
It is fantastic.
It is such a good A place to find recipes and then create your own variations on it.
And so when I got your book and I was reading it, I'm like, okay, let me experiment with some of these.
And reading through them, I have to admit, I'm like, I don't know if I could make most of these.
But I'm sure there are some that are great and you can, I also like spice, so I would need to add that.
But I asked about bizarre foods.
What are some that you actually really enjoyed from your research here?
Coming back to the House of David, the Rinkum Diddy is fantastic.
It's kind of a version of a rare bit, so you can't go wrong with a really nice buttered toast with a cheese dip.
That was one of my favorites, actually.
Then there are a few that seem a bit odd, and again, people should feel free if they want to try them to add a little salt and pepper, because again, rejecting spices was part of the religious traditions and the beliefs for many ways, so they are kind of under-spiced in general.
Yeah.
But the macrobiotic pot pie is actually, if you add a little salt and peppers, is pretty good.
But reading it, when you read through, it's very putsy, overly putsy.
And if you read through it, it looks like it may not taste very good at all, but it actually does if you add a little salt and pepper.
I am an atheist with a degree in religion, so I find storytelling fascinating, as I know you are as well because you write about that.
And reading the entire book was just fantastic because this is the type of research that I love doing.
But I'm also like, if I was ever in a religion and they were like, you can't use spice, I don't know if I could stay in.
I'm sure you guys, I mean, I know you guys talk about Hassan, Steve Hassan's The Bite Model, and these are those tests, the pressure tests, and that's part of it, especially more in modern, when I talk about modern, like kind of post-World War II, new religious groups, is there was a belief about spices and about what they would do and what they couldn't do and what they could cause and the reaction from them.
But also, it was a pressure test.
Would you obey?
Were you willing to give up like this thing as simple as like salt, you know, as any kind of spice?
And if you were, of course, it made you more susceptible to the other kind of dictums and rules you had to follow.
I think it's really fascinating too, on the converse side, if you look at like Hare Krishna cuisine, it's really sweet.
It's extra sweet.
Why?
Well, Prabhupada loved, had a sweet tooth, and as well as that was sugar.
That was the only thing that would trigger, you know, the happy cells in your brain that the Hare Krishnas allowed for themselves.
So, you get this really little, you know, tweaks to recipes and flavors based on, you know, anything, any kind of interpretation, any kind of belief, even just personal preferences.
Now, you argue that the most important aspects of food and religion in America come down to the First Amendment and tax codes.
Can you unpack that a little bit?
Oh, sure.
For me, this is my big theory.
And why only in the United States we have this just growth industry in new religious movements and cults, because in other countries there are state religions.
You know, some of them are pretty lax at this point of, you know, where it's a state-mandated religion, but the government does have control.
For example, like in Germany, Scientology is outlawed in Germany.
You just cannot be a Scientologist.
Jehovah's Witnesses are illegal in Russia.
In the United States, because of the First Amendment, bam, the United States cannot make a law against any type of religion.
So that's thing one.
That started it.
And then by the turn of the kind of late 1800s, early 1900s, with the implementation of the tax codes that essentially established non-profits and churches as non-profits, allowed these new religious movements to Incorporate in a way that allowed them to start earning revenue.
Now, we can get into some pretty weedy areas of tax law and nonprofit accounting, but statistically, the IRS does not go after many, many, many churches in enforcing any kind of tax law.
And because of that, And because that's a nervous thing.
Anytime you go after a church under that First Amendment, people get a little nervous.
And so that's allowed everybody to grow, have businesses, sell crystals, do whatever they want.
And as long as it's part of the mission, it's okay.
You don't have to pay taxes on that.
But you're not supposed to support any political parties.
And as we've been covering recently with a bunch of episodes on Christian nationalism, they're just looking that right in the face and saying, yeah, no, this is a political movement now.
Yeah, exactly.
And when I've done a couple live presentations, I do have a like a little slide and that is a legitimate from the like about 2010 era.
From an accounting agency that specializes in religious organizations.
And it gives, it outlines exactly what you're not supposed to do.
And when I show that image, most people bust out laughing because Every religious movement, especially on the right at this point, is violating those IRS rules.
But yet, you know, I don't see any agency having the guts or the wherewithal to go after any of these groups at this time.
No, I don't see it in the near future either, unfortunately.
But let's get into a couple of the stories here, because you make a connection that I actually wrote about in my first book in 2005, and that's the Indian influence on the Rastafari in Jamaica.
So there were these Nyabinghe communities that people often look at as African communities, rightfully.
But in the 1830s, Indians came over to work on the Clarendon Plantation, as indentured servants and they brought their culture with
them.
And as the Africans were freed, they were free, but they also needed to generate revenue.
So many of them also worked as indentured servants as well.
And those two communities came together.
So the Hindus at the time, they brought marijuana to Jamaica, which didn't exist there before.
So the whole reggae and marijuana connection comes from India.
Dreadlocks, as well, is called jatawi.
The notion of karma ended up influencing Rastafari theology, but then you also get Ital cooking, which is based partly on Ayurveda.
cooking. So I very rarely see that story told. It's something that I had to special order
a book from Jamaican University 20 years ago to really unpack and find out about. So how
did you come across that piece of information?
My background is history and then specifically food history.
What I enjoy doing is really trying to find these connections that other folks, and your research was fantastic on that, and that actually uncovers a little bit.
And you know what it's like, everybody listening, once you get an idea or find a little piece of information, if you keep picking at it, you're going to find more.
So going into actual some of the history of Jamaica itself, and then there was a fantastic book that was published about a year ago, but of course the scholar who wrote it had been writing papers and things, that essentially wrote the history of Jamaican cuisine.
And it's like a thousand page book and it's incredible.
But some of his earlier papers were really, really helpful in going into some of the detail that you just touched on about this connection because it is also underwritten in American versions of Caribbean history is the Indian Influence, as well as the Jewish influence and how that affected both the food and the culture and the belief systems, which goes to what you mentioned with Rastafari is this belief as the lost tribe of Israel.
So, as part of that lost tribes theory, which is an undercurrent in a lot of American new religious movements, Rasta believes that they are part of the lost tribes and that kind of came through from Yeah, later today for another project I'm working on, I'll be talking to a St.
Thomas reggae singer actually.
He's from St.
of the larger diaspora.
Yeah, later today for another project I'm working on, I'll be talking to a St. Thomas reggae singer,
actually, he's from St. Thomas, and his brother moved to Israel in the 1970s
to become part of one of the communes there.
And there's this large commune of Jews that live in Ethiopia that trace their lineage back to the biblical times as well.
And of course, the language is Aramaic that was used in the Bible originally.
And these stories exist and we have such a myopic view sometimes, especially what's going on in Israel right now of like binaries.
But From what I've found in all of the years that I was working as a world music writer, which also spilled into cuisine as well at times, is that when people congregate, and yes, it's not always under the best terms, of course, but they share their food with one another.
And that's such an important aspect of the evolution of our species, I would think.
I think it's the primary evolution of our species.
Because if we think about it, just from that most basic view, if I give you a cookie, Trust me that I'm not poisoning you.
At that most basic, you're trusting me to give you food that is unpoisoned and clean and tasty.
And we form a bond when we share food together.
I mean, that's a very primal, basic thing.
And part of the earliest cash route, some of the food rules and the food rules you see with the Janes are really about protecting people from poisoning, from
that first iteration. And then of course about building community, about who's in, who's out, how do
we recognize members of our tribe? And a lot of it becomes like we eat the same
food or we don't eat the same food. And it does evolve from there. And I think it's how
we become human and more specifically, it's how we become American. When you talked about
authenticity, I love going to grocery stores, you go to the grocery store and curry pizzas.
You can see frozen pizzas, curry pizzas.
I love that.
Is that authentic?
It's authentic to the United States because that's what we do here.
We just take it all and we make something new out of it.
My views on this idea of appropriation come from there because I definitely think cultural appropriation exists in certain circumstances, but I think sometimes people get a too Little too fanatical about it because of what we've just said.
People are interested in exchange and explore, and there are so many ways of doing that that it doesn't just honor the past, it also just shows where we are now as people, which I think is equally relevant.
We become Americans through our stomach.
From sharing lunches, from seeing what other people are eating at school lunches, from being made fun of, from having something different is a very American experience.
for good and bad. This is how we are introduced to different cultures and different foods.
My wife is an army brat and her mother is from Thailand and And so growing up in the American South on all the army bases, she would be bringing Thai lunches and no one knew what that was.
So she got a lot of flack at that time.
Now take that today and Thai food is one of the most popular cuisines in America.
Absolutely.
And that's what I think is, when I was a kid, there was no such thing as a Taco Tuesday.
Tiki Masala Thursday, Samosa Saturday, right?
It's all coming.
We just can't get enough.
And it comes back to this idea of identity.
We need to carve out an identity for ourselves and so it goes to a new spiritual practice, a new eating practice, and when you can combine the two together, then it fulfills that little like sweet spot in our brains that we've somehow elevated, that we're somehow part of something we weren't before, we're members of a group and we found our people.
It's a very social communal kind of aspect to how people develop cuisines around their spiritual practices.
Well, let's talk about that.
That's actually the next question on my list here because there is this movement in the 60s and 70s that happens, this back to the land movement, which combines everything you've been mentioning.
It combines a certain form of nostalgia.
Authenticity is there as well.
But one of the places your work sort of dovetails with what we do at Conspirituality is this idea of this purity of foods that happen in these communal spaces.
And sometimes this leads to eating disorders, especially I would think in high-demand groups where you can only eat certain things.
Having suffered from an eating disorder, I know very well the sort of psychology that is involved when you're thinking about what you can and can't eat all the times.
So, did you find any hints of this or patterns in earlier incarnations of this ideology of the Back to the Lamb movement where food was being weaponized in this manner?
Absolutely.
It's a very not-as-popular, not-as-famous cult group from the late 1800s, early 1900s, based in Milwaukee and Chicago, which is, I'm a Midwesterner, the Maz-Daz-Nan.
It was this pseudo-resurrected zoroasterism, and it had a highly prescribed eating system.
You had to follow seasonality.
There were certain foods you could only eat certain times of year.
There was very rigid fasting, and they got taken to court numerous times on child custody and child abuse issues because, say, a non-custodial parent at the time or a parent who wasn't in the group You know, was at their wit's end and seeing their child essentially be starved in many ways.
And that was one of the earliest groups of earliest documented that you're seeing that type of highly restrictive eating have severely negative effects, especially for children who never chose to be there anyways.
You see it a little bit later too weaponized in a way of suppressing protein intake.
A lot of the groups with high control suppressed protein intake because if we think about from a basic nutrition point of view, if we don't get enough protein, we're fairly lethargic, our brains aren't working as well, and when our brains aren't firing on all cylinders, we're much more susceptible to just kind of command, obey kind of a structure.
So there's that two elements.
It's the purity of belief.
Somebody, a true believer, like I'm thinking of an Adi Da who had this highly restrictive They were nearly breatharians.
You should only drink this very alkaline kind of smoothie.
And it's just detrimental to health overall.
So those are some of the earlier groups that then morph into the later groups.
I thought it was very interesting on the farm, which started as a very spiritual movement and then later just kind of was back to land, worked very hard to solve the problems of nutrition, but in doing so, embraced the cult of authenticity.
Now, there's another aspect you bring up, which is this attribution of disease to food.
And we also, we talk about this a lot, we see this a lot in wellness spaces where certain foods are demonized because it causes cancer or whatever.
And you write about Ann Wigmore, who claimed that AIDS was due to malfunctioning digestive system and cancer toxins that could be removed with wheatgrass.
So, how often did you find this sort of magical thinking around food in your research?
All the time.
There's a lot of magical thinking.
We see it today.
Bill Maher.
I mean, if you've watched Bill Maher pontificate about that, it's a pet peeve of mine because it's easy if you have a professional chef who's working full time to provide gourmet vegan meals to follow a very healthy, you know, prescribed healthy plant-based diet, which again, statistically, medically, Blue zone studies show that a plant-based high vegetable diet is probably long-term healthiest in modern America for all these reasons of our food.
So how it becomes this idea of then It's always been this idea of associating, it goes back to where we started talking about the morality.
So if you're fat, there's that moral aspect of it.
So you're either eating too much food or you're eating the wrong food.
And that's where this idea of wrong and right.
There's also, I know you guys have talked about the whole, the enema thing, which is just bazonkers in my mind.
I always laugh when I see it come back.
Every generation or so has this enema movement.
And that goes back to the 1800s as well, because it gave some immediate, provable, tangible results.
So if somebody was feeling ill, they're constipated, they evacuate, they feel better.
And so there was that Good point.
I gave up on Bill Maher, finally, the last season or two.
I was a fan for a long time, even when I didn't agree with him.
I'm actually working on a bonus episode about that right now.
things are easily reinforced by that immediate result.
And that's not necessarily a good result.
It's just a result.
Good point.
I gave up on Bill Maher finally the last season or two.
I was a fan for a long time, even when I didn't agree with him.
I'm actually working on a bonus episode about that right now.
Like when do you finally stop engaging with people that you, you know, because it's not
healthy to just write off anyone you don't agree with.
But then there's like this drive towards a certain contrarianism that's been happening.
I never liked his stance on the fat shaming around foods, which he did for a long time in his show.
The anti-vax stuff finally pushed me over the edge, I think.
Because that's a more difficult one for me to handle, to take anyone seriously.
But there is this real anti-obesity fat shaming that happens in those spaces that can be very difficult for people.
I didn't see as much talk about that in your book, but did you come across any of that sort of ideological thinking where fat became a moral issue as well?
Absolutely.
It was throughout.
I chose not to talk about that.
That was a conscientious choice on my part.
As someone, I'll confess, I'm a hundred pounds lighter than I was maybe five years ago.
And it wasn't because I ate a bucket of fried chicken.
It turns out I had a very severe long-term illness that went undiagnosed for a long time.
And so based on my personal experience with both The health industry and food and working in food, it's one of my very sore spots about this idea of moralizing and then adding the religious component on top of those judgments about obesity because
Science knows differently.
We are complex machines, and there is no single solution to some of these epidemics.
Now, how do we get out of that?
That I don't have an answer for.
And that, unfortunately, because we don't have a singular answer or kind of a consensus, It opens the door for all of this woo stuff, for everybody's theories that coffee enemas, a vegan-only diet, and the moral judgments.
And so you did come across... The Oneida were very judgmental.
They had the weekly circles where everybody would accuse each other of stuff that they didn't like for the week.
A very model of modern cults do that as well.
And they would do a lot of fat shaming.
In their group and call out people and it was always based on gluttony, this notion of gluttony.
Growing up overweight is what led to my eating disorder and grappling with that for so much of my adult life.
So I think we share a similar sentiment around that.
Thank you for unpacking that a little bit though.
One other place that moralizing happens a lot and sometimes for good reason, but often like it becomes its own sort of religion as well as vegetarianism.
I was a vegetarian for almost 20 years.
Two years vegan.
And I know the psychology behind it.
And I think you can eat any sort of diet and be healthy.
So, I don't regret not being that anymore or the time that I did spend.
But it did very much become a political and health movement in the 70s and 80s.
And you write about this, the Seventh-day Adventists, which you talked about, other Christian theosophical groups.
So, Blavatsky was doing this in the late 19th century, promoting vegetarianism.
How influential has that been on the American landscape coming up through these different religious groups and cults?
Absolutely influential.
I'm indebted for some of the research work that was done by fellow Portlander Jonathan Kaufman.
In his great book, Hippie Food, he really outlines that effect that these new religious movements and communes and co-op movements had on this idea of vegetarianism.
It became a political thing in the 70s.
So accepting vegetarianism and then veganism was essentially a rejection of whatever your parents were, a rejection of the mainstream.
It was another way to separate and identify yourself.
As well as that early environmental movements and seeing the outcomes of industrial farming and all of the negatives that go along with that, as well as then people's personal moral beliefs about eating animals, influenced again by some of the Indian, the Hindu and Jain religions that are coming in.
And so all of these influences come together to create this vegetarian as superior mindset And that's where that generated and we've never left it.
And what I see is this acceleration.
And this happens in all of these kind of new spiritual movements is they take an illogical concept and they follow it to its logical extreme.
And so if we're going to start kind of demonizing food in any way, You have to keep demonizing different foods, and then you get to a point where you're only, like the Janes, eating fallen fruit and regenerative leaves.
So we have to be, I think, personally really careful about being morally judgmental about the food itself.
The food did not ask you to judge it.
It's just there.
So, last question.
I've asked you about the bizarre food, your favorite food, but I know as someone who has my own tract of doing this work of studying religion, some groups just appeal to me.
I kind of wonder what it would be like being involved in that.
Were there any groups that you've looked at and been like that really just kind of struck you as something that you were personally fascinated by?
There's a few, and it very much reveals more about me than anything else, is I would probably do well.
The Shakers, I thought the Shakers were great as a very feminist, women-centered, refuge kind of commune belief system.
I think they were fairly idealistic, and I thought, you know, that is a great place to retire and be an old lady at.
The Source family, the infamous Source family of LA, seemed to have the most fun.
And so that would have been fun to dip in.
One of the groups that to me is so lovely and benign, there's two of them.
Well, benign so far.
One I know is fairly benign, which is the Unarians.
They are followers of the Book of Urantia.
And their whole practice is about eating cake and creative arts, like arts and crafts and cake.
That's my sweet spot right there.
I'm a sweet, so that's pretty good.
And then other one, there's a new one.
And if you're in like the California area, or I think there's some in Arizona, is Loving Hut Vegan Restaurants.
They are owned by a group run by, I think, Madame Shanghai, something like that.
And it's called, oh, Very Love.
And they're very innocuous.
They have a YouTube channel and they just want everybody to meditate on world peace.
And then they own vegan restaurants that are actually pretty delicious.
That's funny.
I've cycled by the Loving Hut in Portland a number of times.
I'm looking at it now, and I do recognize it.
I did not know it was a religious group, so thank you.
Yeah, definitely go in because, again, the food is fantastic, and they're very low-key.
They're not going to be in your face, and there'll always be a little bit of their paperwork and what they're about on the counter.
You're free to take, so check it out.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
