Food Faiths: Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating by Catherine L. Newell (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Food Faiths: Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating by Catherine L. Newell
• Jonathan D. Riddle

Catherine L. Newell. Food Faiths: Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2023. ix + 253 pp. ( 978-1-79362-006-4).

Critics of diet and exercise cultures often complain that people treat their health practices like religions. They intend this observation as a critique. Comparison to religion in this context implies that devotees demonstrate excessive zeal for their lifestyles, expect too much from mere regimen, and, especially, engage in unwelcome proselytization. In Food Faiths: Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating, historian Catherine L. Newell rejects this dismissive attitude and takes the resemblance between diets and religion seriously, exploring where food-focused lifestyles fit into the history of religion in the United States and how they operate as spiritual practices today.

Newell begins by situating the diets she denominates food faiths—veganism, Paleo, and various ancestral diets—within sociological conceptions of religious change in the last half century. According to the framework proposed by Robert Wuthnow and others, American believers moved from faiths focused on "dwelling" (p. 19) in traditions and institutions in the mid-twentieth century to "seeking" (p. 20) new forms of extra-institutional spirituality during the counter-culture years. Now, following the rise of the religiously unaffiliated, many believers simply focus on cultivating a "spiritual practice" (p. 22).¹ Food faiths fit into this final stage, Newell argues. Here she proposes a secularization narrative. For as much as we should understand dieting as "a new form of spiritual practice" (p. 24), this practice derives not from belief in deities or scriptures but from belief in science. Dieting is not so much like religion; it has replaced religion, becoming "secular theology for the science-minded" (p. 14).

In the next two chapters—the longest of the book—Newell offers a detailed history of diet-based lifestyles from the health reform movement of Sylvester Graham in the early nineteenth century to the debates between Ancel Keys and John Yudkin over the lipid hypothesis in the late twentieth century. Secularization again provides the framework. While antebellum health reformers urged Americans to adopt abstemious diets as part of the divine plan for material and spiritual flourishing, late twentieth-century Atkins dieters followed the dictates of science in pursuit of bodily health and beauty. The turning point in this transition, Newell argues, came in the early twentieth century with John Harvey Kellogg. Kellogg began promoting healthy lifestyles at the Battle Creek Sanitarium as an extension of his Seventh-day Adventist faith, but, when he had to decide what constituted "healthy," he deferred not to revelation but to the science of physiology. This narrative operates like a line of best fit: it does not account for exceptions like the deeply religious evangelical diet culture of the 1960s and 1970s, but it does highlight the trajectory of change from "Christian-oriented" to "science-based" regimens (p. 75). [End Page 171]

Thus far into the book, Newell focuses on placing food faiths in existing scholarship. In the remaining chapters, she turns to explicating her own "techno-ethnographic" (p. 29) research among online communities of the food faithful. These thematic studies sparkle with insights. Newell first examines the testimonies of vegan and Paleo dieters, showing how they mirror traditional religious conversion narratives. She argues that these accounts do not simply deploy the language of conversion, they testify to transformations as powerful and thoroughgoing as religious awakenings. Newell quotes Lewis R. Rambo's description of religious conversions as "a radical shifting of gears that can take the spiritual lackadaisical to a new level of intensive concern, commitment, and involvement," suggesting that new vegan and Paleo dieters experience a renewal no less significant (p. 125).²

Newell next analyzes diets focused on ancient foodways, such as Paleo, traditional eating, and Afro-Veganism. She argues that the narratives driving these diets function as cosmic redemption sagas. Dieters tell stories beginning with an Eden in which ancestors ate according to the dictates of nature—as determined by contemporary science, especially genetics—and therefore enjoyed perfect health. Then came "the inevitable Fall" (p. 152), whether the...