10.13125/CH/5437
application/pdf
2533-1825
5437
2, special
en
urn:nbn:it:unica-29816
Vereno Brugiatelli
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Critical Hermeneutics
On Food and Religion: An Introduction
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch
7
Varia
2024-01-10
2022-12-29
2024-01-11
2024-01-11
255-257
1
Vereno Brugiatelli
2023
10.13125/CH/5437
255
2533-1825
2, special
257
urn:nbn:it:unica-29816
On Food and Religion: An Introduction
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/article/download/5437/5811
7
Critical Hermeneutics, 7(2), special, 2023                  Received: 29/12/2022
Biannual International Journal of Philosophy                 Accepted: 29/12/2023
http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/index                    Published: 10/01/2024
ISSN 2533-1825 (on line); DOI 10.13125/CH/5437




             On Food and Religion: An Introduction


                                 Vereno Brugiatelli
                                University of Verona - IT




      It is a well-known fact that besides having an indispensable
nutritional function, food also has an important cultural value. Methods
to transform and make use of food have their origins in social contexts
and contribute to generating cultural processes and forms of life.
According to this view, food is also a cultural invention which has come
to influence man’s ways of being and living, as well as the manner in
which man relates to others, the world and the divine.
      Food and its production, cooking methods and consumption
practices can be considered on a hermeneutic-interpretative level for
possessing a strong symbolic and, therefore, semantic value. In order
to fully understand their historical, cultural and social dimensions, from
which the symbolic becomes operational, it is necessary to conduct a
careful interpretation to reveal those meanings forgotten by the very
cultural traditions that produced them. This interpretative work is of
direct interest to philosophical reflection as it raises questions
concerning the human condition, the individual, social and community
life of man and, in general, his being-in-the-world.
      It is evident from the articles presented here that over the
millennia man has established an intimate connection between his
forms of life with food and its cultural productions. In different societies,
food takes on multiple meanings that bind and commit people to living
Vereno Brugiatelli,, On Food and Religion: An Introduction




and behaving in certain individual and community ways. In the great
cultural traditions, different semantic dimensions are reflected to the
point of blending into the life forms of peoples.
       The cultural tradition of a community makes food, with its rules of
transformation of preparation, consumption and its prohibitions and
taboos, a fundamental trait of collective identity. In the article entitled
Religioni e cibo: le prescrizioni alimentari di tipo religioso come mezzo
di definizione identitarian (Religions and Food: Religious Food Rules as
a Means of Identity Definition), Cristiano Marasca opens us up to the
different interpretations of the meanings of food that we can find in
Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Reviewing the studies
of various anthropologists, he points out that food also performs an
important identity function: “Human beings bind themselves to their
religious group through food-related patterns, and religious rules
concerning food are often used as a means of safeguarding cultural
identity”. Moreover, in different cultural traditions, food possesses a
powerful semiotic capacity and performs functions of exclusion, rivalry,
distance, community and belonging. As Lévi-Strauss points out, a
society expresses a language from which it unconsciously allows its
contradictions to emerge. It is thus that “food rules and taboos could
be seen as a semiotic device carrying specific cultural meanings and
identity markers that demarcate the boundaries between endogroup
and exogroup”.
       In the interview with Master Swami Joythimayananda, themes
emerge concerning the meanings and values of food and fasting in the
complex field of Ayurvedic medicine. The Master emphasises that food,
as well as fasting, are fundamental to the spiritual path. In this sense,
nutrition is an integral part of Ayurvedic medicine as it concerns not
only the body, but also the mind and soul. «In order to balance the
functioning of body, mind and soul, we have to take good care of our
nutrition». The choice of food, its preparation, and its consumption are



256
                                       Critical Hermeneutics, 7(2), special, (2023)




all part of a spiritual way of life that aims to be in harmony with the
environment and the Whole.
    Rosaria Cavalieri, with her article entitled L'esperienza del gustare
tra corpo e mente, soggettività e oggettività (The Experience of Tasting
between Body and Mind, Subjectivity and Objectivity), offers us,
instead, a careful reflection on the food-taste-cognition relationship.
Through her arguments, going against the philosophical prejudice
regarding the unreliability of taste for cognitive purposes, the author
intends to show that food and taste are issues that philosophical
thought should re-evaluate, reconsider and deepen. In fact, dealing
with sensoriality and thus with a sense such as taste is important for
many reasons concerning knowledge. This is because through the
analysis of sensoriality it is possible to grasp the intricate connections
that are established in humans between bodily experience, cognition
and subjectivity. Eating and tasting have to do with complex emotional,
sentimental, cognitive dynamics so that they constitute an opening to
the world that passes through our perceptions and our “being body”.
Enjoying food is not only a multisensory experience but also an
emotional and cognitive one. Tasting, then, “is a form of embodied
knowledge”. Taste constitutes a form of 'bodily intelligence' that
contributes on a cognitive level to help us grasp distinctions, nuances
and discernment.
    The multiple meanings that man has attached to food, its
processing and consumption, closely touch man's being-in-the-world.
They raise questions concerning man's individual and collective life
together with his cultural productions that cannot leave philosophical
thought indifferent.




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Vereno Brugiatelli,, On Food and Religion: An Introduction




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