A Loaf for Learning

Teaching the Study of Religion with Food

Abstract

Cooking and eating in the Religious Studies classroom is a challenging and valuable pedagogical practice which turns upside down students’ individualist ideas of religion as belief inside people’s heads, drawing them out into the complexity of lived religion, and in so doing breaks open the modernist study of religion itself. Teaching with food upsets gendered stereotypes about whose religion counts, and it brings students into direct confrontation with the boundaries, borders, taboos and pleasures that are at the heart of religions and the religious. Cooking and eating with students reminds them that religion is not actually a category separate from the other aspects of human life and culture; it’s connected! With food, the classroom becomes a different place, where students move beyond religion as intellectual interiority into the complexity of everyday religion as lived.