ABSTRACT
Food provides a means of understanding and evaluating both the social and the physical character of landscape as place. What is the connection between the eating of particular kinds of food, the physical character of the lands where that food is produced, and people’s identification with landscape as place and community? This chapter examines this question by looking at the parallels between the sacred role of sacrificial food in religion and the apparently profane, festive consumption of food. Food, it will be argued, provides a key to understanding the way that people and landscape are symbolically ingested and thereby incorporated within public community life.
