ABSTRACT
Religion and food exist in a symbiotic relationship. What we eat and how we prepare food has an immediate effect on the physiology of our bodies and, therefore, how we experience the world around us. The consumption of certain foodstuffs, or, conversely, the refusal to consume food, enables us to induce altered states of consciousness – think of the effects of chocolate or prolonged fasting – as a result of physiological transformations within the body. The centrality of food for human survival, the enormous efforts we have to invest in its production, as well as how food can affect our psychosomatic balance, our sense of being in the world, go a long way towards explaining the preeminent role that food has played as a multifaceted metaphor in religious belief systems, but perhaps even more so in the material culture of religions across the world. Food symbolizes the materiality of our earthly existence but also the potential, in analogy to the cooking process, to transform our bodies and minds into something more spiritual and ethereal.
