Are You Just What You Eat? Ritual Slaughter and the Politics of National Identity

You are what you eat. Eat organically, eat naturally, eat healthily, eat fat-free, eat high-fiber, eat low-carb, eat fair-traded, eat slowly (or, at least, eat slow food), and you are by definition a better person than those who don’t. The conventions of diet remain, pace Mary Douglas, one of the central means of creating categories of social inclusion and exclusion. From the nineteenth to the twentieth-first century, the debates about the ritual slaughter of animals in regard to Jewish and Muslim slaughtering practices were and are a litmus test for the potential or actual integration of these religious communities into a secularized, post-Enlightenment Europe. You are quite literally what you eat.