306: Food, Religion & Cults with Christina Ward

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. At its core, the act of sharing food with someone is an act of trust. So as an attractant, and even if we think back to kind of mainstream religions, feasting and fasting and sharing those meals, and so those ideas were then, I think, adopted by these new religious groups. Food is essentially another language of community. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbinell.

0:59Christina Ward is the author of Holy Food How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat It's a fascinating new book that digs deep into how fringe and mainstream spiritual practices of America's past shaped modern food culture from trends to products still in the grocery aisle today It's a conversation you won't soon forget and we hope you enjoy

1:28Christina Ward, this is Taste. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Oh, thanks for being here. I'm excited to speak with you. How's your morning been so far? Great. Better. Now I've got another cup of coffee and we're ready to go. We're caffeinated. We're going to talk about cults and religion. This is like my ultimate morning, kind of. And to start, I'd love to know a little bit about where the idea for your book, Holy Food, came from. As someone who really loves history and studies history, the twinned obsessions of my life have been both like religion, why people believe things that they do, and food, why people eat the things they do.

2:00And so to me, it was a really natural fit, especially coming from my Gen X background, that everything is kind of the weirdness and so attracted to that weirdness. And just doing the research, especially after figuring out that Little Debbies, especially are associated with the Seventh-day Adventists a long time ago, it really sent me down that rabbit hole of doing the research and figuring out and trying to put it all together of where does food and religion fit together in more than just what we understand and we practice, but in American groceries and business and more of the smaller, really outsized influential cults and communes and those new religious movements.

2:41Yeah, I think as a reader of the book and just as a person that eats food in the world today, there are some that are very obvious. You know, I grew up in LA and on the bottom of every like In-N-Out bag. They have like, what is it, John 17 or something like there's some Chick-fil-A that you know about. And then there's some reading the book that I was like, oh, actually, I had I had no idea about the origin of this, which is so fascinating. And that's really a difference, too, is there are food businesses where the owners are religious and they proselytize and they put that messaging out there.

3:13But there the food really isn't influenced by their spiritual beliefs. Yeah, it's just a burger. It's just a burger. Whereas where Holy Food, where I was going is where what's the food that is actually influenced a bit? And how does that look and how does the religion influence the food and the culture and vice versa? I'm thinking, too, you mentioned the In-N-Out or Chick-fil-A is Celestial Seasonings Tea. Everybody loves Sleepy Time Tea. The founder of that company is a firm believer in the Book of Urantia. Which what is that? Yeah, the Book of Urantia was channeled by a shoe salesman from Chicago in the early 50s.

3:52And it's essentially a thousand so pages of messages from the Space Brothers and the Ascended Masters. Okay, and what's the message? It's to drink tea? Well, the message is that it's a complicated message, is peace and that we are manifest of a larger universe and humans are seeded from space aliens and that we work to find world peace. A lot of the new religious movements that can then form into cults have these elements of, you know, a fusion, we'll use the culinary term, where they just take and they cherry pick different types of beliefs and different elements and then mash them together into something new.

4:36So let's go back to Little Debbie's example for a second. For listeners that haven't read the book, can you just talk about, like, what about that was so interesting to you in the first place? It was interesting to me because growing up in the 70s, Little Debbies taste a little different now than they did when I was a kid. They don't use carob, whereas they did. There was a lot of carob in the Little Debbie products. They didn't have as many of them either. And carob was a substitute kind of for chocolate. And that kind of sent me down looking at the Seventh-day Adventists who, based on their belief that the body is a temple, which we've all heard in Scripture, but they really believe it in the sense that your body doesn't actually really belong to you.

5:19And so you really have to take care of it and eat healthy. And so they ban any type of stimulant or kind of processed-y foods, even though Little Debbies are very processed. And so they started coming up with their own foods that they could sell to their believers and make it easier for someone who maybe wasn't familiar, especially if you're thinking about early 1900s, familiar with a vegetarian diet or a vegan diet. Really, a lot of the SDA follows a vegan diet. But that's really how I got started and where that Little Debbie thing started, the trickle and researching more. You know, Seventh-day Adventists are also the owners of Worthington brand of, you know, fake hamburgers.

6:02Yeah. Yeah. And they also they sold it off, but they started Morningstar brands. Oh, like the vegetarian frozen foods? Yep. Exactly. Wow. You know, carob to me is like the alarm bell of like a new age food fad in some kind of way. Like I think it's kind of like the biblical alternative to chocolate kind of. It is. And of course, it's also known as St. John's Bread. So, you know, yeah, it's a pretty loaded ingredient. So this was kind of your way in. How did you go about the research process? Because there are so many different kinds of like followings and like businesses that are covered in the book.

6:40We were making the joke of that the research process took years and five years of active research and writing. And it looked very much like the infamous scene from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia with the conspiracy and the threads and the cords. The red yarn in every corner. That's what it looked like. And so it started really with the cookbooks because Seventh-day Adventists and even groups in the late 1800s started publishing cookbooks. And the cookbooks were intended to help new believers follow the diet. And it also acted as an attractant for folks who were maybe they weren't going to follow, say, Rosicrucianism, but they were looking for a vegetarian cookbook.

7:26And so you got a little bit of the mixed messages. So it started with the cookbooks because I collect cookbooks. And that was really where it started. And I could dig down and find out so much information. And it really unraveled for me the whole story. And did you have any criteria about like what would make something qualify to be covered in the book? I wanted really good examples. There were far more than I included. But I wanted really good examples that showed the different pathways of belief in the United States, how it broke apart, and good representational groups that had a really successful food culture.

8:07So that was my criteria. Was there any like group that was maybe most surprising to you over the reporting process in terms of like how they took their belief and put it into practice or just like that the belief existed in the first place? One of the most surprising things for me that I was not expecting and to me brought me great joy is really researching and discovering the interconnectivity between many of these groups and not just, you know, ideas, but people. So this guy met that guy. This guy was a follower of this guy. Then he broke off and did his own thing. And so that connection to it, and it builds like a through line, a historical through line through all of these groups and the foods they're eating.

8:51Yeah, I think that's always really interesting is that things that maybe seem more separate are actually the red yarn is connecting all of them. So speaking of red yarn, I wanted to talk to you about a lot of these foods that we see in the grocery store aisle that originated in religious contexts. So like Kellogg's Cereal, which was started by the Seventh-day Adventists, or Yogi Tea, which was started by, was it Yogi Bajan? Yogi Bajan, yeah. Yogi Bajan. Which one do you think would be the most surprising to contemporary grocery shoppers? Oh, in telling people the stories a little bit and talking to people, kettle chips, kettle potato chips.

9:25Wait, I don't remember this one. Yeah. Tell me. Because kettle potato chips taste really good. They're good chips. That's also a Yogi Bajan company. Oh, and so can you maybe talk a little bit about Yogi Bajan and like why this is specifically a controversial person to be associated? Yeah, Yogi Bajan started off in the United States as a yoga teacher, kind of with an invented form of yoga. Is it Kundalini? Kundalini, yeah, which is the way the explanation is way too long for our conversation. Separate podcast. Separate podcast. And his 3HO, the Happy, Holy, Healthy Organization. And essentially, Yogi Bajan was a foodie.

10:03He didn't have any training. He just really liked food and would spontaneously cook things for people. And he also loved capitalism. And coming to the United States, he saw that pathway to use the yoga teaching to form more of a sustained belief system and then break off to the food businesses. And he was really interested in making money and using the laws and the tax laws and the First Amendment in the United States to be able to do that and build a billion-dollar business kind of under the radar of the U.S. tax system. And he also was implicated with – was it sexual assault with his followers, right?

10:46Yeah. And unfortunately, for people who do join these groups, that is an unfortunately common outcome is the leaders in charge often do take advantage and sexually assault their followers and Yogi Bhajan the same way. He had endured a lot of accusations, but he was so rich and so powerful, especially in Los Angeles, that most of the women bringing those accusations and charges were ignored for decades. And it wasn't really until his death in 2003 that the organization took it seriously and started investigating. And so today, like these kettle chips or yogi tea, are they still associated with his following?

11:27They are. And because the businesses, some of the businesses were set up under the church and he really set up all these multiple corporations, is his family and the organization, the 3HO organization, which is now a nonprofit and run by a board, they're still fighting in the courts about who owns what and who can take the profit from what. So those are still active companies, but under controversy. Wow. But the vinegar chips are so good. I know. That's so interesting to think about. I think like to me, what was so interesting about this book is that, you know, when you're raised in religion, maybe you think about like I'm Jewish.

12:03So like laws of kashrut, like there are some very like clear ways that belief systems like incorporate food. But then like the extent that which people were like the nation of Islam doing like import export, like the way that it gets put into practice, I think is maybe something that people don't know about as much. And I'm curious, like zooming out, why do you think food is such a good lens to be talking about like these larger questions of, you know, belief or like following or capitalism even? I've thought about this a lot because at its core, the act of sharing food with someone, of inviting someone to eat your food is an act of trust.

12:37We have to trust that we're not getting poisoned. We're not going to be made sick in some way. And so that's where it starts. So as an attractant, and even if we think back to kind of mainstream religions, feasting and fasting and sharing those meals and then jointly going without a meal. Those are such common practices to being human. And so those ideas were then, I think, adopted by these new religious groups because it's wholly American. And people are really comfortable with this idea that food is essentially another language of community. And I think that's where the core of it is. Definitely.

13:12I think you are what you eat is such a cliche, but that is something that a lot of these groups were really upholding, that you can be choosing to identify with a group or to distance yourself from someone else by eating in a certain way. Yeah. It's a form of tribalism, too, in the sense that we can recognize each other. Oh, you're a vegan? I'm a vegan. You know, there becomes that, again, making the world smaller and building that community. Definitely. And I want to talk about food sovereignty also, because I think that's such an interesting part of the book. Can you Maybe tell me about how that guided groups like the Nation of Islam.

13:44Post-Civil War, Reconstruction period, there was kind of a golden era of the United States where the country and the government was going to try to reintegrate and integrate black people into modern American culture. Jim Crow laws put that to pasture right away. And so in reaction to a little bit of freedom post-Civil War and then having all that stripped away, it became really critical for black leaders in the communities from, again, the late 1800s on to essentially separate themselves from white people and white culture. They couldn't be trusted. And so that was the drive towards self-sufficiency.

14:27George Washington Carver at Tuskegee, he did brilliant work about soil restorations and teaching people how to grow your own food, how to can it, and how to, again, be self-sufficient. It was about not being dependent on outsider culture in any way, shape, or form. And that came to through Father Divine in Harlem and then later adopted by the Moorish Science and the Nation of Islam. And Nation of Islam to this day still has food businesses and also, interestingly, works in coordination with the Unification Church, the Moonies. And the Unification Church supplies about 80 percent of all the sushi fish in the United States.

15:09New World Seafood. Yeah. I wrote like a big story about sustainable sushi a couple of years ago and spent months trying to talk to the Moonies about New World Seafood and no one would reply to my emails. I don't know if you got in touch with them, but I didn't try to talk to them, but I did talk to some of the NOI. And again, some of these traditions is from the early days in Chicago, more science. They could get a lot of jobs doing truck drivers. And because the NOI had such a high moral standard, they were trusted by the Capone outfits. And that tradition of having Nation of Islam truck drivers and longshoremen continues to this day.

15:44And that's where the partnership for the fish company with the Unification Church. So you've got the Unification Church working all the fish stuff and then the NOI drivers and longshoremen transport it. It feels like the start to some kind of movie, honestly. It's like way beyond what you think it could be. It's either the best buddy flick ever or the worst. Oh, honestly, I could really see this. I hope someone listens to this and gives us royalties and makes it into a movie. So I want to talk a little bit about the recipes in the book. Did all of them come from these cookbooks that you were finding and going through or were any of them adapted?

16:20So the recipes came from a couple of sources. So either the cookbooks themselves, based some on research and talking to people and some of the groups were kind enough to like share some historic recipes with me. And then others were published in strange ways. You kind of dig down into some of their scripture, you'll find a lot of food recipes in the groups that had a high control food culture. So that's the three sources. We tried not to adapt. We meaning I had a group of friends during the pandemic. We tested all the recipes. And so we tried not to adapt too much. I took out things that were uncommon during, say, the 50s and 60s and 70s, but common now.

17:04So, for example, there's no recipe on how to make your own tempa because you can go to the grocery store and buy tempa now, where it used to be important to know how to do that if you were going to be a sustainable vegetarian. in. So you tested the recipes. I'm so curious about that process. Were there any favorites or any ones that were maybe a little traumatizing for people to eat? Yeah, there were some fun ones that became horrible. So first, my process, culling through everything, lists in a spreadsheet, narrowing it down, getting it ready to food test, and then asking for volunteers out of my friend group.

17:38So a couple that really, you know, caused problems for people was some of the macrobiotic recipes got rejected as being flavorless. No one liked to eat those. They could make them and they're like, I feel like I'm being punished for being healthy. That was a common refrain. One of the recipes that is in the book is for the Mormon deviled egg casserole. And a good friend of mine who is Sicilian and is a chef, I couldn't put it in the book, but she commented that this was the food that fueled the January 6th insurrection. It was so stodgy and just white and heavy. It was just, for her, it represented that.

18:22Okay, so what about some that maybe people liked? One of the perennial favorites was from Tassajara, which is, that's an easy one because they have a great food system out in San Francisco. It's associated with the San Francisco Zen Center. So the Tassajara shortbread cookies, fantastic. unlikely ones that are great is from late 1800s, Bishop's Hill, the cardamom horns. That's one of my favorites. So what is a cardamom horn? And it's, people may recognize it. It's more of a European style pastry rolled like a croissant, a little bit curved. And, but it has a cardamom flavor to it and it's very lightly sweet and it's a yeasted dough.

19:03So kind of like a crescent roll, a sweeter crescent roll. That does sound really good as like a breakfast pastry. Yeah, anything. I had a conversation with Beatle and Hollis, who bakes a lot of historic recipes. He had a book, Baking Yesteryear, that came out this year. And he has a lot of recipes that are quite good and then a section that's called Worst of the Worst that are kind of these traumatizing recipes. And we were talking about, like, this debate of, like, whether or not to include something that, like, isn't actually going to be good. And you know that it's not going to be good because it kind of is a cultural or historic artifact still that people were making that at that point in time.

19:37Did you have any debate over like the recipes that maybe like weren't as delicious? Like why would I publish this in the first place? Yeah, I mentioned it in writing my little introduction because that is a common question. I thought it would be too easy to kind of do the point and laugh of like, look at this ridiculous thing. You know, why would anybody eat that? It's horrible. So I chose not to include those. But I will say the worst one and it was so terrible. It actually made me gag. It hit the trifecta of badness. The color was awful. Just baby poop gray. And the texture was kind of mushy, mealy.

20:16And the flavor was kind of dirty and acrid. You know, kind of this dry dirtiness. It was so strange. and it was from the True Light Beavers and it was a mushroom-based, like, vegetarian pate. From the ingredients list, and anybody who cooks knows does this, you can read through an ingredient list and you kind of get an idea of what it's going to taste like. Yeah. Mushroom pate, that could be great. It could be great. I read it. That could be great. It was not. It was so not great, I actually asked a couple of their friends, test this one, is this just me? Did I do it wrong? Did I get a bad batch of something?

20:49And no, everybody agreed. It was horrible. So when there is like a recipe that just doesn't taste good, like do you think they knew that it didn't taste good and they didn't care? Or was it almost like hazing that you had to eat this thing that didn't taste good? Like why would groups be sharing their recipes that just frankly don't measure up? I think there's a couple of different reasons. Some of it is based on a bad tasting recipe is core to a group's belief. I'm thinking of Adidam and their green smoothies. They, a very extreme restricted group on what they ate. And it's just essentially like a kale smoothie, not even really any apples or anything to balance it out.

21:32And it's just, it's not good. It's not really good. But that's what they ate because that was part of the practice. Whereas other groups were also reflective of the culture. So especially ones from the 70s, you see like the nascent health food movement kind of growing in there. And so to modern tasters, they taste a little off because you'll get cookies with no sugar at all. And, you know, we want a little bit of sugar. Or Nation of Islam recipes tend to be a bit bland because they don't use salt. Why not? Elijah Muhammad, who wrote Eat to Live and really kind of outlined the food culture in the NOI, felt that salt made bodies sluggish.

22:16And it was part of the conspiracy of the white people to keep black people down and oppressed. OK, so no salt in anything then? No salt. Minimal. Sometimes, you know, people would do it, but it was always like under the table. Try not to use the salt. Wow. That's so fascinating. And I think, you know, we've talked about recipes and diet maybe, but I feel like the book also talks about food trends and fads that kind of like originated in these groups. Is the macrobiotic diet an example that comes to mind for you? Oh, right away. I think a lot of people don't even understand or know that it really originated from a very specific movement.

22:57It comes out of the late 1800s again, this German tradition called nature men. And it's where we get this idea of like Rudolf Steiner and biodynamic farming. That whole movement came out of Germany and spread around the world. And Georgia Shawa combined those ideas with some very traditional Japanese healing food ideas and came up with this macrobiotic diet. And it was also rigid in some of the beliefs. They were, you know, you couldn't, you weren't supposed to drink at all. And you had other restrictions if you were truly following that diet. So just to go back a second, what was the nature man?

23:38What was that? So it was a cultural reaction in Germany, kind of a post-industrial revolution. And I mean, not the 17th, but the later one. You've got all this industrialization and factories and people are disconnected from nature. And that's really what nature meant. And people were going outside and making that like clubs and practices, von der Vogel. People would just hike for days. and this idea of embracing the connection to nature. And that's the core of it and exported to France and then of course to the United States, especially to California. Yeah, I think growing up in California, like even way after that period of time, there's still a lot of macrobiotic places.

24:22And here in New York, there's like Suen, for example, which is a great Japanese restaurant that's very like macrobiotic. And just, I think as someone that thinks about contemporary food trends, I see the macrobiotic diet as kind of setting up the era of the all-day cafe that we have today, even in terms of these like hearty brown rice squash green bowl. Like that's something that could be at a trendy restaurant but also is kind of rooted in those practices beforehand. It absolutely is. And I think – and that's some of those trends. The culture influences things. And again, people are unaware that it may have some sort of religious or spiritual background.

24:57I'm looking at a lot of the vegan restaurants, especially in the black community, that it's fantastic. The food's usually always really good. But a lot of folks start the vegan restaurants for the food trend, for the fad, because veganism is becoming a fad. But how it even got to a point to become a fad was because a number of these religious and spiritual and cult groups adopted vegan diets, started restaurants that were serving that food to everybody. And that's how it starts to catch on. It's very much a word of mouth thing. Yeah. I'm curious if there are any other contemporary food trends or things you see happening that you can trace back to kind of these earlier origins.

25:39I see, you know, as you pointed out, some of what we call, you know, the health food, the brown rice. Yeah. The less processed. And that's kind of that intersection to of the 70s with Jonathan Kaufman did such fantastic work with his book. hippie food, really tracing back how that health food thing came about. And so I think what we see as a modern on the grocery shelves is a more blatant, if you will, a more outrageous statement of belief. So now where groups were just trying to kind of send the message in, more groups are being more outward, like the In-N-Out Burger, that it's become a proclamation of belief and on the food.