Food Preparation, Cooking, and Ritual in Judaism

Introduction

Judaism is one of the world’s oldest religions and has a rich history of ethical approaches to food, eating, and cooking.

Although food and eating serve central roles in nearly all of the world’s religions, they hold particularly outsized places in Judaism. The lived practices of many Jewish holidays often center on food practices. The daily routines of Jewish living frequently highlight issues of food, specifically the kashrut regulations that proscribe certain foods, types of meals, and their production and preparation methods. Communal and individual approaches to Jewish life in the contemporary world often hinge on the acceptance, rejection, or adaption of food-related practices, ranging from assimilationist attitudes that reject Jewish foodway particularity, to traditionalist ones that enforce rigid separation (Greenspoon et al. 2005). Ethical questions regarding the appropriate means of producing, preparing, and eating food – and even what stuffs merit the...