Islamic Paradigm

312 Pages·2017·6.62 MB·English

Fit For Food:
“Eating Jewishly” and the “Islamic Paradigm” as Emergent
Religious Foodways in Toronto
by
Aldea Mulhern
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Department for the Study of Religion
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Aldea Mulhern 2017
Fit For Food: “Eating Jewishly” and the “Islamic Paradigm” as
Emergent Religious Foodways in Toronto
Aldea Mulhern
Doctor of Philosophy
Department for the Study of Religion
University of Toronto
2017
Abstract
This project is about Jews and Muslims who participate in the food movement in Toronto, about
how and why they do, and about what challenges and opportunities this presents to contemporary
understandings of kashrut and halal as religious dietary laws. In early twenty-first century
Canada, food is a site where consumer ethics and religious diversity intersect. The two groups I
focus on are Shoresh Jewish Environmental Programs, a charitable organization running Jewish
environmental practices at multiple satellite sites, and Noor Islamic Cultural Centre, a mosque
where community members gather regularly for religious ritual and political and cultural events.
Both are intentionally non-sectarian religious communities that invite pan-Jewish or pan-Muslim
participation, have norms viewed as progressive by the wider religious community, and run
considerable food-related programming that actively connects religion with alternative
foodways. Both advocate for more “conscious” food practices, including local, organic,
sustainable, humane, and social-justice-oriented food choices. They develop religious foodways
that are, on the one hand, fundamentally connected to traditional religious food law, and on the
other hand, significant departures from typical understandings of kashrut and halal. The
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foodways that emerge in this milieu are “eating Jewishly,” in relation to kashrut, and an “Islamic
paradigm” for eating, in relation to halal.
The aim of this comparative project is to show how religious communities do the work of
constructing religion through material practices at once economic and symbolic. Drawing on
anthropological fieldwork conducted with Noor and Shoresh from 2012 to 2015, I show how
both organizations develop their religious foodways: as ethical interventions, as means of
invigorating community, and as means for resisting industrialized orthodoxies. People at Noor
and Shoresh bring religious life to bear on public lives, tying together social justice,
environmentalism, and eating in a practice for recalibrating market values. Constructing religion
as a domain of practical ethics, participants at Noor and Shoresh draw on religion for resources
to develop emergent religious foodways that cut across and re-inscribe boundaries between
insider and outsider, moral value and market value, and even Muslim and Jew.
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Dedication
This work is for the people I met through Noor and Shoresh. Many people shared with
me their time, their space, their thoughts, and their food; in so doing turned questions in my head
into relationships in the world,
For Risa, Sabrina, and Andrea, and for Khadijah, Azeezah, and Samira, without whom
this particular story would not exist, and for those who do not appear by name in these pages
because I have not found the way to tell that story yet,
And for my mother Phyllis and sister Zenia, for the years of love shared, miles of road
travelled, and commitment to discovering, in each of us, our best selves.
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Acknowledgments
I owe debts of love and gratitude to every friend whose laughter, patience, and advice has
helped me to find the writer in me: Rebecca Bartel, Paul Bowlby, Arun Brahmbhatt, Jenny
Bright, Ian Brown, Judith Ellen Brunton, Marilyn Colaço, Anne Marie Dalton, Maria Dasios,
Bonnie DeBruijn, Kyle Derkson, Ken Derry, Michel Desjardins, Vincent Grandjean, Mary Hale,
Fereshteh Hashemi, Paula Karger, Rebekka King, Elizabeth Klaiber, Kasra Koochesfahani,
Debra Krieger, Roxanne Korpan, Pierre Lairez, Reid Locklin, Craig Martin, Florence Pasche-
† ‡
Guignard, Helen Mo, Jessica Radin, Barbara Wade Rose, T. Nick Schonhoffer, Noam Sienna,
Youcef Soufi, Eric Steinschneider, Edith Szanto, and David Walsh.
Damian Tarnipolski, Florence Pasche-Guignard, Susannah Heschel, Marie Griffith,
Graham Harvey, and Jordan Rosenblum all gave generous feedback on portions of this work at
crucial moments in its development; I hope I have honored it in these pages. David Walsh and
Rachel Brown ran the race alongside and helped more than they know. Adrienne Krone came to
Bela Farm’s grand opening and became a colleague, interlocutor, and friend.
Funding from the Department for the Study of Religion, Massey College, the Jackman
Humanities Institute, the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies, the Religion and Diversity
Project, and the Religion in the Public Sphere Initiative made this project possible. J.M. gifted a
computer and transcription system when I needed them most. For sacred space and time to write,
I thank Leticia Mansur and Sandra Aluisio at Universidade São Paolo and Universidade São
Paulo at São Carlos, Germaine Chandler in Shediac, New Brunswick, Sarah Kleeb and her
partner Dez and family, my colleagues and carrel-mates at Massey College, and Jake Hogan,
Paula Karger, Janelle Joseph, and Bonnie Jane Maracle of the dissertation writing groups at the
School of Graduate Studies, University of Toronto.

†
Sept 20, 1983 - April 11, 2017.
‡
October 11, 1982 - January 24, 2012.
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Most of all, I thank my dissertation committee. Pamela Klassen’s anthropological
sensibility has been a trustworthy guide as I sought my own ethnographic voice. Thank you for
guiding me back to my data again and again, and for helping me see the value of a short
sentence. Amira Mittermaier shared with me her critical questions and her extraordinary
perceptive skill. Her discursive grace quickly untangled some of my more cramped thoughts and
intractable clauses. Thank you for your insight, your incisiveness, and your encouragement.
Anna Shternshis always knows what needs fixing so that stories will be heard, and has taught me
to keep my intellectual centre. Thank you for your expertise, your practicality, and your vision.
Andrea Most supported me with intellectual honesty in many ways: as teacher, advisor, co-
author, interlocutor, and food-sharer. Thank you for your example, your commitment, and your
authenticity, from the classroom to the farm and at the many tables in between. Examiners
Vanessa Ochs and Simon Coleman generously gave their time and critical attention to my
project, and to the next stages of its life. Thank you both, so much, for your engagement and
insight.
From first to last, this dissertation was conceived, researched, and written in Toronto. I
would like to acknowledge the sacred land on which the University of Toronto and the Council
of Ontario Universities operates.

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Land Acknowledgement
This land has been a site of human activity for 15,000 years. This land is the territory of
the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of
the Credit River. The territory was the subject of the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt
Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and Confederacy of the Ojibwe and
allied nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. Today, the
meeting place of Toronto is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle
Island, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to work in the community, on this territory.
Many nations were invited in friendship to share the territory and protect the land:
Mississauga (Anishinaabeg), Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, and other nations, both Indigenous
and non-Indigenous. As settlers and newcomers to this land we have been invited into this treaty
in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect. The “Dish,” sometimes called the “Bowl,”
represents what is now southern Ontario, from the Great Lake to Quebec and from Lake Simcoe
into the U.S. We all eat out of the Dish—all of us unique peoples—but it only has one spoon.
That means we must share, and that we have responsibilities to make sure the dish is never
empty: to take care of the land and the creatures we share it with. Importantly, there are no
knives at the table: we must keep the peace.
As many of us are settlers on this land, it is our collective responsibility to pay respect
and recognize that this land is the traditional territory of the Mississauga of the New Credit First
Nations and we are here because this land was occupied. In recognizing that this space occupies
colonized First Nations territories, and out of respect for the rights of Indigenous people, it is our
collective responsibility to recognize our colonial histories and their present-day implications,
and to honour, protect and sustain this land. As settlers and newcomers, we are bound by the
treaty of the Dish With One Spoon Wampum in friendship and solidarity.
–adapted from an Acknowledgement by the Elders Circle (Council of Aboriginal
Initiatives) November 6, 2014, from the Bunz Network of Toronto, and from CUPE3903 at York
University. Like the dissertation it marks, it is also a trace of my own searching and learning in
this place. Aldea Mulhern, spring 2017.
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Table of Contents
Dedication ...................................................................................................................................... iv
Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................v
Land Acknowledgement ............................................................................................................... vii
Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... viii
List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... xii
On Transliteration, Translation, and Terms ................................................................................. xiii
Introduction ....................................................................................................................................1
Methods and Theories .................................................................................................................7
On Comparison: Whither, why, and comparing what? ......................................................13
Eating halal and keeping kosher ...............................................................................................15
I. Kashrut’s social histories: Toward Jewish food practice ...............................................19
II. Halal’s social histories: Toward Muslim food practice ................................................25
III. Jews, Muslims, and food in Canada and the United States .........................................30
Outline of Chapters ...................................................................................................................38
Voices, Stories, Data ..........................................................................................................41
Chapter 1 “Eating Jewishly” at Shoresh Jewish Environmental Programs ..........................42
“Canadian Soil, Jewish Roots:” Introducing Shoresh ...............................................................45
Industrial kashrut and the (Jewish) food movement ..........................................................50
Jewish Food Ethics ............................................................................................................53
Authoring and Authorizing “Eating Jewishly” .........................................................................56
The Shoresh Food Conference 2013 .........................................................................................58
A Performative Plenary ......................................................................................................61
“Eating Jewishly, here” ......................................................................................................65
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Four Questions ...................................................................................................................67
I. Jewish foods ...................................................................................................................68
II. Keeping kosher ..............................................................................................................69
III. Jewish ethics and values ..............................................................................................71
IV. The Divine ...................................................................................................................73
Authoring Orthodoxies and Orthopraxies ..........................................................................75
On the ground, in the earth ........................................................................................................78
Bela Farm: The first Bela kollel .........................................................................................79
Conclusion: Authorizing Eating ................................................................................................87
Chapter 2 Food and ‘Islamic Paradigm’ at Noor Cultural Centre .........................................92
Light: Introducing Noor ............................................................................................................93
Making a Place in Canada: Politics in Islamophobic times ...............................................98
The pragmatics of the personal-political ..........................................................................110
Politics and Food: Constructing an “Islamic Paradigm” ........................................................115
Eid ul-Fitr 2013: The Eid khutbah ...................................................................................115
Embodied Identification: Feeling Fasting ........................................................................120
Paradigm and Principle ....................................................................................................123
I. “What’s legal doesn’t exhaust what’s moral” ..............................................................124
II. The Imperative to Know .............................................................................................127
III. “Islam [as] Food Ethics” ............................................................................................128
IV. Creation and Justice ...................................................................................................131
Whose Justice? .................................................................................................................133
The Islamic Paradigm On The Ground ...................................................................................134
Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................138
Chapter 3 Taste-Identity as Performative Practice ................................................................141
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You are what you (don’t) eat ..................................................................................................145
You eat what you are ..............................................................................................................154
Halal, health, and hospitality ...................................................................................................157
“You eat the food you are accustomed to eating” ............................................................159
Food for Us: Reh’ma Community Services and “culturally appropriate food” ......................163
Food For You: Performing Jewish Hospitality .......................................................................173
Performing Hospitality at “Bella! Did Ya Eat?” ..............................................................176
Conclusion: Us and Them .......................................................................................................183
Chapter 4 Religion-Making: Ethics and Trust .......................................................................188
A Brief Note on “Ethics” .................................................................................................193
“Religion and Ethics go hand-in-hand” ..................................................................................195
Religion, Contagion, Truth .....................................................................................................197
A second look at xenophobia ...........................................................................................203
Trust and Others ...............................................................................................................205
Expanding “us,” Contracting “us” ..........................................................................................208
“It’s so much easier to connect with someone who’s observant of something” ..............209
Do Religions Sanction Pain and Suffering? .....................................................................215
The Limits of Pluralism ...................................................................................................219
“I like the idea of sanctity” .....................................................................................................226
“…if you are going to eat meat, do something.” ..............................................................229
Pluralism’s Periphery ..............................................................................................................230
“It’s for sure peripheral” ..................................................................................................231
Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................233
Chapter 5 Value-Making: Discernment and Desire ...............................................................236
Class Critique and Capitalism .................................................................................................237
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