The suggestiveness of Foucault’s remarks resonate all the more strongly in contemporary late capitalist society when considering the pervasiveness of popular dietary regimens (from vegetarianism to Jenny Craig to Atkins), for, according to Foucault, dietetics also constituted a “deliberate practice on the part of the individual” in the sense that “it proposed to equip the individual…for a rational mode of behavior” (pp. 107-108). Dietary regimens continue to be self-imposed disciplines of the self, but they are impossible to separate from the economic conditions of consumer capitalism in which they are practiced. While dietetics in ancient Greece were transmitted through philosophical schools and medical texts, what might be called “capitalist dietetics” is transmitted through a barrage of advertisements, specialized cook books, celebrity testimonials, fitness programs, and so on that are designed less to “permit one to respond to circumstances” as they are to enable the user to build desired body-shapes in an alchemical, transubstantive process—the way dietary practices are advertised, health and nutrition often appear subordinate to concerns about physical appearance.
It is in this context that I propose to situate my observations about dietary practice at First UU Springfield. In this congregation, one sees an attempt at a break from the homogeneity of capitalism in the form of dietetics, a self-disciplinary impulse. However, the dominant economic structure continues to infiltrate and shape congregational practice. With respect to the study of dietary practice and religion, my analysis of the peculiar dietary dialectic at First UU Springfield poses what I hope will be a helpful challenge to the mainstream orientation of food scholarship in the field of religion. I have substantial doubts that the ritual-symbolic approach advocated by Douglas and appropriated by her followers in the field of lived religion makes much sense in the context of late capitalism, in which the commodification of dietary practices, in addition to food and drink more generally, seems to infringe on the ritualized element of eating and significantly limit the possibility of any symbolic correspondence between food and “social order” or the unlimited, autonomous construction of culturally-specific “meanings.” Instead, this report has argued that it is necessary to develop new vocabularies to better suit the socio-economic conditions in which food is eaten, in which diets are constructed, and in which discipline is practiced.
