For Gordon and For Faith

        Taste is often seen as lesser sense, especially concerning religion. There is less revelation in taste, sublime experiences are seen, not tasted. This view of taste means that its importance to religious practices and bonding are easily overlooked. Taste subtly brings people together by sharing meals and cooking together. This sense is the foundation of bonding by being a daily activity. People need to eat multiple times a day every day in order to survive. This provides ample amounts of time to connect with one another while cooking and eating. Day by day, small conversations that slowly build into something greater. 

Spaghetti

In her experience with Afro-Cuban religious practices in Chicago detailed in her book, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the making of Black Atlantic Traditions, Elizabeth Perez noted the general unwillingness many of the converts initially had about joining the community. The people Perez met were not to the community but rather wound up there in some way and hesitatingly participated. The commitment came later, after all the cooking together, the long hours in the kitchen, those seemingly meaningless and forgettable moments. Perez even said that people would “stay after developing a sense of solidarity with, and investment in the community” (Perez 100). The converts only converted when they had already felt attached to the community, they did not seek out the experience.  

The Golden Arches

       Perez’s experience illustrates how cooking and eating bring people together, how taste connects us. We eat with our friends and our families. How often do we have meals with strangers? Personally, I do not sit next to someone I never met at McDonalds if an open table is available. In fact, the idea seems invasive, rude, even unnatural. Taste is a shared experience, one that requires a previously established bond. It largely goes unnoticed; we tend not to think about the particulars of why we eat with who we do. 

      

       Taste is a vitally important sense to forging bonds with other people and religion, but it largely overlooked. Perez emphasizes in her book that these cooking “micro-practices [allow the religious experience] to coalesce and endure” (212). Taste may not have clearly distinguishable sublime moments such as sight, however taste is the foundation of the faith for that sublime experience. Without taste, without cooking together, without sharing a meal together, that sense of community, that attachment only these experiences can provide is lost.