The (Un)holy Alliance at Meals: Shaping a Relation between Food, Conscience and the Law

Abstract

It is commonly recognized that Mediterranean cultures show a certain level of accordance in their own lifestyles, customary rules, accepted affective values. This substantially correct scientific stance, however, easily turned into a caricatural position when that assumed collective framework is elevated to the standard of a universal rule. When the recognition of similarities implies to undervalue the importance of meaningful differences the cultural pattern does not work anymore. Keeping in mind this methodological prudence, it is a still fruitful hermeneutical experience to try to reach a structured study about the common roots in the qualified relationship between the not only symbolical sense of the food, Mediterranean heritages and confessional legal orders based on monotheism. Regarded from this point of view, the theme undoubtedly offers a historically founded influence of ethics and religions in conceiving a net of rules even in the mere act of eating. While often hidden, food is at the base of Mediterranean religiosities more a fact of discipline than a way of liberation: the ancient beliefs prescribed a deeply extensive series of rules to define the right time to eat and to avoid to eat (especially in, but not limited to, the Jewish tradition), the forbidden types of food and the licit ones, the universal condemnation of heathen uses, considered as blaspheme kinds of actions (this was an element absolutely peculiar, but again not exclusive, for Muslim scholars, thinkers and guiding personalities). It seems finally time to restart a different consideration, describing even a typical legal and formal approach, underlining the opportunity of a study on food, not hiding the duties and the virtues of cultural religious usages. The task is to step away from the barely coercive contents of them and to widen the sense of conviviality, dialogue and collaboration. The Jewish rituals on prayers and purification have meant an undeniable ethically directed reflection on the core sense of being clean, first of all, to ourselves: a personal interrogation with a not strictly confessional and religious element of self-critique. The first Christian communities adopted a joyful praxis of meals that expressed a vivid alternative to the aristocrats and their conception of common alimentary uses to establish relations of power in a hedonistic atmosphere of richness. The apparently more defined and stronger Islamic approach was also a positive revolution in giving the meals a different quality of collective presence: against the clan and tribe tendencies, the weakest were again admitted to the experience of eating together at least once a day. According to Albert Camus, if the most distinctive element of a Mediterranean behavior stands in its own warm attitude, what the biggest monotheistic cults realized at the time certainly was a not secondary brick to build that sense of conviviality.