Food, Religion, and Babette's Feast

I’m not particularly familiar with the relationship between food and protestantism, which is really due to the fact that I’ve never experienced any sort of protestant holiday or service. What I do know about the protestant faith, both from the film Babette’s Feast and from past history classes where I learned about Martin Luther, is that protestants vehemently avoid the enjoyment of earthly pleasures, including things like dancing and fine food. On one end of the spectrum is hedonism, and on the other end is protestantism.

What interests me about this is how different this relationship between religion and food is how different it is from the religious experiences I’ve had in my own life. At my grandmother's house in West Virginia, the very solemn methodist easter sunday service I went to was followed by an easter dinner with a ham and all the trimmings. At the reform jewish synagogue I went to growing up, the Friday services were followed by the oneg, where the temple gathered around a table piled high with challah and sweet treats, to be blessed and then enjoyed with a small glass of wine, or grape juice for the kids. An old joke about jewish holidays is that they can be summarized with “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.” I’ve found this holds true most of the time in my experience. There’s even dancing for several jewish holidays, particularly bat mitzvahs. Then there was a brief period of time where I was in a mainly African-American gospel choir (long story). The songs we sang we’re usually accompanied by dancing and swaying, and occasionally full-on shouts of joy.

It seems to me that different religions all embrace their own mixture of solemn contemplativeness, and joyful exuberance, and food is one of the ways that mixture can be expressed. The food in Babette’s Feast is a representation of the two ends of the spectrum. Bread-and-ale soup versus Cailles en Sarcophage. The extravagance of the titular feast is something that the guests at the dinner will likely never experience again, but the event did open their eyes to the existence of more than what they had before. I like to think that maybe in the future the villagers will enjoy something a bit nicer than thick and bland soup. They were shown that fine food does not turn them to a life of sin, but in a way bring them closer to their religion, and each other, than ever before.