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David J Neumann, Marlene Epp. Eating Like a Mennonite: Food and Community Across Borders., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 426–427, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae580
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While cleaning out her parents’ house recently, my cousin found her mom’s well-worn copy of Frances Youngren’s Food for the Body, Food for the Soul, a cookbook first published by the Moody Bible Institute in 1943 and reprinted many times. Readers found spiritual inspiration as well as recipes inside: how to avoid wilting lettuce by turning on the faucet of “refreshing thoughts of love, duty, honor, sharing and kindness”; the importance of vitamin B, the Belief Vitamin, “essential to the development and normal functioning of the new life”; and advice on appropriate conduct for mothers and fathers that made no attempt to connect to the theme of food.
My cousin’s unexpected discovery illustrates Marlene Epps’s central argument in her 2023 book Eating Like a Mennonite: Food and Community Across Borders that food is “imbued with cultural, religious, social, and political meaning,” but because it is “so ubiquitous and so everyday … we overlook its potential to offer meaning” (13). Epps is particularly interested in her own Mennonite tradition, a form of Anabaptist Protestant Christianity that has typically emphasized adult believer baptism, simple living, sharing possessions, and pacifism. The present global population of roughly 2 million Mennonites is spread across North America and, thanks to evangelism, countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Exploring what it means to “eat like a Mennonite” reveals important connections between ethnoreligious identity and immigration, colonization, gender, and memory.
