Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture

This toothsome debut by religious historian Sack examines the ""whitebread"" mainline Protestant food culture he grew up in, featuring untold potluck Jell-O salads and volunteer hours in church soup kitchens. If the second chapter (on coffee klatches and church suppers) is more compelling than the others (which address Protestant responses to hunger, and 19th and 20th-century changes in Communion), this only underscores Sack's own point: church food represents community, and that, more than theology or politics, is of primary concern to American Protestants. He discusses many Protestants' discomfort with their abundance of food and wealth, especially when the ""lifestyle"" movement of the 1970s encouraged many churchgoers to abstain from meat and materialism. (Coffee-hour Kool-Aid and cookies were sometimes replaced by herbal teas and vegetable sticks, much to the consternation of the old guard.) Sack sometimes misses opportunities to develop specific points; he refers in passing to the postwar boom in church kitchen construction, but fails to offer examples aside from one in-depth case study. That case study--of a Chicago congregation's transformation from an ethnic neighborhood church to a justice-oriented outreach ministry--could have been balanced by a parallel case study of a rural church. These quibbles aside, Sack has assembled a feast of understudied topics here, seasoned by the emerging fields of food studies and the material history of religion. Its accessible prose and universal topic will make it of interest to anyone who has ever been sustained by green bean casserole. (Nov.)