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Mennonites are often associated with food, both by outsiders and by Mennonites themselves. Eating in abundance, eating together, preserving food, and preparing so-called traditional foods are just some of the connections mentioned in cookbooks, food advertising, memoirs, and everyday food talk. Yet since Mennonites are found around the world – from Europe to Canada to Mexico, from Paraguay to India to the Democratic Republic of the Congo – what can it mean to eat like one?
In Eating Like a Mennonite Marlene Epp finds that the answer depends on the eater: on their ancestral history, current home, gender, socio-economic position, family traditions, and personal tastes. Originating in central Europe in the sixteenth century, Mennonites migrated around the world even as their religious teachings historically emphasized their separateness from others. The idea of Mennonite food became a way of maintaining community identity, even as unfamiliar environments obliged Mennonites to borrow and learn from their neighbours. Looking at Mennonites past and present, Epp shows that foodstuffs (cuisine) and foodways (practices) depend on historical and cultural context. She explores how diets have evolved as a result of migration, settlement, and mission; how food and gender identities relate to both power and fear; how cookbooks and recipes are full of social meaning; how experiences and memories of food scarcity shape identity; and how food is an expression of religious beliefs – as a symbol, in ritual, and in acts of charity.
From zwieback to tamales and from sauerkraut to spring rolls, Eating Like a Mennonite reveals food as a complex ingredient in ethnic, religious, and personal identities, with the ability to create both bonds and boundaries between people.
“While food studies is an increasingly popular field of research, there remains a continued tendency to neglect domestic food production. Eating Like a Mennonite makes a major contribution by examining these intimate and quotidian acts of nourishment. Moreover, it is a delight to read, and made me hungry for the foods of my childhood.” Janis Thiessen, University of Winnipeg
"Eating Like a Mennonite reveals important connections between ethnoreligious identity and immigration, colonization, gender, and memory. Epp strives to keep it accessible to a general audience by interjecting her own experiences [and] underscore the material nature of a book in which food is central." American Historical Review
"Eating Like a Mennonite is a highly accessible contribution to the field that speaks to a general readership. The book makes a persuasive case for the value of food studies as a means of understanding the cultural and social life of any community and it is a welcome and important addition to the growing literature on food and identity." Canadian Food Studies
"Eating Like a Mennonite gives scholars, students, and general readers a view into the foodways of a global, diasporic group unlike any other." Gastronomica
"This book is not only relevant to discussions of Mennonite identity but also deserves a place of significance within the broader scholarship on immigration, cultural transformation, and food within the humanities and social sciences. Epp’s research is thorough and exemplary; photos, recipes, and other illustrations enrich the book’s narrative. I highly recommend this book for both lay readers and academics." University of Toronto Quarterly
“A broad-ranging and accessibly-written survey of Mennonite food practices, Eating Like a Mennonite will challenge general readers and scholars within Mennonite Studies to rethink their assumptions about gender, ethnicity, faith and identity–evident in the routinized invocation of food as a form of boundary-policing. Epp invites in the unsuspecting reader who might presume they know the answer to what it means to ‘eat like a Mennonite’ and then immediately destabilizes their notion of ethnic insidership.” Food & History