Food has always been more than fuel. Across spiritual traditions, it’s one of the most ordinary—and most powerful—ways we make meaning and build community together.
This briefing explores what spiritual innovators can learn from academic research about how to most effectively use food in your gatherings and meaning-making experiences. Plus, we’ll look at one example of a community that uses food really creatively.
Sometimes food is sacramental, used in ritual to signify the presence of God. Other times, rules about what we eat (and don’t eat) help us live our values and signal who we belong to. Fasting and abstaining shape attention and desire. Feeding others can be an act of holy service. Even our language shows how food and the holy are connected: we use hunger to describe not just bodily need, but spiritual longing.
Given this deep connection, it’s worth asking: what does academic research tell us about food and spirituality? How might shared meals extend a sense of the sacred, deepen our understanding of ourselves, and strengthen our relationships—with one another and with whatever we hold transcendent?
Tip 1: Eat Together
The best thing to do with food is to eat it together.
According to neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, food and social connection are neurologically linked.1 Using MRI scans, researchers demonstrated that our brains exhibit a neurologically similar “craving signal” when shown pictures of food after fasting and pictures of social interaction after isolation. Put simply, when we’re socially isolated, we’re hungry for connection just like we get hungry for food.
Claude Fischler, a French social scientist, conducts interdisciplinary and comparative research on the integrative aspects of food, culture, and community. Spotlighting commensality—the act of eating together in groups, he argues that shared meals transform the biological and self-oriented act of sustaining life into a communal practice with implications for our identity, values, and relationships.2
Tip 2: Look for Laughter
Laughter at a meal is a key sign of connection.
Robin Dunbar, an experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford, analyzed data from a national survey aligned with The Big Lunch project, an annual community meal in the U.K.3 His findings indicate that social eating—especially at laughter-filled evening meals—improves participants’ self-esteem and happiness, generates social trust and bonds, and deepens social networks and engagement. In fact, according to Dunbar, the social impacts of shared meals are so profound that commensality likely evolved to facilitate our peaceful co-existence as human beings.
Tip 3: Set Time, Not (Just) Tables
Food alone won’t make magic. Make sure to have a clear intention.
OneTable, an American non-profit created in 2014 to harness digital tools and networks to facilitate peer-led Shabbat dinners for Jewish adults, extends these research-based insights to religious gatherings. Together with Arielle Levites, professor of education at George Washington University, and Julianne Holt-Lunstad, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, OneTable conducted experimental and observational research on the impacts of this modernized ancient practice.4 Their findings reveal that shared Shabbat dinners reduce loneliness and strengthen social well-being among hosts and guests. Notably, while food serves as a powerful draw for dinner participation (particularly when that food connects participants to family, heritage, and memory), OneTable’s research also shows that food alone isn’t what makes these gatherings meaningful. Instead, the most essential and effective element is the intentional creation of a shared, sacred time—time set aside for conversation, presence, and community.
Food In Practice
St Lydia’s is a Dinner Church in Brooklyn, NY, where community members gather for weekly worship—but the worship takes place at the table around a big, delicious meal that they prepare and also clear up together! Since 2015, this community has gathered to share food, explore scripture, sing, and pray.
The inspiration for this Christian community goes back to the second and third centuries CE, where early Christians gathered for sacred meals they called the Eucharist (from the Greek word for “thanksgiving”). Jesus and many of his first followers were Jewish, so the meals were related to Jewish Sabbath supper and the Passover Seder meal, and involved blessing bread and a cup of wine. The meals shared by these early Christians were the great-great grandparent of today’s Eucharist, also called Communion or the Lord’s Supper. Check out this video to see St Lydia’s in action!
Tip 4: Prepare Food Together, Too
Make meaning—and meaningful relationships—by preparing food together.
In Religion in the Kitchen, Elizabeth Pérez, a historian of Afro-Diasporic and Latin American religions, highlights the importance of food-based conversation in the shaping of spiritual selves and groups.5 Her observational research in Ilé Laroye, an African-American community on Chicago’s South Side, finds that initiates to the Afro-Cuban Lucumí tradition become religious community members through two interrelated “micropractices:” food preparation and casual verbal interaction. While fixing sacred food for exacting deities under the guidance of priestly elders in house-temples, these newcomers (who tend to be women and gay men) learn how to talk about, feel, and enact their faith, feeding their own spirits as they help reproduce their community.
Notably, cooking is often seen as a medium of divine connection and blessing. Susan Starr Sered’s sociological fieldwork illustrates how, in preparing traditional kosher foods for new generations, Middle-Eastern Jewish women in Jerusalem manifest a “relationship-oriented religiosity,” ritualizing central elements of Judaism while also caring for the living, connecting to dead ancestors, and honoring and strengthening their own ties to God.6 They also engage in religious socialization, helping young Jews quite literally ingest their faithful tradition.
Tip 5: Prepare and Share Beyond Your Community
To bridge differences, cook with and for many.
In Heaven’s Kitchen, sociologist Courtney Bender provides further evidence for the spiritual and connective impacts of “kitchen work.”7 Through field research with culinary staff and volunteers at God’s Love We Deliver, a non-sectarian organization founded in 1985 to prepare and distribute nutritional meals to individuals living with HIV/AIDS, she unearths the transcendent frameworks that animate food preparation: while some kitchen workers bring institutional religiosity to bear on their work, others come to see cooking as “prayer” or “meditation” and food, itself, as “love.” With shared labor, laughter, conversation, and silence, they cohere as a spiritually-plural people—and kitchen.
Jiemin Bao’s anthropological research on Thai Theravada Buddhist temple food in the U.S. demonstrates innovation at the intersection of cooking and spiritual life.8 According to Bao, Thai American Buddhists use temple food markets to cohere their community, educate the public about Theravada Buddhism, raise temple funds, and—most significantly—feed monastics. Through this creative offering of alms food, they practice “merit making,” an act central to their identity as Theravada Buddhists, while blurring the distinction between sacred and material spaces.
Further Reading
Douglas, M. 2002 (1966). Purity and danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. Routledge. A classic work of social anthropology on food, religion, and moral and social boundaries.
Helliwell, J. F., Layard, R., Sachs, J. D., De Neve, J.-E., Aknin, L. B., & Wang, S. (Eds.) (2025). World happiness report 2025. University of Oxford: Wellbeing Research Centre. A report that combines well-being data from more than 140 countries; includes a chapter on the relationship between shared meals, happiness, and social connectedness.
Krone, A. (2025). Free range religion: Alternative food movements and religious life in the United States. The University of North Carolina Press. A new book that engages observational research to demonstrate how religion and food production, distribution, and activism can intersect.
Ortiz, A. (2026, January 22). “In a Harlem church, a free three-course dinner, no questions asked.” The New York Times. An inspiring article on one effort to develop hopeful souls and communities through food.
Vine, J., Oveson, M., Williams, J., & Henley, E. (2025). Eden Project communities evaluation report. An evaluation of fourteen years of the Eden Project’s community initiatives, including The Big Lunch.
Footnotes
1 Tomova, L., Wang, K.L., Thompson, T., et al. (2020). Acute social isolation evokes midbrain craving responses similar to hunger. Nature Neuroscience, 23, 1597-1605.
2 Fischler, C. (2011). Commensality, society and culture. Social Science Information, 50, 528-548.
3 Dunbar, R. I. M. (2017). Breaking bread: the functions of social eating. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 3, 198-211.
4 OneTable. (2025). Extending the table: What Shabbat dinner teaches us about social connection.
5 Pérez, E. (2016). Religion in the kitchen: Cooking, talking, and the making of Black Atlantic tradition. New York University Press.
6 Sered, S. S. (1988). Food and holiness: Cooking as a sacred act among Middle-Eastern Jewish women. Anthropological Quarterly, 61(3), 129-139.
7 Bender, C. (2003). Heaven’s Kitchen: Living religion at God’s Love We Deliver. The University of Chicago Press.
8 Bao, J. (2017). Not simple temple food: Thai community-making in the United States. Journal of Global Buddhism, 18, 189-209.
