Cult Food
Taught by Sarah Lohman
Sarah Lohman is a culinary historian and the author of the bestselling books Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods and Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine. She focuses on the history of food as a way to access the stories of diverse Americans. Endangered Eating was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by Amazon’s Editors, Food & Wine, and Adam Gopnik on the Milk Street podcast. It was a finalist for the Nach Waxman Prize for Food & Drink Scholarship and winner of the Ohioana Library Book Prize for Nonfiction. Lohman’s work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and NPR. Lohman has lectured across the country, from the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, DC to The Culinary Historians of Southern California
In this talk, Food Historian Sarah Lohman explores the often bizarre connections between food and America's cults.
America in the mid-nineteenth century is thought of as a time of repression, but it also birthed a legion of free-thinking, free-lovin', agrarian societies. Although these utopian groups were often focused on building a better world through food, many of these gatherings led to disaster. When the time comes to pick your cult, will you be smithing flatware to make a buck like the Oneida Community or subscribing to a radical vegetarian diet like the Fruitlands?
The agrarian cults of the 19th century have a direct connection to the Hippie cults of the 20th century. But like The Source Family, the free-love, vegan-focused cults of the American Southwest were all fun and games until someone declared themselves the Messiah. And in the 21st century, we'll focus on the proliferation of cults that use diet and fasting as a control technique: NXIVM, Weigh Down Workshop, and even LuLaRoe.
