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Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 6: 67. © American Folklore Society 2018

Review of:

Food Cults: How Fads, Dogma, and Doctrine 
Influence Diet
Kima Cargill, ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Studies in 
Food and Gastronomy, 2017. Pp. 252, index, contributors.

By: Tallen Sloane

Food Cults: How Fads, Dogma, and Doctrine Influence Diet, edited by Kima 
Cargill, is a comprehensive volume of essays that document and analyze fringe 
communities of extreme eaters’ ideologies and behaviors throughout the world. 
These communities are defined as cults in the broadest sense of the term 
to encompass a spectrum of exclusive fringe food movements that leverage 
promises based in cultural fears. From juicing and elective restrictive diets to 
media-fueled gluttony and marijuana categorized as a vegetable, essay topics in 
Food Cults demonstrate the dynamism of community eating rituals and reveal 
the fleeting promises of longevity, fertility, happiness, thinness, and countless 
other cultural ideals that perpetuate cult belief. Researchers, folklorists, mental 
health professionals, and omnivores intrigued by socio-cultural analyses of 
polarizing attitudes towards our foodscape would benefit from this collection. 
Additionally, open-minded raw-food vegans, ardent juicers, paleo lifestylers, 
gluten-free advocates, sourdough fermenters, and cooking fanatics would 
find this collection pleasurable, if sometimes challenging, due to the authors’ 
invitations to question cult rhetorics. 

Cargill, a psychologist whose expertise lies in uncovering deceptive techniques 
that the pharmaceutical industry utilizes to promote consumption of 
their products, subtextually reveals her critical background throughout 
the compilation. Her introduction synthesizes the broad expanse of food 
communities by providing an inclusive definition for the term “cult,” so often 
misconstrued with the likes of the Jonestown, Guyana, American Peoples 
Temple Agricultural Project cult and such other notorious groups. Cargill sees 
cults as serving as communities to “explore the mechanisms of group and 
individual identity, the distortion of nutritional science, the ways in which 
food behaviors express our anxieties, and how dietary practices organize us 



Sloane, Tallen. 2017. Review of Food Cults: How Fads, Dogma, and Doctrine Influence Diet. 
Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 6: 68. © American Folklore Society 2018

psychologically” (3). The first collection to bring together various works on 
fringe food communities throughout time and space, Food Cults offers readers a 
fascinating insight into commonalities across these groups.

As important as the definition is for the compilation’s coherence, the essays 
within demonstrate the fantastic power of small group collective anxieties, 
ritual practices, and identity politics. Each of Food Cults’ fifteen ethnographic 
and analytical essays invites readers to delve into the mindset of a specific 
group’s members. The essays are organized from the philosophical and 
cerebral, such as “The Psychology of Food Cults” (Cargill), to the historical, 
such as “Food Practiced in Early Christianity” (Brazinski), and then segues 
into the restrictive and contemporary, “Juicing: Language, Ritual, and Placebo 
Sociality in a Community of Extreme Eaters” (Veissière and Gibbs-Bravo) 
and “Contemporary Superfood Cults: Nutritionism, Neoliberalism, and 
Gender” (Sikka), for example, ending with a macrocosmic, global view of how 
communities define food, specifically good food, such as in “‘Herb Is for the 
Healing of the Nation!’: Marijuana as a Consumable Vegetable among Ghetto 
Muslim Youth of Maamobi in Accra, Ghana” (Botchway and Prempeh). 

The collection’s central focus concerns how these cults form identity around 
collective anxiety, group dogma, and belief generated within a specific group. 
For example, in “Of Bananas and Cavemen: Unlikely Similarities between Two 
Online Food Communities” (Maxfield and Rissing), fruitarians and primal 
dieters find common ground in legitimizing “dietary choices and . . . pursuit of 
a lean, muscular bodily aesthetic,” while both groups’ manipulation of science 
in the quest for “one true diet” asserts moral superiority over each other even 
though they cite the same theory (141). 

Researchers seeking a grounded counterpoint to online forums and social 
media would deeply benefit from this carefully chosen collection of essays about 
exclusive food attitudes and actions that are culturally entrenched and globally 
enacted. Former and current food cult members might recognize behaviors in 
these pages that challenge their chosen doctrine. Folklorists interested in small-
group dynamics, the evolution of religion, secular ritual, and identity politics 
would find this compilation fascinating. Omnivores, cookbook aficionados, 
culinary historians, and librarians interested in diversifying their food literature 
would benefit from this set of social criticism. Mental health practitioners 
working with extreme eaters or loved ones who are concerned about extreme 
eating behaviors could find this a helpful addition to their library. While not an 
overt critique of individual cults’ ideologies, Food Cults introduces a healthy 



Sloane, Tallen. 2017. Review of Food Cults: How Fads, Dogma, and Doctrine Influence Diet. 
Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 6: 69. © American Folklore Society 2018

dose of skepticism and critical review to the complicated conversation about 
healthy bodies and healthy communities. 


