ABSTRACT
Problems of hunger, malnutrition, and obesity are rampant across the globe, and providing the world’s population with affordable, nutritious, and safe food is becoming increasingly difficult. Food and agriculture present unique problems in the field of religion and environment because, first, everyone must eat and, second, agriculture relies on sets of relationships between humans, plants, and animals. Agriculture requires human interventions into the earth’s processes in the form of planting, harvesting, and slaughtering, but we can choose how we construct those interventions. If humans are members of the biotic community, to use Aldo Leopold’s words, what kind of members should we be? The world’s religious and cultural traditions offer multiple frameworks to assess human roles in the biotic community. This chapter explores some factors that food and agriculture present in the field of religion and environment and will consider how the world’s religious traditions offer tools-both potential and actual-to think through how we grow, produce, and distribute food while considering all members of the biotic community: human and nonhuman.
