The Hidden Religion of American Food

On food labeling, American secularism, and anxiety turduckens

By Lauren Macknight

I’m calling it an anxiety turducken. It’s the moral panic that will set in when I’m trying to meal plan for a Thanksgiving dinner with various family members I love — and whose diets and tastes form something more like a chaotic scatterplot than a spectrum. We start with a set of grandparents who cannot imagine a Thanksgiving without a turkey and boxed Stovetop stuffing, add in a husband who is a newly enlightened vegetarian, and round it off with a toddler who will not be bothered to eat anything that isn’t beige. Then there’s me, the host who complicates matters even further with what I feel is my moral imperative to present a green vegetable. In the week ahead you’ll find me in the grocery aisles puzzling over products that tout “USDA Organic,” “Natural,” and “Non-GMO” labels, and I will be one among many — mostly women — contending with this distinctly American ritual of making the right, best choice in foods for our families, holiday season or otherwise.

This self-portrait of the desperate host, beset by nutritional impossibilities, might be a slight exaggeration, but it illustrates something peculiar about how Americans navigate food choices —that is, with a lot of anxiety, and under enormous pressure. Go to any major media outlet and you’ll find an article about the dangers of ultra-processed foods or the benefits of a plant-based diet on the environment. We are constantly told that the dietary choices we make will reverberate throughout a child’s life and may fling us further into climate crisis. The stakes appear to be high.

This is all a way of saying that we’re living in a moment where what we choose to eat and feed our families has been tied to religious identity and secular consumer culture, often in ways we don’t recognize. And if that sounds unlikely, Chad Seales would like a moment of your time.

An associate professor of religious studies at UT Austin, Seales’ research addresses the relationship between religion and culture in American life, whether that’s the social expressions of Southern evangelicals or the religious politics of U2’s Bono. Recently he’s been interested in religion and industrialization, specifically agricultural industrialization, with an eye toward how the marketing of genetically modified organism (GMO) foods reveals a subtle but powerful connection between evangelical values and how we think about processed food.

“I look at the diffusion of religion into the artifacts of our cultural lives,” says Seales, and when it comes to GMO food marketing, that diffusion shows up in the bifurcated treatment of marketing to industry vs the consumer. “When [GMO companies like Monsanto (now Bayer) and DuPont] are selling to farmers, they're incredibly forthright about and proud of their GMO technology,” Seales explains. But when you’re comparing stuffing mixes at the supermarket, you won’t find a Monsanto logo anywhere on the box — even though the corn and soy in there almost certainly came from their seeds. And the language and labels you do see won’t give you much insight into the role genetic modification plays in what goes on your plate.

This split personality in GMO marketing reveals something deeper about the relationship between American capitalism and religion, Seales says. He would argue that this selective invisibility is actually a form of American secularism — where corporations deliberately hide certain aspects of production while wrapping consumption in the language of personal choice and moral goodness.

Think of American secularism as less about the separation of church and state, or political secularism, and more of a magic show where religious influence is hidden and unspoken, going underground while still shaping everything around us. It's akin to how tech companies talk about "making the world a better place," language that's devoid of explicit religious references but still carries this quasi-spiritual promise of salvation through innovation and progress. With GMO marketing, we see this same pattern: the technology is presented as neutral and scientific to consumers while being wrapped in almost religious language of purity and righteousness when marketed to farmers. Seales cites a 1917 Sovereign Cigarette ad that proclaimed "Purity is a Great Thing, Friend!" and depicted a white washerwoman bathing a cartoon cigarette in a "lady's parlor" as the early 20th-century equivalent of today’s agricultural ads’ emphasis on “exclusive genetics.” These modern ads portray farmers — typically white men — as “technological warriors” who use everything at their disposal to eradicate threats to crop production. The language has moved away from explicit racial messaging, but it’s still coded to emphasize purity and the connection between consumption and moral virtue.

Further, when consumer food labeling does draw attention to itself, it’s to use non-GMO labels to increase profitability since research shows that consumers will pay more for transparency. Seales argues there’s a kind of spiritual justification driving the desire for non-GMO foods, one that prizes the pursuit of salvation through individual choice, just as there’s a justification for the use of GMO seeds by farmers. These motivations are secular not because they’re non-religious, but because they expertly hide their religious DNA.

The irony, Seales points out, is that a majority of evangelical Christians — who represent a significant portion of American consumers — initially opposed biotech that genetically modified food production, with 62% against it in 2001. Yet corporate interests prevailed by doing something remarkably clever: rather than fighting religious opposition, they co-opted it. Since the mid-20th century, corporations have actively funded specific branches of evangelical Protestantism, particularly in the Sunbelt, even hiring workplace chaplains to mediate labor disputes in food production facilities.

Which brings us to the most fascinating part of Seales’ thesis about how this practice ties into what he calls "cultural evangelicalism," which might also describe our current "wellness" discourse. Whether we're talking about GMOs in the 2000s or ultra-processed foods today, the American response to food system problems consistently comes down to individual choice and personal responsibility.

“There’s a pattern here about how culture gets into food, how moral solutions are proposed to problems within the food system,” says Seales. “An evangelical thread is in the belief that you can live as if the individual can pursue their own salvation through making the correct food choices.” Never mind that our industrial food system has made minimally processed, nutrient-dense foods inaccessible to many Americans, especially in communities of color.

And so here we are again, standing in the grocery store aisle, turning over packages of stuffing mix while trying to make the "right" choice — the choice that doesn’t give a child a crippling metabolic disorder or risk catapulting the globe into fierier temps. Seales would likely tell that frazzled shopper something both discomfiting and liberating: the impossible decision you're trying to make was designed to be impossible. "The way that industrial food marketing has succeeded is by convincing us that if we made better choices, we would live healthier lives,” he might say, “but that displaces responsibility away from the system and onto the individual, making it a moral issue of personal choice rather than collective action.” The real turducken isn't the combination of dietary restrictions at your holiday table — it's the layering of evangelical thinking, corporate messaging, and American individualism that's been served up as the natural order of things.

So, what does Thanksgiving look like for Seales? Growing up in the Florida panhandle, his grandmother would cook chicken and dumplings, along with butter beans, black-eyed peas, collards greens, and his dad would roast the requisite turkey. “My mom’s side of the family were more connected to the Gulf Coast and would often catch blue crabs and make gumbo,” recalls Seales. Today, Thanksgiving looks a little different. Seales and his family live in Texas and he has three kids. “We eat a lot of the same foods, but just source all produce and any meat we serve from local farmers, rather than from factory farms.”

Does he have a turkey? Turducken? Tofu turducken? “Half of our family is vegetarian, so we often have a lot of vegetables, and usually don’t have a turkey, since there is not enough of us to eat it.”