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The purpose of this paper is to investigate if religious food laws can provide answers to current issues with the food systems.

This paper provides a discussion of the dietary and food system principles from a Judaism, Christianity and Islamic perspective for the design of a more sustainable and healthy food system.

The commercialisation of the natural resources, industrial food production approach and consumerism is endangering the food security, health and environment. Current industry practices are not sustainable and do not comply with Jewish, Christian and Islamic scriptures. Kosher, Christian and halal food laws share common principles in prohibition of certain animals (like pig), prohibition of blood, role of fasting and animal welfare. As a change in the diet is the solution, there is a key role for the food industry to comply and for religious leaders to radically reduce meat consumption and food waste of its followers.

This viewpoint paper shows that religious food laws provide answers to current problems with the industrialised food production approach and consumerism.

New food industry directives should convert meat-based to plant-based ingredients and additives; replace porcine by bovine sources; and emphasise on animal welfare to better serve the Jewish, Christian and Muslim consumer. Religious logos (kosher and halal) should incorporate nutrient profiling through a traffic light system to promote healthy food choice.

Religious food laws are important for a big part of the world population (Jews, Christians and Muslims), which share many common principles. This study contributes to a better understanding of the commonalities and differences in these religious food laws.

The aim of the study is to capture consumers' conceptualization of ethnic food and ethnic restaurants, focusing on what it takes for ethnic restaurants to be perceived authentic.

Qualitative research, based on semi-structured in-depth interviews which were transcribed and subjected to inductive thematic analysis.

The findings conceptualize what ethnic food and ethnic-authentic restaurant are, leading to formulating the criteria that authentic ethnic restaurant should meet.

Findings have practical implications for restaurateurs interested in establishing themselves as ethnically authentic and for businesses focusing on ethnic food. This study was based on Israeli-Jewish participants; studies with other populations will contribute to the findings' trustability.

This study provides novel and critical insights into ethnic restaurant managements and to the customer conceptualization of the concept of ethnic authentic, demonstrating it being a multifaceted concept.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of customer discomfort in service settings when employees and customers who share social incompatibilities, stemming from war, nationalism, religious differences or terrorism, work together in service settings.

The authors engage in triangulation research to understand how Israeli Arabs and Jews experience comfort/discomfort in services. Study 1 uses an experimental design to show how comfort differs when Israeli Jews work with Arabs and Jews in three different service settings. Study 2 employs survey methodology to explore how comfort differs among Israeli Arabs when they work with either an Arab or a Jewish employee. Study 3 uses grounded theory methodology to provide a theoretical framework that explains reasons for customer discomfort occurrence between Israel’s Arabs and Jews, its impact on customers’ attitudes and behaviors and suggestions for increasing comfort.

Israeli Arabs and Jews express various feelings of discomfort when working with each other, and Druze, in service settings. Israeli Jews express higher levels of discomfort when working with Arabs than vice versa, while Israeli Arabs express discomfort when working with Druze employees. Five strategies for increasing customer comfort are defined and developed.

Social incompatibilities prevent many consumers and employees from experiencing comfort during service exchanges; however, managers can alleviate some of the factors that exacerbate customer discomfort.

Managers need to realize that customer discomfort leads to place avoidance and thus should implement strategies to assuage it.

Unabated service situations that result in customer discomfort may lead to customer ill-being, including fear.

This study is the first to explore customer discomfort due to social incompatibilities in depth.

Purpose and methodology – Many adult women struggle with serious eating problems (EPs) and obesity is increasing, yet, little is known about the origins of EPs, which often begin in childhood. Personal Narratives with 25 Israeli Jewish women in recovery from EPs explore (a) types of childhood experiences, (b) the connection between childhood experiences and subsequent EPs, and (c) why food!

Findings a.Analyses of personal narratives uncover a broad range of emotionally abusive experiences in childhood (CEA) including continuous criticism about body shape and weight, emotional neglect and abandonment, death or illness in the family in the absence of a nurturing adult, conflict and tension surrounding parental divorce or dysfunctional marriage, geographic dislocation, and aftermath of the Holocaust.b.Interviewees explicitly identified CEA as the cause of their turning to food for comfort in childhood and subsequently developing lifelong EPs.c.Why food! It was easily accessible, its sweetness took away the pain - temporarily, children replicated parents' unhealthy relationship with food, it was abundant and central in Jewish cultural, ethnic and religious traditions.

Research Implications – This research documents the critical contribution of emotionally abusive experiences in childhood to the development of EPs and confirms the need for additional research.

Practical Implications – The findings warrant a shift in policies and practices to address the role of emotional abuse in the development and maintenance of EPs. Moreover, policies focused on obesity, particularly among youth, need to recognize the contribution of CEA – in addition to poor dietary choices and lack of exercise.

Increased awareness about the importance of a safe, healthy nutrition has changed human interactions with food and increased worldwide demand for high quality and ethical food. In this respect, the purpose of this paper is to highlight the concept of ethical food and the nature of kosher food production, assessing common traits and the main differences between the two. A literature review was undertaken in order to verify the direction in which further studies might proceed.

A research review on current literature was carried out exploring concepts of ethical food and food certification underpinning kosher businesses by means of an analysis of both producers’ and consumers’ perspectives. In order to proceed with an accurate analysis, the paper matches both the conceptual analysis and the bibliometric one. The overlap between these two forms of analysis makes results robust and useful for future research.

This review reveals common points between ethical and kosher food because attention is given to both processes and products and the way the market perceives them as expressions of trustworthy and safe production. Furthermore, the analysis reveals an under emphasis on kosher food in the academic world and the results reveal the importance of empirical analysis.

The analysis is focused mainly on kosher food production as an expression of ethical food. It would be interesting, however, to expand the analysis to other types of ethical certification such as Halal food, for example, in order to perform comparative evaluations.

From a practical point of view, it is interesting to note that kosher food is conceived as very safe food and that non-religious people are sensitive to this, which opens new horizons for ethical food. It also offers the possibility that firms that have never considered entering the field of ethical food certification may do so to expand their businesses. This implication also reveals that there is a higher attention on sustainability and safety in agro-food market. Therefore there are great opportunities of expansion for ethical food.

From a social point of view, this paper is of importance for several reasons. It deals with a relatively new and relatively unexplored issue; it points out the relevance of sustainability and safety in food market and consumer behavior, it presents the possibility of exploring knowledge interactions between different perspectives (multidisciplinary approach) and cultures which, in the opinion, will present significant challenge in relation to agro-food business research in the future.

The originality of this work is that of systematizing a literature review of ethical food, enlarging its scope and boundaries with specific reference to kosher food. It also highlights the need to focus on both management and marketing, since up to now there has been a lack of academic contributions to these areas of research. Directions for further research are outlined.

This study aims to explore the hospitality and religious experience of Israeli travelers visiting the globally prevalent Jewish Orthodox Chabad Houses that provide religious, spiritual, educational and hospitality havens in their locales, regardless of the degree of observance.

Using Schmitt’s (1999b) experiential consumption dimensions of Sense, Feel, Think, Relate and Act, this study measured the various visitors’ experiences, satisfaction and loyalty using a sample of 488 Israeli travelers obtained from online social media sites, popular with Israeli travelers.

The findings reveal that Israeli visits to Chabad Houses were primarily characterized by Act, Feel and Relate experiences like meeting fellow Israeli travelers, a sense of togetherness and a feeling of belonging. In predicting satisfaction and loyalty, the visitors’ religious experience did not play a major role, but rather the actual hospitality extended by their religious hosts, like a home-like feeling, comfort, tasty food and a sense of togetherness did.

Collecting data from an online sample might yield results that would not be applicable to the typical Chabad House visitor. Due to the Chabad Houses’ global presence, their visitors’ experiences may vary from one house to another and the findings may not represent an accurate picture of the typical Chabad House visit.

To continue its hospitality brand, the Chabad movement’s decision-makers should continue focusing on innovative visitor experiences and balance the religious and secular components of their hospitality, as well as consider carefully how to direct their marketing and operational budgets.

Adding to the body of literature on travelers’ experience at religious sites, this research is a pioneering attempt to study and explore visitors’ religious and hospitality experiences while visiting small non-conspicuous religious centers that extend their global hospitality brand to travelers.

Many case studies on minority ethnic groups have been concerned with the social, structural and economic patterns of these communities. Knowing how these patterns have influenced the ethnic identity in some cases, the authors believe that they can extrapolate from the strength of the social cohesion of a group to the possible strength of the group's traditional food habits. This series of articles emphasises the strength of traditional food habits in a different cultural environment, and the factors which contribute to this strength.

Debates over ritual slaughter, sacred food, fasts, and forbidden foods, perpetuated by religion and tradition, are nothing new. Dietary obligations and prohibitions, in all their diversity, have always been the object of comment, critique, or even concern from one human group towards another. The consumption of meat (or its prohibition) has always been about more than its nutritional function. Reducing religious dietary obligations to hygienic or gustatory practices would be an unrealistic attempt to erase the diversity of the procedures which people undertake to give meaning to life, death, and the world, and to locate themselves in relation to “others”. These rites, ­legitimated by myths, inevitably provoke phenomena of influence, reciprocated within and outside groups. The selection of food – of meat in particular – plays a primordial role as a social marker, the rules of which contribute to the organisation of groups by tracing ­differences between individuals, between men and women, and between communities. Formerly attached to a totemic group and its territory, then to a religion and its society, dietary practices are globalising and encountering one-another. Questions are now raised about the management, in shared spaces, of a diversity of dietary prohibitions and obligations. These questions are at the core of this chapter, notably, what place should be reserved for dietary particularities in collective catering in human organisations? And what limits should be given to the expectations of each regarding dietary purity or fasting?

Ethnic entrepreneurs’ networks are analysed on the basis of three complementary dimensions: intensity and complexity of networks; power relations; and entrepreneurs’ horizons of awareness. The analysis is based on two theoretical propositions. First, firms located in the periphery are weakly embedded in national markets due to their external depended relations. Second, local firms use the tendency to embed themselves in their home regions as a strategy to improve their position in external power relations. The inquiry of Arab industry in Israel suggests that the form and degree of embeddedness of any given firm is affected by the existence of both separate economic milieus: Arab and Jewish. The findings lead us to suggest two concepts. First, over‐embeddedness, which characterises Arab firms that are highly embedded in the local milieu, operate under the influence of kinship structures and a petrified supportive tissue that downgrades networks into cohesive coalitions opposing structural changes. Second, under‐embeddedness, which characterises firms that manage to develop and maintain wide inter‐ethnic dependent sets of networks, but due to lack of power fail to transform them into more rewarding exchanges.