This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A sacred food entry records a dish or offering whose making or eating carries genuine religious meaning within a named tradition, distinct from an ordinary recipe that happens to be eaten by people who are religious. The atlas holds a religiously varied set: festival breads and cakes, offerings set before an image or altar, foods tied to a specific date on a religious calendar, and dishes eaten, or deliberately avoided, as a mark of belonging to a particular community.
Corrie Norman's survey of food and religion, in the Oxford Handbook of Food History, states the working thesis an entry can borrow directly: food has allowed religious peoples to relate to their gods, to each other, and to the world, whether through a ritual as specific as Christian Communion or a Hindu deity feeding, or through an everyday dietary code such as Jewish kashrut or Islamic halal. Norman's account also draws on Mary Douglas's anthropological reading of Hebrew dietary law, in which what a tradition eats, or refuses to eat, encodes a social boundary as much as a religious one.
An entry therefore records three things distinctly: what the dish is and how it is prepared, the specific ritual or calendar occasion that gives it its religious meaning, and which named tradition claims it, since the same broad act, an offering set before a deity, a festival eaten in common, a food kept from or avoided at a set time, recurs across otherwise unrelated religions without being the same claim in each one.