Faith-friendly food

Trend expert Faith Popcorn, who predicted the cocooning craze in the 1990s, was a keynote speaker at the Future of Food conference held in December in Washington, D.C. She predicts we will begin to see what she calls faith-friendly foods showing up in the marketplace as an outgrowth of what her company calls clanning, the desire to belong to groups with common ideas.

In fact, faith-friendly food has already surfaced. Tyson Foods, the maker of all types of meat products, is now offering free downloadable prayer books on its website. The booklets contain mealtime prayers for a variety of faiths.

Other experts are predicting the possibility of Christian-raised chicken. Both Judaism and Islam have standards for the humane slaughter of animals - Kosher and Halal. There is certainly no reason why the faith-friendly concept can't be extended to the manner in which animals are raised.