ABSTRACT
Food and eating are more than biological necessities; rather they are imbued with a symbolic and, at times, mythical force. In the burgeoning field of food studies, there is a widely held consensus that what, how, and why we eat food (hereafter termed foodways) is informed by and can inform about cultural codes and social norms. Mary Douglas believes that if we treat food as a code, then we can see the messages it encodes in the different degrees of “hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion” and in transactions across boundaries. Like sex, she argues, the “taking of food has a social component as well as a biological one” (Douglas 2003, 231). Foodways dictate inclusion or exclusion to familial, social, religious, and national groups. One must follow food and eating norms if one is to be accepted. Transgressing food boundaries can mean absolute ostracism, such as exclusion from religious ceremonies or family celebrations. Eating is thus one of the essential ways humans create social differences. As a highly symbolic aspect of social mores involving a system of dietary codes and taboos, food constructs a significant part of our cultural identity. Indeed, David Sutton has argued that “Food does not simply symbolize social bonds and divisions; it participates in their creation and recreation” (Sutton 2001, 102). Through eating, we delineate our individual and group identities. If we accept this significance of foodways in forging national, social, and familial identity, it is interesting to explore what happens to these identities when foodways are broken, lost, damaged, rendered abject, or forbidden. In the Atlantic slave trade (the trade of Africans to the American continent and the Caribbean from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries), foodways defined race and power relations in subtle and long-lasting ways. Food became a system of codes delineating race divisions; rations and food denial were an implicit part of a power structure that left many hungry and/or malnourished; the joy and pleasure usually associated with food was inverted as food was used to punish and torture; and, paradoxically, food became a source of strength, memory, and identity for those denied their liberty and all its attendant graces.
