Transforming Foodways: Changes in Diet, Procurement, Consumption, and Access for Laborers on the Stono Plantation, James Island, South Carolina

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Stono Plantation cultivated produce and cotton for the city of Charleston. The plantation’s labor force was originally comprised primarily of enslaved Africans working on a task system. After emancipation, the plantation continued its operations using a “free” primarily African American labor force based upon a sharecropping and/or tenant system. The foodways of plantation laborers changed little over time. Those shifts that did occur between enslavement and emancipation related to increased reliance upon mass-produced foodstuffs and mass-produced goods associated with cooking and eating. This transition involved increased access by laborers to formal and/or illicit markets and reflects the industrialization of the South Carolina Lowcountry during the late nineteenth century.