African Diaspora Foodways in Social and Cultural Context

Abstract

African diaspora foodways stand at a crossroads between necessity and expression, biology and culture, sustenance and pleasure. Eating is a biological imperative. But foods are also deeply imbued with cultural meaning. Enslaved African and African American cooks in the Americas created meals that reflected their varied African homelands as well as European and Native American influences. Indeed, Peggy Brunache (2011, 180–182) has argued that this culinary creolization began before enslaved people reached the New World; captives were provided a mixture of culturally familiar and unfamiliar provisions on ships, including American-grown crops like maize. Even under the extreme and deprived conditions of the Middle Passage, newly enslaved people exercised some agency in relation to their food consumption—for example, a first-hand observer in the 1700s reported that captives sometimes refused to eat broad beans, instead tossing them overboard (Brunache 2011, 183). From the beginning, then, the foods of African descendant people in the Americas were profoundly embedded in broader social systems of control and resistance. As Alexandra Crowder (2021) explains, a forced and abrupt change in diet for enslaved captives newly arrived in the Americas was both culturally disorienting and dehumanizing. Indeed, it was designed to be so. Food played a continuing role in social control on plantations as well; the enslaved relied on their enslavers for either direct provisions, an allotment of time to grow their own food, or some mixture of both. These provisions of food and time, of course, could be withheld. As much as food remained a tool of social control on the part of slave owners, for enslaved people, it was also a means of resistance to that control. In a recent study of provisioning at Jesuit haciendas in Peru, Brendan Weaver, Lizette Muñoz, and Karen Durand (2019, 1016) observed that “Foodways among the enslaved populations ... stand at the intersection of top-down and bottom-up processes at the estates.” Brunache argued a similar point when she identified the