“I Never Met with a Worse Article in My life”: Disgusting Food and Repellent Food Habits in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean Colonies

ABSTRACT

According to their accounts, British and American travelers in the nineteenth-century Caribbean encountered a wide range of disgusting elements connected with food. Not only did they face unknown and strange foodstuffs, but they also dealt with other repugnant habits such as the filthiness of the people and the places where they ate – or would have eaten had they managed to overcome their revulsion – and the lack of manners of the people with whom they had to share some of their meals. For some visitors, disgust was connected with the realization that the locals ate unusual food, while others were offended by the huge number of dishes eaten by Creoles or by their bad manners and the dirt. In just one case, the sources show a strategy of learning to cope with the emotion of disgust. This essay will discuss how disgust arose from the encounter of different food habits in the colonial spaces of Jamaica, Cuba, and Antigua in order to shed new light on the processes of inclusion and exclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Dietary habits
• otherness
• civilization
• empires
• colonialism

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the editor of the special issue, Carla Cevasco, to Rachel Herrmann as co-editor of Global Food History, and to the anonymous reviewers whose helpful comments contributed to improve this article.

The research for this article has been made possible and sponsored by the participation of its author in two Spanish research projects: the first one, Nacionalismo culinario y cuerpo: Cuba entre el dominio de España y Estados Unidos en el siglo XIX, Ayuda Emergia, captación de talento investigador, Junta de Andalucía, and the second one by the Junta de Andalucía (PAIDI), Historia de la Globalización: Violencia, Negociación e Interculturalidad (HUM 1000, Director: Igor Perez Tostado).

Notes

1. Disgust and mistrust for local and unfamiliar foodways were not the only attitudes travelers had for foreign food. On this aspect see Berti, Colonial Recipes.

2. Menninghaus, Eiland, and Golb, Disgust, 1.

3. Douglas, Purity and Danger; Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust.

4. Barthes, “Psychosociology of contemporary food consumption,” 21.

5. Rozin, Fallon, “A Perspective on Disgust;” Fischler, “Food, Self and Identity,” 277–78.

6. Leong-Salobir, Food Culture in Colonial Asia, 11.

7. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant; Classen, Aroma; Rotter, Empire of the Senses.

8. Gugliuzzo, “Acridofagi;” Marinaccio, “Garlic Eaters”

9. Bender, “The Delectable and Dangerous;” Montanari, “The Stinky King”

10. Saldarriaga, Alimentación e identidades, 134–40.

11. Janes, “Curiosité gastronomique et cuisine exotique”

12. Cevasco, “Nothing which hunger will not devour”

13. Berti, “The ‘offensive’ and ‘abominable’ Spanish Garlic”

14. Sheridan, The Formation of the Caribbean Plantation Society, 394, 398–404; Smith, “Sugar’s poor relation,” 69–77. For a history of coffee see also Monteith, Plantation Coffee in Jamaica, 1790–1848; Combrink, “Slave-based Coffee,” 18–20.

15. Heuman and Burnard, The Routledge History of Slavery.

16. Nederveen, White on Black, 32–51; Grant, Representations of British Emigration, 175–93; Holt, “Marking: Race, Race-Making;” Hall, Civilising Subjects, 338–79.

17. Thompson, Travel Writing; Rubiés, Travel Writing as a Genre, 8–9.

18. The travel literature examined in this study usually overlaps with the narrative as a genre. In fact, while they include the story of a journey, they also employ the “devices of fiction.” Bohls, “Introduction,” xxi.

19. Blanton, Travel Writing.

20. Berti, “Good Things from Bristol and Ireland;” Smith, Watson, Reading Autobiography, 24, 25, 42–5.

21. A Physician, Notes on Cuba; Gifford, “John George F. Wurdermann,” 44–5, 47, 56, 59, 60.

22. Paton, Down the Islands, 5–6.

23. Ibid.

24. Ward, “What Time Has Proved,” 68.

25. Williams, A Tour Through the Island of Jamaica; Nordius, “Racism and Radicalism in Jamaican Gothic,” 674–5.

26. Anonymous, Marly; Williamson, “Introduction”.

27. Feibel, “MAJOR-GENERAL THOMAS STAUNTON ST. CLAIR,” 29; Staunton St. Clair, A Soldier’s Sojourn, i.

28. Staunton St. Clair, A Soldier’s Sojourn; Feibel, “MAJOR-GENERAL THOMAS STAUNTON ST. CLAIR”.

29. Vernon, Early Recollections of Jamaica.

30. Procida, Married to the Empire, 42–53.

31. Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal; Berti, “Food and Colonists’ Identity,” 45–6.

32. Robert, New Year in Cuba; Masur, New Year in Cuba, 158; Bower, “New Year in Cuba.”

33. Anonymous, Rambles in Cuba, 8; “Adeline M. Noble (Ferris).”

34. Ward Howe, A Trip to Cuba; “Julia Ward Howe;” Alvarado, “Mrs. Howe in Havana,” 21.

35. Gifford, “John George F. Wurdermann,” 47–8.

36. Anonymous, Notes on Cuba, v.

37. Williamson, “Introduction,” xi.

38. Ward Howe, A Trip to Cuba, Chapter XIV.

39. Overseers and bookkeepers were British people of lower status in charge of working on the plantations. Vernon, Early Recollections of Jamaica, 17–19.

40. Anonymous, Marly, 52–3.

41. St. Clair, A Soldier’s Sojourn, 107–8.

42. Montgomery, British Colonial Library, 103.

43. Lévi-Strauss, Le cru et le cuit.

44. Anonymous, Marly, 211–12.

45. On Whitehorne see Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal, 321; “Samuel Risby Whitehorne II”.

46. Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal, 80–1.

47. Gardner Lowell, New Year in Cuba, 84–5.

48. Ibid., 4–6.

49. A good number of contemporaries underlined the Creoles’ impoliteness and ignorance. Among them see Day, Five Years’ Residence, Vol. I, 247, 254–5. Scholarship discusses the issue, too. See Berti, “Good Things;” Petley, “Gluttony, excess and the fall of planter class.”

50. Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal, 11.

51. According to Douglas, the concept of dirt “is the eye of the beholder”. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 2.

52. Ibid., 44.

53. Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal, 55–7.

54. Ibid., 57. This topic has been already discussed in Berti, “Food and Colonists’ Identity,” 34–7.

55. Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal, 63, 64, 68, 69, 76, 79, 80, 101.

56. Ward Howe, A Trip to Cuba, n.p.

57. Paton, Down the Islands, 65.

58. Williams, A Tour Through the Island of Jamaica, 246–52.

59. Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal, 17.

60. Ibid., xv.

61. Paton, Down the Islands, 69–70.

62. Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal, 203.

63. Ibid., 204.

64. Anonymous, Notes on Cuba, 192.

65. Anonymous, Rambles in Cuba, 53–4.

66. Cevasco, “'Nothing which hunger will not devour,'” 265–8, 276–8.

67. Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal, p. 204.

68. See Henderson, Account of British Settlement.

69. Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 89; Cf. Gugliuzzo, “Acridofagi,” 156.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NextGenerationEU.

Notes on contributors

Ilaria Berti

Ilaria Berti is working on her new project Nacionalismo culinario y cuerpo: Cuba entre el dominio de España y Estados Unidos en el siglo XIX financed by the European Union “NextGenerationEU” within the framework of the Maria Zambrano call for the requalification of the Spanish university 2021-2023, Pablo de Olavide University, Seville.

She has been the Principal Investigator of her Marie Curie project (H2020) Imperial Recipes, a postdoctoral researcher at the Munich Center for Global History and at Bologna University, and a visiting researcher at the European University Institute. In 2020-2022 she taught Storia delle Americhe at Florence University.

Besides her forthcoming monograph Colonial Recipes in the Nineteenth-Century British and Spanish Caribbean, Ilaria has also coedited, with Yun Casalilla and Svriz, American Globalization, 1492-1850 (Routledge, 2021).