We do not know what the surprised native inhabitants thought of the stocky, bearded, overdressed and smelly men who stepped out of the surf and into their lives on that autumn day in 1492, but thanks to Rebecca Earle's most recent book, we now know a lot about the ways in which the Europeans tried to figure out who the indigenous people were and above all, why they were so different from the Europeans themselves.
One of the rare educated earlier intruders, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, drew on his understanding of Galen and the principles of ‘Humoralism’ (Earle has a lucid and useful chapter on this esoteric matter) to explain that the people of the Indies had a different ‘complexion’. While Spaniards were ‘choleric’, Indians were ‘phlegmatic’ and thus melancholic, even delicate and feminine. Although these inherent qualities might be altered by such things as air or climate – or even by the stars above – the contrast between European and native diet ‘more than anything else made European bodies different from Amerindian bodies’ (p. 21). Moreover, at first glance the natives’ food was not only different, it was weird and disgusting to European eyes. What could one expect from a people whose diet included toads, frogs and dogs, along with snakes, grasshoppers and sautéed worms, accompanied by such a lowly tuber as the cassava? Spaniards, on the other hand, owed their superiority to red wine, olive oil, wheat bread and the flesh of lamb, pork and beef.
During the first years of contact, disquieting fears arose. Would European bodies take on Indian characteristics if they consumed native foods? That seemed to be the case with Jerónimo de Aguilar, famously held captive and nourished for several years by the Maya, who effectively turned the Spaniard into an Indian. More optimistically, could Indians become Europeans if they adopted a proper food regime? Columbus imagined at first that food fit for Europeans might be supplied by imports, but as growing numbers of Spaniards settled in the Indies, it became obvious that demand for wheat bread, wine, pigs, goats, sheep and cattle could not be satisfied by transatlantic shipping. Colonists soon began to ‘Europeanise’ the New World landscape, thus making food a foundational element in the colonial project.
The highest priority was bread made from wheat, the ancient Mediterranean cereal. Apart from nourishment, wheat bread and red wine represented the most intimate symbols of the Christian culture that the invaders wished to establish. As Earle shows, however, the creation of a European food regime in the Indies was no simple matter. Wheat required the transfer of the entire array of Mediterranean practices, which included the plough and draught animals, the ‘broadcasting’ of seed, harrowing to cover the seeds, and sickles or scythes for harvesting. Moreover, since the Spaniards threshed by having animals tread out the grain – rather than using the flail common in northern Europe – they required large numbers of mares and hard-packed threshing floors. Then, imported mechanical mills, not the Stone Age maize culture of mano y metate, reduced grain to flour.
As for wine, the first Vitis vinifera came on Columbus’ second voyage and its transfer to the Indies also presented problems. Grapevines are susceptible of frost and mildew, requiring a warm, dry climate in the growing season. Even today, apart from the excellent vineyards present in a swathe running from central Chile across the Andes to Mendoza and the odd niches in Baja California or the Peruvian coast, there are few decent viticultural areas in Latin America. It is painful to imagine the harsh, oxidised, often vinegary brew that must have trickled out of the first colonial presses.
Olive oil, another essential item in the Spanish diet, was mainly imported – rarely produced locally – until the end of the colonial epoch. Pulque from the maguey, chicha (the Andean corn beer) and distillates from sugar cane remained the preferred native alcoholic drinks until fairly recent times.
Sheep, cattle, goats and pigs spread rapidly among the European colonists but the native people in the early colonial years remained essentially vegetarian, limiting their meat consumption mainly to fish and fowl. New World agriculture, then, until well into the sixteenth century, remained divided between plough and hoe culture; between field and chacra.
In the course of the following two centuries the early division between Old and New World food consumption was complicated by taste and sex. Many Europeans found that they actually liked pineapples and other tropical fruits, frothy cups of chocolate, and the spicy ají or chili, to name but a few of the native foods that found their way onto European tables. For their part, native people in Middle America and the Andes continued to prefer the more easily cultivated corn to wheat. They quickly adopted the chicken and developed a taste for pork, mutton and beef, together with imported vegetables and fruit. By the late sixteenth century, Indians and mestizos owned herds of pigs and large flocks of sheep and cattle in central Mexico.
Along with a natural evolution of taste, contact among European settlers and native villagers led to a growing mestizo culture furthering the creation of hybrid food regimes from the Rio Grande to the Bio-Bio. By the eighteenth century, pastel de choclo, papas a la Huancaíno, delicate mole verde cooked with pork, and many more unrecorded combinations had appeared in colonial kitchens.
Professor Earle's path-breaking book ‘examines the centrality of food to Spain's colonial endeavor’ and aims ‘to explore how ideas about food and bodies underpinned the ways Europeans understood the environment and inhabitants of the new world’. Differences between European and indigenous foodways also ‘marked out the distance Amerindians needed to travel to become fully civilized human beings’ (pp. 2–3). Earle recounts in the very first sentence of her book that when she announced her intention to research early colonial attitudes about food, her colleagues wondered, ‘but are there any sources?’ They had no need to worry. Drawing on an almost overwhelming volume of mostly sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writing, the bibliography stretches on for 34 single-spaced small-print pages and 14 bundles of archival material. Because these are almost all original, early colonial sources, the writers often enter into dialogue with contemporaries to contest, qualify and reject opinion coming from the Indies. Moreover, this attempt to get a grip on Spain's early colonial policy was beset by the imperial ambiguity that ‘aimed simultaneously to incorporate the indigenous population into European cultural space while at the same time doing everything possible to prevent that from happening’ (p. 18).
Rebecca Earle weaves her way through this rich tapestry of information, ambiguities, ignorance, misunderstanding and contradictions with a sure hand to produce an original and fascinating study.
