A reflection on critical race conversations

Featured below is a jointly-authored reflection on the panel We Are What You Eat. Scroll to the end to find a recording of the event.

In an event that arguably could be termed edible scholarship, two academics joined in conversation to discuss food and racialization from an educational perspective. We Are What You Eat: Conversations on Food and Race took place on October 15, 2020, and was hosted by The Folger Institute. Part of a series on critical race studies within academia, it seems that institutes of higher learning are trading long papers for full plates for this event. The conversation included topics of colonialisms, co-opting, culture, and culinary art and overlapped various lenses of analysis including race and class to view these topics from multiple perspectives. This event mirrored discussions of realms of gendered work, domestic labor, and racial impact that we have entered into within the virtual classroom of HST 311. A juxtaposition of the panel topics, source material by Amanda H. Herbert, Susan D. Amussen, and Allyson M. Poska, and our class discussions on a broad scale deepens understanding and extends our scholarship, settling more deeply into the topic of racialization than we have gone as of yet. All in all, We Are What You Eat continued conversations, began new ones, and left intellectual gaps that left us hungry for more.

At the start we are introduced to the panelists: Dr. Gitanjali Shahani of San Francisco State University and Dr. Jennifer Pak of the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Their conversation aimed to examine the intersections that exist between food studies, critical race studies, and early modern studies. Full of flavor, panelists argued that these different forms of historical study “enrich” one another and serve as critical tools for analysis. This echoed sentiments of our early class discussions that emphasized how economic histories, religious histories, etc., are expanded by the application of gender as a category of analysis. This begs the question--just as we ask if the existence of “women’s history” is necessary, should there be a historical culinary field? Or perhaps just a continued study of food’s impact on race, culture, class, and other categories. This week’s reading delves into this topic, featuring a quote that deepens our position. “Gender is an especially useful category of analysis for understanding the early modern Atlantic world because it transcends imperial, religious, and cultural boundaries…” (Amussen and Poska 2014) [1] Substituting “Food” for “Gender,” it highlights how studies of community and historical experiences render our studies more fruitful when juxtaposed with broader conversations.

The panelists interrogate the ways in which discussion of food history is often rooted in colonialism, imperialism, and more broadly racism, analyzing the relationships between food and identity by complicating a seemingly simple and complicated yet highly racialized cliche: “you are what you eat.” This section also relates to our course in its examination of early European colonialism and migration as a tool of increased globalism and transfers of knowledge and trades. Dr. Jennifer Pak specifically discusses the ways in which this simple cliche uncovers racialized power dynamics in food history which often resulted in the abuse of power by Europeans in early modern Europe. These acts of violence are seen in the prominence of colonialist and imperialist histories rooted in the subordination and especially erasure of people of color in conversations of food. Indeed, Dr. Pak argues that it is impossible to divorce these foodstuffs from the means through which they were acquired. Dr. Shanani speaks about how these historical erasures are being remedied by historians through their work on histories of everyday food products such as tea, sugar, pepper, and coffee. She calls these scenarios in which different cultures intersected through food in early modern history, “cross-cultural encounters” or “culinary zones.” These same historians point to these foodstuffs as key tools for understanding “migration, plantation, transportation, and colonialism.”

Another key connection to our course is the usage of these ethnic foodstuffs in the recipe books of early modern European homes. The connection between women and ethnic foodstuffs in early modern Europe was especially complex. Dr. Pak states that “...the English housewife in the seventeenth century had no direct contact with the enslaved people of the Caribbean plantation, but she sprinkled the products of their labor into her preserves and confections.” This act of erasure has been palpable throughout our own engagement with pre modern material. The written work is certainly less appetizing, and the numerous times we have engaged with household dynamics without properly discussing racial elements of these households unsettles the stomach. For example, in Amanda H. Herbert’s Cooperative Labor: Making Alliances through Women’s Recipes and Domestic Production, we specifically discuss bedrooms, worksites, and specifically kitchens as sites of connection and friendship for lower- and higher-class women. These areas were often sites of violence and control for those of racialized experiences, but using European wives as the norm relegates those under that subjugation to obscurity.

The panel certainly was not without its problems. One major issue that was not addressed was the appropriation of ethnic remedies by early modern European women. The panelists discussed the use of spices as bodily remedies and discussed the reliance of early modern women on steady spice supplies. Dr. Sania explicitly names pepper as a prominent natural remedy that was used by women to hinder contraception after sex. In the home, techniques such as sugaring (a method of preservation) became widely used amongst women in England. Dr. Pak also discusses the usage of sugaring, in particular, by early modern European women to contribute to England’s colonial expansion. This revelation relates back to the participation of women in the building of empire and underscores the ability of everyday women to uphold colonialism. Returning to the piece by Herbert, she also underscores the joint investment from women across class or position in the control of household dynamics. When these women are understood to be white it underscores that the label of “everyday” does not undermine the potential for them to subjugate non-white people within that realm as well.

Furthermore, while this discussion is important, it suffers from the same issue that plagues many of the readings engaged in our course context: a lack of a Black perspective. Despite engaging with the idea of racialized colonialism--a system founded on anti-Blackness--there are not Black voices in the room.

There are certainly more uplifting notes of cooperation to underscore. In our class, we examined the history of recipe books as a means of analyzing women as agents of knowledge. This panel discussion takes this analysis one step further and suggests that some of these early modern recipe books can serve as agents of cross-cultural knowledge and tools for determining migration and exposure.

In conclusion, We Are What You Eat: Conversations on Food and Race was an afternoon of culinary conversation that echoed a semester of domestic study. When juxtaposed with materials from class and the wider world, it deepened our understanding of culinary dynamics and entered into a broader discussion of food-based appropriation, racialization, and control.

[1] Amussen, Susan D., and Allyson M. Poska. 2014. “Shifting the Frame: Trans-Imperial Approaches to Gender in the Atlantic World.” Early Modern Women 9 (1): 3–24.