Unit 16
Food, Demographics, and Culture
Introduction to Unit
This unit explores dramatic changes in the ways food was produced and consumed as a result of global connections after 1500. These changes were as obvious in the Caribbean as they were on the opposite side of the world
in China. Indeed, both regions represent key places where the introduction of new foods produced extraordinary
changes in culture, economy, and demography. After 1500, in fact, the histories of both regions cannot be understood without reference to the wider world. In the three centuries after 1500, patterns of food production and
consumption were engines that drove global processes. Cultures of consumption could shape population movements, declines, or increases. They could also shape identities and express cultural values. Finally, these cultures
nearly always enriched some at the expense of many others. In recent centuries, changes in food production and
consumption have only intensified, and these changes have helped to shape the many flavors of our global
community.
Learning Objectives
· Trace the shifting patterns of food production and consumption related to the process of globalization.
· Trace the social and cultural changes resulting from the introduction of new foods to China, West Africa, the
Caribbean, and Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
· Identify the effects of the introduction of new foods on local and regional environments.
Preparing for This Session
Read Unit 16 in the Bridging World History online text. You may also want to refer to some of the Suggested
Readings and Materials. If you feel you need more background knowledge, refer to a college-level world history
textbook on this subject (look under the index for Agriculture [early modern era, twentieth century], Sugar, Cacao,
Maize, Rice).
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Unit 16
Unit Activities
Before You Begin—30 minutes
Discuss the following quote:
French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau writes,
If I wanted to taste a dish from the end of the earth, I would rather seek it out there than have it brought to
me. For the most exquisite dishes always lack a seasoning that cannot be brought with them and that no cook
can give them: the air of the climate that produced them …it is only at great expense that some rich man in
Paris succeeds in having bad vegetables and bad fruits on his table the whole year round. (Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, “Emile,” in Oeuvres Completes, eds. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond [Paris: Bibilioteque de la
Pleiade, 1969] 4:679–80.)
Discussion Questions
· Does the quote show that eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau was afraid of
consuming foods from other lands? Do you think Rousseau wanted foods that had passed through the
fewest hands possible before reaching his table?
· We tend to think of adulterated foods as a recent phenomenon. In fact, in the time of Rousseau foods in
France were undergoing tremendous changes. Does the quote from Rousseau show his opinion that
human beings had disrupted the order of nature, and that taking food out of its natural environment was
something to be feared?
· During Rousseau’s time, French cuisine went through a phase in which the new Asian spices from global
trade (like saffron, ginger, and passion fruit seeds) were rejected in favor of popular local native herbs—
tarragon, basil, and thyme. Can you think of similar culinary trends today?
Watch the Video for Unit 16: “Food, Demographics, and
Culture”—30 minutes
Activity 1: Movement of Foods Around the World—
30 minutes
Map the movement of foods around the
world. Begin by showing Old World foods and
flavors like citrus, coffee, and sugar coming to
the Americas. And from the Americas, show
potatoes, chocolate, and chili peppers
spreading to Africa and Eurasia. In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese introduced
cassava into coastal West Africa and the
Congo basin.
Item #6496. Hot Pepper Studios, created for Bridging World History, MAP OF
GLOBAL TRADE ROUTES (2004). Courtesy of Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Unit 16
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Unit Activities, cont’d.
Activity 2: Menus Over Time—60 minutes
Using information from the sources below, create the following menus over time.
· Spanish royal menus before Columbian voyages and afterwards.
· Kongolese royal menus before Columbian voyages and afterwards.
· Sixteenth-century Caribbean plantation dinner, and dinner in Jamaica after influence of Maroons.
· Chinese wealthy and peasant families before and after foods arrived from the Americas.
Sources for Menus
On Columbus’s second voyage from 1493 to 1496, royal physician Diego Alvarez Chanca wrote about the flora,
fauna, and peoples of the Caribbean:
Always the land was of the same beauty and the fields very green and full of an infinity of fruits, as red as
scarlet, and everywhere there was the perfume of flowers and the singing of birds, very sweet. The people
come laden with ‘ages,’ which are like turnips, very excellent for food .... It is so sustaining to eat that it comforts us all greatly, for in truth the life which has been spent on the sea has been the most difficult that ever
men went through. (Cecil Jane, Select Documents Illustrating the Four Voyages of Columbus [Hakluyt Society,
1930; Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967] 1:132. Citation is to Kraus edition.)
The cultural patterns of enslaved African peoples had a definite impact on their slave masters. On the island of
Jamaica, the cuisine of Maroons—communities of freedom fighters and runaway slaves—influenced the new
British overlords of the island. The jerked hog was a tradition invented by Maroons, which came out of African culinary traditions of smoking meat and cooking it very slowly. Cassava was indigenous to the Americas and an essential part of many pepper pots, which were single stew dishes. In addition, a number of the other ingredients came
from different parts of the world.
Lady Maria Nugent, the wife of the Jamaican governor, writes, “The first course was entirely of fish, excepting
jerked hog, in the centre, which is the way of dressing it by the Maroons.” In her diary entry of March 1802, Lady
Maria Nugent describes an elegant estate dinner that offered tables laden with foods derived from many cultures:
There was also a black crab pepper-pot, (confides) for which I asked the recipe. It is as follows; a capon stewed
down, a large piece of beef, and another of ham, also stewed to a jelly; then six dozen of land crabs, picked
fine, with their eggs and fat, onions, peppers, ochra, sweet herbs, and other vegetables of the country, cut
small; and this, well stewed, makes black crab pepper-pot. (Lady Maria Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her
Residence in Jamaica, From 1801 to 1805 [Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Jamaica, 1966]: 70.)
Within a century, huge population growth marked the success of the Chinese agricultural system and the benefits of newly imported crops. China’s numbers increased from 165 million in 1500 to 310 million in 1650. In 1720,
Frenchman Pierre Poivre traveled to China and marveled at the country’s agricultural success. By Poivre’s time,
markets, merchants, and the Chinese state made it possible to transport grain up to a thousand miles. Trade, innovation, and adaptation were changing the landscape of food in China. The slopes of southern China now grew
American foods like sweet potatoes, beans, peanuts, cocoa, pineapple, squash, tomatoes and maize.
Pierre Poivre writes,
By what art can the earth produce subsistence for such numbers? I examine, and pursue the farmers through
all their operations, and observe that their secret consists simply in manuring fields judiciously, plowing them
to a considerable depth, sowing them in the proper season, turning to advantage every inch of ground which
can produce the most considerable crop, and preferring to every other species of culture that of grain, as by
far the most important. (Robert Marks, Tigers, Rice Silk and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South
China [Cambridge University Press, 1998]: 284–85.)
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Unit 16
Unit Activities
Activity 3: Early Consumer Boycotts—30 minutes
Consumer boycotts against products were most common in the later twentieth century. Some boycotts occurred
earlier—against foods produced by African slaves as a protest against the institution of slavery. For example, in
England an abolitionist pamphlet declared,
As the Englishman sweetens his tea, let him reflect on the bitterness at the bottom of the cup. (Jenny Sharpe,
“The Rise of Women in an Age of Progress: Jane Eyre,” in Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the
Colonial Text [Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987]: 27.)
Look at the following images of slavery in the Americas. What other products might abolitionists urge their fellow
citizens to boycott? Try to create a catchy slogan to persuade European consumers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries not to purchase or consume those products.
Item #3114. Anonymous, WEST INDIES: MANUFACTURE OF SUGAR (1667).
Courtesy of The Library of Congress.
Item #3820. Richard Bridgens, PLANTING THE SUGAR CANE (1836).
By Permission of the British Library.
Unit 16
Item #4917. Empire Marketing Board, GATHERING COCOA PODS,
EMPIRE MARKETING BOARD (c. 1927–1933). Courtesy of The Image
Works.
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Homework
Read Unit 16 in the online text, Section 3, Reading 3: Candice Goucher, Charles LeGuin, and Linda Walton, “My
Dinner with Attila the Hun,”in In the Balance:Themes in Global History (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998): 341 and answer
the following questions.
Abstract: This essay explores the complex cultural meanings associated with food etiquette, and the ways
those meanings vary between cultures. It uses an account by the Roman statesman Priscus detailing his dinner
with Attila the Hun to demonstrate this point; Priscus paid close attention to the unique aspects of his host’s
dining etiquette. Such accounts give historians a sense of the variety of ways humans have historically shared
food.
Reading Questions
note: no reading questions provided
Optional: Visit the Web Site
Explore this topic further on the Bridging World History Web site. Browse the Archive, look up terms in the Audio
Glossary, review related units, or use the World History Traveler to examine different thematic perspectives.
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Unit 16
Notes
Unit 16
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Bridging World History