African Diaspora Foodways in Social and Cultural Context

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

foodways of enslaved people [as] an arena of multiple conflicts: the struggle between planters and enslaved laborers; the struggle between the colonial administration and plantation owners; and also, the enslaved communities’ struggle to not only survive and sustain life under an institution of racial terror but also to provide culinary satisfaction in their meals (Brunache 2019, 154).

Brunache’s last point here is particularly poignant: In preparing meals, African and African American cooks sought to create foods that not only enabled the survival of their communities but also sated and gratified those who consumed them. Food was not just about fueling the body; it was about satisfying deeper sensory, social, and cultural needs. In attending to these needs, cooks ultimately were asserting the humanity of themselves and their communities. In fact, many researchers have argued that foodways were a primary means by which African descendant people in the New World both formed communities and forged new shared identities (e.g., Covey and Eisnach 2009; Franklin and Lee 2019; Yentsch 2008).

This special themed issue explores African diaspora foodways in social and cultural context. Wallman’s article is most regionally broad, comparing archaeological results from 15 sites across the Caribbean. She examines how provisioning and enslaved people’s independent acquisition of food were affected by the islands’ varying geographies and colonizing powers. Historical records have typically emphasized the diet of enslaved people in the Caribbean as highly dependent on grains and plants, with the enslaved maintaining access to only “lower quality” proteins or using meats simply as “seasoning” in a plant-based diet. In complicating such narratives, Wallman turns her full attention to enslaved people’s strategies to supplement their provisions with additional protein sources included fishing, collecting shellfish, and raising their own livestock. Along with gardening, these methods of protein acquisition did more than enable survival: they cultivated a measure of independence and supported the development of island-specific cuisines and identities. Indeed, as Wallman notes, the foodways developed under enslavement in the region form the basis for what we think of as Caribbean food today.

Pavão-Zuckerman et al. (2021) narrow the geographic frame to food acquisition, preparation, and consumption at a single plantation: Montpelier, the Virginia estate of the fourth U.S. President James Madison. Pavão-Zuckerman and her colleagues pay particular attention to differences in food consumption patterns by enslaved people engaged in different kinds of work on the plantation and living in separate parts of Montpelier. Like Wallman, the authors here focus on the analysis of animal bones. Those enslaved individuals living in the South Yard complex and closest to the plantation house were most dependent on meat rations and consumed the least wild game. Faunal evidence indicates that the enslaved living in the Stable Quarters were most active in pursuing their independent subsistence. While this settlement is not particularly close to the wild areas abutting Montpelier’s borders, Stable Quarters residents may have maintained more independent control of their time and movement, within and beyond the plantation, as skilled workers who could be loaned or hired out to other estates. In contrast, while both the Tobacco Barn and Field Quarters settlements were located closer to the plantation’s borders, fewer wild game were recovered at these sites, indicating that residents had less time for independent subsistence pursuits. In detailing the diversity of diet patterns at Montpelier, Pavão-Zuckerman and her colleagues caution us against narrowly defining any single universal plantation diet. Even on this one plantation, labor patterns, movement, and differential access contributed to a level of diversity among enslaved people’s diets that is not often recognized by archaeologists.

Crowder’s article (2021) analyzes archaeobotanical remains at another Virginia plantation, Stratford Hall. The Oval Site, named for the gravel oval drive previously in front of Stratford’s plantation house, was a residential area occupied by both enslaved people and an overseer during the mid-eighteenth century. Analysis of archaeobotanical remains there centered on two structures at the site: a combined kitchen and living quarters occupied by enslaved people and the overseer’s house. In both structures, Crowder identifies a mixture of Native American, West African, and European plant species, reflecting the development of a creolized African American cuisine. Importantly, Crowder identifies this creolization as affecting not only the diets of enslaved people of African descent but also a white overseer: beans of West African origin, for example, were found at both structures. Since it was highly likely that enslaved cooks prepared the overseer’s meals, the inclusion of West African taxa indicates an important choice on the parts of such cooks. Crowder locates the Oval Site’s foodways and diet as existing in a system of racial terror in which enslaved people were abused and exploited but not entirely powerless. By growing West African plants in their yards and preparing them in their kitchens, the enslaved called on traditions and practices from their homelands to supplement the restricted provisions they were afforded. Crowder additionally argues that gardening and preparing meals were important mechanisms by which enslaved people of diverse origins and experiences could build community.

Joy’s concluding article in this issue centers on the analysis of faunal remains (as well as ceramic ware types and vessel shapes) at the Stono Plantation, James Island, South Carolina. Her primary comparison is temporal and focuses on the diet of African American residents before and after emancipation. Her analysis shows continuity in many aspects of diet between enslaved plantation workers and later tenant farmers at Stono. In both pre- and post-emancipation periods, residents primarily relied on a mixture of shellfish and domesticated mammals, like pig and cow. Both pre- and post-emancipation Stono occupants also tended to use all parts of consumed animals, rather than being rationed specific (often less desirable) parts of an animal, like its feet or head. This pattern suggests that there may not have been a well-developed and formal rationing system for food at Stono; alternately, rationing may have been heavily supplemented by independent subsistence activities like raising livestock or hunting. What is most important here is the continuation of diet patterns under slavery following emancipation. While later occupants of the site consumed fewer wild animals and purchased more mass-produced ceramics, the basic pattern is one of continuity. This continuity demonstrates the persistence of the legacies of slavery under tenant farming and sharecropping at Stono.

In the kitchens across the southern United States and the Caribbean, enslaved cooks drew on techniques and taxa from their African homelands, as well as from European and Native American traditions. The meals they created nourished their communities. Narrow in its geographic scope, this special themed issue is obviously far from a comprehensive consideration of African diaspora foodways. What we instead hope to demonstrate is the importance of considering such foodways in their full social and cultural context. Certainly, faunal and archaeobotanical data at sites of enslavement reflect the coercion, deprivation, restriction, and dehumanization of slavery. However, in these bones and seeds, we can also mark the myriad ways in which enslaved people exercised their agency and asserted their humanity. Food was more than fuel; it represents a product of and ingredient for community creation and identity formation.