Feeding Race

Abstract

Despite dating back to early America, eating contests have received little if any academic attention. The following socio-historical study seeks to rectify some of this ongoing neglect by investigating what I call the “racial eating contest,” a popular mode of entertainment that proliferated around the turn of the twentieth century. During this era, whites often used their relative power to organize gorging competitions between blacks as a source of “light entertainment” in diverse social situations. The pervasive media descriptions of these matches highlighted the supposed natural distinctions between blacks and whites' bodily makeup, eating styles, appetites and culinary preferences. By applying Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital and Frantz Fanon's notion of the racializing gaze to questions relating to food, domination, race and the body, I argue that these contests constituted specialized sites in which powerful white actors sought to delineate group boundaries along racial lines as part of a broader remapping of power structures during the postReconstruction era. Their capacity to do so rested in great part on blacks' varying abilities to effectively oppose, resist or subvert these competitions.

Keywords:

• food
• power
• body representations
• inequality
• eating contests
• race
• racial gaze
• stereotypes
• cultural capital
• Jim Crow era