Empire and the Reordering of Edibility: Deconstructing Betel Quid Through Metropolitan Discourses of Intoxication

Abstract

Exotic, plant-based stimulants such as sugar, tea, and coffee linked metropolitan bodies with colonial expansion in support of the formation of modern Europe. But, not all tropical commodities easily flowed along these metropolitan routes. Betel quid, a prepared comestible, was among the most widely consumed stimulants in the world, but it was not popularized as a masticatory in modern Europe. This article traces the reconfiguration of betel quid in the British metropole in the early modern and modern periods. Through discursive analysis of medical and herbal texts, advertisements, British guides, and parliamentary papers, it shows how evolving discourses of intoxication motivated the betel quid’s transition from stimulating fruit into a largely inedible substance. Shifting notions of intoxication – first as a form of dissolute inebriation, and later as a state of measurable toxicity – provided the tools, language and social context to dissolve the betel quid’s edibility in conjunction with a broader civilizing process in imperial Britain. These metropolitan discourses reconfigured betel quid and in the process mobilized it as a new site of colonial differentiation.

Keywords:

• Edibility
• stimulants
• toxicity
• globalization
• British Empire
• modernity

Acknowledgments

I received very helpful comments on this work through anonymous peer review at Global Food History, as well as from a workshop on edible genealogies hosted by the University of Toronto-Scarborough’s Culinaria Research Centre and a session on the same topic at the 2015 annual meeting of AFHVS/ASFS. I am grateful to the other workshop and panel participants for their questions, insights and thought-provoking discussions. I would also like to thank to Dan Bender, Amy Bentley, Jeffrey Pilcher, and Krishnendu Ray for their feedback on earlier versions of this article, which significantly helped move this work forward.

Notes

1. “Pan Leaf Scare,” 8.

2. “Betel-Nut Poisoning,” 7.

3. “Curing Betel-Nuts,” 6.

4. “Panic and Pan,” 3.

5. Hafeez, “In Praise of Pan,” 10.

6. “Maleficent Benevolence,” 2.

7. Ibid.; Hafeez, “In Praise of Pan,” 10.

8. Dymock, “Narcotics Spices of the East,” 36. Colonial officials calculated that there were at least 1,000,000 betel quid sellers throughout India alone. See “General Report Census India,” 102. This figure represented a sizeable portion of vendors. By comparison, officials estimated there were only twice as many produce grocers (over 2,000,000).

9. See, for example, Forsyth, A Dictionary of Diet, 31–2; Lawson, Narrative Celebration of the Jubilee; Parlby, Wanderings of a Pilgrim, 444–6; Havell, Benares, the Sacred City, 161; and Dymock, “Narcotics Spices of the East,” 36.

10. Crowther, Eating Culture, 9–11.

11. See Arnold, Toxic Histories, 83.

12. Ibid., 3.

13. Ibid., 3–11.

14. Stoler and Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony,” 12; see also Silverstein, “Guerilla Capitalism,” 284; Norton, “Tasting Empire,” 661; and Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 321.

15. Foucault, The Order of Things. See also Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 1–18, on reading power and difference in the colonial order of things.

16. Withington, “Introduction,” 13. Withington shows how European notions of intoxication have changed over time. “Intoxication” generally connoted a poisoned state until the seventeenth century. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the meaning shifted to imply a state of drunkenness through the consumption of alcohol. The meaning shifted again in the middle of the nineteenth century as the field of toxicology developed and scientists isolated the active agent in a wide range of substances. The betel quid’s contextualization in Britain reflects this trajectory.

17. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 365–447.

18. On the empire’s violent reorganization of colonial communities, bodies and sensorial experiences, see Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 20; and Roy, Alimentary Tracts, 1–30.

19. For an extensive list of regional terms for areca nut and betel leaf, see Ahuja and Ahuja, “Betel Leaf and Nut,” 20–1.

20. Zumbroich, “Origin and Diffusion of Betel-Chewing,” 114–15.

21. Ibid., 124.

22. Ibid., 90. For more on the history of betel quid in Asia, see Reid, “From Betel-Chewing to Tobacco-Smoking”; Gutierrez, “Modes of Betel Consumption”; Loureiro, “Betel-Chewing Sixteenth-Century”; Raghavan and Baruah, “Arecanut”; Williams et al., “Sociocultural Aspects of Areca Nut”; Ahuja and Ahuja, “Betel Leaf and Nut”; and Rooney, Betel Chewing Traditions, who offers European travelers’ accounts of betel quid, 14–18.

23. Ibid., 89–90.

24. Goodman, “Excitania,” 121–8; Albala, “Stimulants and Intoxicants,” 50–9; Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 195–7; Jamieson, “Essence of Commodification,” 279–80; Norton, “Tasting Empire,” 687; Walvin, Fruits of Empire, 9–47; and Breen, “Drugs and Early Modernity,” 1–4.

25. Norton, “Tasting Empire,” 666.

26. Cho, Eating Chinese, 101; Roy, Alimentary Tracts, 5–6; Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, 76–7; Sharma, Empire’s Garden, 31–2; and Walvin, Fruits of Empire, 132–54.

27. Roy, Alimentary Tracts, 7.

28. Walvin, Fruits of Empire, 102–4; Bickham, “Eating the Empire,” 71; and Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, 37–54.

29. Bickham, “Eating the Empire,” 103–6; Maroney, “Tracking Meaning of Curry,” 129–32; Stobart, Sugar and Spice, chap. 10; and Laudan, Cuisine and Empire, 262.

30. Courtwright, Forces of Habit, 56.

31. Ibid., 55.

32. Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine, 19–20.

33. Jamieson, “Essence of Commodification,” 277.

34. Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 4–5.

35. Tobacco is an interesting case, because of its varied forms of consumption. Goodman, Tobacco in History, 59–89, speculates that the chewing of tobacco in quid form was significantly less popular in Europe than tobacco in snuffed and smoked forms.

36. Courtwright, Forces of Habit, 54; Von Bibra, Plant Intoxicants, 209; and Clarence-Smith, “Global Consumption Hot Beverages,” 37–56.

37. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 18; Norton, “Tasting Empire,” 670. For further discussion of this point, see Rohel, “Turning a New Leaf,” 32.

38. Courtwright, Forces of Habit, 55. Despite these global blockages, areca nuts formed part of a robust regional commerce. Upon consolidation of the East India Company, British merchants entered this trade, commodifying areca nut alongside tobacco and salt to support imperial expansion. See Dirks, The Scandal of Empire, 234; and St. John, The Making of the Raj, 18.

39. See Louriero, “Betel Chewing Sixteenth-Century,” 49–59, for Portuguese accounts of betel quid. Louriero traces one of the earliest European descriptions of betel quid to Marco Polo, who wrote about the chewing and spitting of betel quid in the port of Kayal in 1392.

40. Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie, 1521.

41. Ibid., 1521.

42. Ibid., 1520.

43. Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 195–200.

44. Ibid., 218; Marr, “Plant Names Identities India,” 47; and Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, 35.

45. Lloyd, “Dietary Advice and Fruit-Eating,” 555, 570–4. See also Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance, 78–114, 241–83 for discussion of how taste, flavor and cuisine could balance humors and temperaments.

46. Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance, 102. He notes that cold and dry foods such as poppies and cannabis could similarly constrict and paralyze the body.

47. Dewhurst and Locke, John Locke, Physician and Philosopher, 263.

48. See, for example, Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie, 1520–1.

49. Shapin, “‘You Are What You Eat’,” 378–90. Leschziner, “Epistemic Foundations of Cuisine,” 432–40, offers another perspective on historical classifications of food, showing how this emergent cognitive shift impacted modern culinary culture.

50. Withington, “Introduction,” 12–3; and Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise, 147–66.

51. Nicholls, “Gin Lane Revisited,” 128.

52. Shapin, “How to Eat,” 25.

53. Gutierrez, “Modes of Betel Consumption,” 131, analyzes prescriptions and proscriptions in Brahmanical legal texts to show how betel quid marked socio-religious identities in premodern and early modern India. Gutierrez finds that betel quid became increasingly linked to venery by the early modern period.

54. Cowan, Social Life of Coffee, 40–1.

55. Ibid., 14, 361.

56. Ibid., 21, 361.

57. See, for instance, Mickle, The Works of the British Poets, 264. William Julius Mickle’s version of Camoens’ “The Lusiad; or the Discovery of India” translates areca nut as “fruit of the drunken date tree.”

58. Madge, “Elizabeth Blackwell,” section 6.

59. Miller, Botanicum officinale, 46–7.

60. Pomet, Pitton de Tournefort, and Lémery, Compleat History of Druggs, 143.

61. Hogg, London as It Is, 287.

62. Buckingham, Evidence on Drunkenness, 9.

63. Johnston, Chemistry of Common Life, 348–50; and Lees, Essays Historical Critical Temperance, 108.

64. Chambers and Chambers, “Temperance Movement,” 2. They write, “The areca-nut, the fruit of the catechu palm, sometimes called the drunken date-tree, is also a favourite excitant with the inhabitants of India and the adjacent countries. With chunam (quick-lime), and the leaves of the piper-betel, these nuts form the celebrated masticatory called betel. The nuts are commonly quartered, one part of which is rolled up with a little lime in the leaf of the piper-betel, and the whole chewed.”

65. Ibid., 1, 16.

66. Flückiger and Hanbury, Pharmacographia, 671; Raghavan and Baruah, “Arecanut,” 338; Reichart, “Toothpastes Containing Betel Nut,” 65–8; Reid, “From Betel-Chewing to Tobacco-Smoking,” 533; Von Bibra, Plant Intoxicants, 210; and Jackson, “The Areca Palm,” 689.

67. Barnett, “Bitter Medicine,” 1384.

68. “Treatment of Cholera in Metropolis,” 165; and Winterton, “Soho Cholera Epidemic 1854,” 11.

69. Von Bibra, Plant Intoxicants, 210; “Indigenous Indian Dyes,” 535; Stanhope, “Medico-Botanical Society,” 341; Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, 54–6.

70. Dodd, Food of London, 406, 492.

71. Pryor, “Indian Pale Ale,” 39–40; and Pilcher, “Asian Encounters European Beer,” 30.

72. Beer Materials Committee, “Report,” 312.

73. “Adulteration of Food and Drugs in Bombay,” 1853; “Analytical Sanitary Commission,” 114; Burnett, Liquid Pleasures, 61; and Burnett, Plenty and Want, 86–104. Burnett argues that food adulteration, which emerged in tandem with global commodity networks and rising duties, was an urban phenomenon that peaked in the mid-nineteenth century, before the establishment of Britain’s Sale of Food and Drugs Act in 1875.

74. Beeton, Book of Household Management, 1519. See also Kingsford, Health, Beauty and the Toilet, 102, and Scott, The House Book, 376, 421.

75. Steel and Gardner, Complete Indian Housekeeper, 109.

76. Zlotnick, “Domesticating Imperialism,” 53.

77. Rohel, “Turning a New Leaf,” 32–4.

78. General Council of Medical Education, British Pharmacopoeia, 67. In her compendium of recipes, the British anthropologist Anne Walbank Buckland classified betel quid as an Asian condiment, noting that the betel pepper leaves were seldom seen in England. See Buckland, Our Viands, 157–8.

79. Mann, “Britain’s Ideology Progress India,” 8.

80. Here, the transmission of knowledge echoes Marcy Norton’s findings about the taste for chocolate, which moved from colony to metropole, upward the social hierarchy. See Norton, “Tasting Empire,” 670. Leong-Salobir, Food Culture Colonial Asia, 40, describes a similar process for the making of curry, which she argues was co-produced by colonizer and colonized.

81. See, for example, Jackson, “The Areca Palm,” 689. The curator of the museums at Kew, London, observes, “The habitual use of the betel-nut is considered by the natives to be very wholesome, but the effects are said by some to be due as much to the ingredients used with it as to the areca nut itself. Its constant use causes the teeth to become black and the mouth and lips of a brick red colour.”

82. Newsholme, Hygiene, 53. This common colonial interpretation of the red pigment as bloodied expectoration connected native consumers of betel quid to visceral forms of rawness, violence and incivility. This appraisal, though, is a cultural construction that needs to be contrasted against alternative notions in Brahminical societies, where red-tinged mouths were aesthetically pleasing when performed in the right context. See Gutierrez, “Modes of Betel Consumption,” 128–9, on how the stains of betel quid chewing often signified auspiciousness, luxury and refinement.

83. “An African Harem,” 406.

84. “Reviews and Notices of Books,” 1335.

85. “Pharmacology and Therapeutics,” 47; and Dymock, “Narcotics Spices of the East,” 40.

86. Weinberg and Bealer, World of Caffeine, 213–34; Chakrabarti, “Empire and Alternatives,” 89; Bhattacharya, “Materia Medica to Pharmacopoeia,” 137; and Gootenberg, “Talking about the Flow,” 16–7.

87. See Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, 103–39. Brockway shows how Britain mobilized Andean cinchona bark to expand the empire by developing its alkaloid derivative, quinine, into a public health technology that protected the bodies of colonial officials against disease in the tropics.

88. Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine, 25–6, 54.

89. Finlay, “Quakery and Cookery,” 405–9; Rüger, “OXO,” 656–63; and Goody, “Industrial Food,” 79–80.

90. Here I want to emphasize metropolitan innovation as a cultural process of reordering edibility. Multiple sectors mobilized the betel quid’s components, though the scale of metropolitan commercialization would have still paled in comparison to trade in the Indian Ocean region in the second half of the nineteenth century, which was vast and profitable. London’s Kew Gardens, which trafficked in the global extraction and refinement of plant matter, announced that the small state of Travancore alone generated £50,000 from areca nuts annually. India produced significant amounts of areca nuts and still imported nearly 30,400,000 lbs from Ceylon, The Straits Settlements and Sumatra to boost its domestic supply. British Ceylon exported the nuts to Bombay, Madras, Penang and Singapore, and Bombay shipped them to British territories such as Zanzibar, Aden and Mauritius, where many indentured laborers lived. See Jackson, “The Areca Palm,” 689; Capper, “A Brief Notice of the Vegetable Productions,” 274; and Dymock, “Narcotics Spices of the East,” 36.

91. Lieffers, “‘The Present Time is Eminently Scientific’,” 943–8; Shapin, “‘You Are What You Eat’,” 390; Scrinis, “Ideology of Nutritionism,” 40–4; Mudry, Measured Meals, 21–46; Spackman, “Transforming Taste,” 37–71; and Arnold, “The ‘Discovery’ of Malnutrition and Diet,” 5–12.

92. Arnold, “British India and the ‘Beriberi Problem’,” 296; and Kimura, Hidden Hunger, 22.

93. Arnold, “The ‘Discovery’ of Malnutrition and Diet,” 11–2. See also Watt, “Relevance Complexity Civilizing Missions,” 1; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 28, on how the empire’s fulfillment of moral and material progress depended on the construction of global hierarchies through which the colonies were made subordinate to a universalizing “silent referent.”

94. Collingham, Imperial Bodies, 6–7.

95. “Colonies and Cancer Research,” 655; and Bentall, “Cancer in Travancore,” 1431.

96. Humphrey, Materia Medica, 44–5; and Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, British Pharmaceutical Codex, 123.

97. See, for example, Sui and Lacey, “Asia’s Deadly Secret”; and IARC, “Monographs Evaluation Risks Betel-Quid,” 80–172.

98. Gupta and Warnakulasuriya, “Global Epidemiology Areca Nut,” 79–80. These figures include gutka, an industrially produced version of crushed betel quid that is distributed in small foil packets.

99. Changrani and Gany, “An Emerging Threat,” 103–8. See also IARC, “Monographs Evaluation Risks Betel-Quid,” 239–78; and Warnakulasuriya, “Areca Use Following Migration,” 127–32.

100. Williams et al., “Sociocultural Aspects of Areca Nut,” 152. Mahendran, “Sylhetisation, Dependence and Ambivalence,” 224–7, is one of the few in-depth studies that lend a cultural perspective to betel quid “use” among migrants. This recent qualitative inquiry into health inequalities for Bangladeshi women in London finds that increased betel quid consumption resulted from individual histories of migration; attempts to make a home in England by forging belonging through social and material connections to the Sylheti diasporic community provided new motivations for chewing.

101. IARC, “Monographs Evaluate Red Meat,” 1–2.

102. Mudry et al., “Other Ways Knowing Food,” 27–33; and Kimura, Hidden Hunger, 1–18.