Calle 14: Revista de Investigación en el Campo del Arte (May 2011)
Food and Coloniality
Abstract
The author tackles the alimentary dimension of life, as something that goes beyond the simple act of ingesting food to acquire nutrients, to concentrate on the cultural implications of eating. To eat is more than to feed oneself, for eating is never by itself a wholly innocent act; that is, eating is never completely stripped from the social relationships of those gathered around a table.From this perspective, the article examines coloniality in all its forms (of power, of knowledge and of being), and shows their function as mechanisms of both alimentary enunciation and classification, that are responsible of the gastronomic supplantation of produce and food from the New World with the goods and customs that were so dear to European settlers (not forgetting that the influx of products and seasonings went also in the other direction). The colonizing project included thus, besides its religious, political and administrative pretenses, a gastronomical element, to be found in the eagerness of the colonizers to reproduce the alimentary imprint of their homeland in the new found territories, at least as far as the circumstances and the climate allowed it. Among all the facets the production of knowledge can acquire, gastronomy has been poorly studied —not to say completely silenced— in its role as a token of cultural divides, in which a coloniality of flavors and palates has been carried out.
