Food, Colonialism and the Quantum of Happiness

Fig. 1.

Europeans first encountered breadfruit in the south Pacific. This image shows one variety: from John Hawkesworth, Voyages autour du monde entrepris par ordre de Sa Majesté britannique, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, 1774.³

Among all the labours of life, if there is one pursuit more replete than any other with benevolence, more likely to add comforts to existing people, and even to augment their numbers by augmenting their means of subsistence, it is certainly that of spreading abroad the bounties of creation, by transplanting from one part of the globe to another such natural productions are likely to prove beneficial to the interests of humanity.

Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 1793.¹

In 1799 a group of wealthy women in Madrid began a decade-long experiment aimed at discovering the best substitute for breast milk. The ladies, members of the Junta de Damas affiliated with Madrid’s Royal Economic Society, had taken over the management of the city’s foundling hospital, which provided motivation for their investigation and a ready supply of infants on whom to test their experimental formulas. Unable to find enough wet-nurses for the hundreds of babies now in its charge, the Junta explored substitutes, including goat’s milk, goat’s milk mixed with fennel, and donkey’s milk drunk directly from the animal’s teat. Members kept notes on the outcome of their tests and discussed the results with doctors from the Royal Academy of Medicine. Disappointingly, almost all the babies died. The Junta was therefore eager to try a new substance that came highly recommended as an infant feed. Maranta arundinacea, or arrowroot, originated in Cuba, where it was reportedly used to great effect. The powder was tested on twenty-two babies. After twenty deaths the trial was halted. The surviving infants were handed over to a wet-nurse and the Junta’s medical team concluded that despite the fanfare this Caribbean root was not a suitable baby food.²

The Junta’s arrowroot experiment was one example of the hundreds of investigations undertaken across eighteenth-century Europe to assess the nutritive qualities of extra-European plants. Many substances – sweet potatoes, quinoa, peanuts, wild rice – were evaluated as possible supplements or staples.⁴ Although schemes to popularize these foods stressed their universal appeal, the ambition was usually to increase consumption by – as one promoter put it – ‘a poor man with a large family’, or by foundlings.⁵

The transformative impact of new-world foods on old-world diets is of course well known. Alfred Crosby’s pioneering works, together with more recent studies, have deftly charted the ways in which global eating practices were revolutionized by the ‘Columbian exchange’ – the transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, and ideas between the Americas and the Old World in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The eighteenth-century quest for new foods to feed Europe forms part of this larger history, while at the same time reflecting central aspects of enlightened science, as the Junta’s careful experiments suggest. A growing corpus of research indeed points to the importance of food in framing eighteenth-century debates about knowledge and health.⁶ The promotion of novel staples in Europe ran parallel to eighteenth-century efforts to identify new commercial crops, edible or otherwise, that might profitably be exploited in European colonies. A rich scholarship has documented the sustained efforts by European states to discover such commodities, and where possible to relocate production to their own colonial orbits. Research has amply demonstrated the close links between natural history, colonialism and commerce.⁷

These better-known efforts at commercial botany, and at discovering new foods for the peoples of Europe, were accompanied by a third enterprise that formed part of this larger assemblage of eighteenth-century food transfers. This was the search for new staples to feed labouring populations not in Europe but its colonies. This article explores two foods that were persistently advocated as ideal staples for ‘workers and black people’ from Cuba to...