Political Gastronomy: Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World

Conclusion. “When Flesh Was Food”: Reimagining the Early Period after 1660

C o n c l u s i o n “When Flesh Was Food”: Reimagining the Early Period after 1660 The times wherein old Pompion was a Saint When men far’d hardly yet without complaint On vilest Cates, the dainty Indian Maize Was eat with Clamp-shells out of wooden Trayes Under thatch’d Hutts without the cry of Rent, And the best Sawce to every Dish, Content, When Flesh was food, & hairy skins made coats, And men as wel as birds had chirping Notes. ––Benjamin Tompson, New Englands Crisis (1676) In the 1660s, John Winthrop Jr. carefully but pointedly refuted the great sixteenth -century herbalist John Gerard’s claims that maize was “a Graine not so pleasant or fitt to be Eaten by mankind,” being “hard of Digestion” and yielding “little or no Nourishment.” Winthrop noted that “there had beene yet no certaine proofe or experience” with maize in Gerard’s time, but by the 1660s, it had been “found by much Experience” to be “wholesome and pleasant for Food of which great Variety may be made out of it.1 Winthrop’s remarks signaled a decisive shift from the Atlantic world of his father. “Much Experience” with crops like maize had changed the way English officials in the New World thought about its foods, and new standards for observing and describing the natural world changed the way the same men wrote about them. Stressing his own experience, Winthrop deliberately effaced the Indian knowledge, alliances, and provisions that had sustained “When flesh Was food” 169 earlier generations and informed earlier writers. The image of William Bradford ’s 1623 wedding, for example—Indians and English sharing a landscape and a table, bound by mutual need—was replaced by Benjamin Tompson’s verses extolling a simpler and more honest time, with humbler foods and meals and with no mention of Native Americans except the glancing reference to “the dainty Indian Maize.”2 The early period of negotiation, trial and error, and mutual dependence gave way after 1660 to a more confident and permanent English presence in the Americas. Rather than stressing their skills in communicating with Indians , understanding their culture, and securing their respect, English writers were increasingly likely after 1660 to portray Indians in a new light: tragic, hungry, and helpless victims of European conquest; or else uncivilized, barbaric , and even bestial. To be sure, these were not accurate descriptions, even though Native American military strength and diplomatic influence had undeniably waned since the first decades of English settlement. Benjamin Tompson ’s verses reimagined New England’s English past without Native Americans even as Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Nipmucks, and other Algonquian groups were burning English towns and seizing English captives in King Philip’s War. Led at least nominally by Massasoit’s son Metacom, New England Algonquians hoped that a victory would purge the landscape of its English population , and after their defeat the English set about much the same goal. And yet despite the profound differences that separated Metacom’s New England from his father’s, English writers in the later seventeenth century still focused their observations on food. Where early accounts stressed common ground, writers after 1660 were more likely to describe what Indians ate and how they ate it with unconcealed disgust, evidence that Indian and English bodies and cultures were wholly distinct. But they still looked to food in making this argument, sharing with earlier writers a sense that food was an especially pure encapsulation of civility, gentility, and status (or the lack thereof). At the same time that English crops, animals, technologies, and laws had transformed the American landscape, new commodities transformed English homes, tables, dishes, and the foods placed on them. Despite the depth and scale of these changes, food remained a unique way to convey meaning, no matter how much those meanings had changed. In the preface to his 1705 History and Present State of Virginia, Robert Beverley wrote, “I am an Indian, and don’t pretend to be exact in my Language.” By claiming to be an “Indian,” Beverley asserted that his conclusions derived 170 conclusIon from a lifetime of direct, firsthand experience in Virginia, not that they were based in any way on Virginia’s native population. In fact, Native Americans are wistfully absent from his account, clearly a part of Virginia’s “History,” not its “Present State”: “Thus I have given a succinct account of the Indians; happy, I...