The Body of the Conquistador: Food, race, and the colonial experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 by Rebecca Earle (review)

“Food,” Rebecca Earle writes, “shaped the colonial body in a number of ways” (5). In her new book, Earle studies food—and a variety of other environmental factors—to understand the importance of the humoural body to early European colonization. Her sources are a magpie’s delight: natural histories; missionary writings; religious, legal, and medical treatises; private and official letters; and fiction. The product is a convincing rethinking of colonial categories such as “Spaniard” and “Indian” and, ultimately, a riposte to simplistic understandings of race in the early modern world.

The book’s first chapter limns the contours of early modern humoural theory and its implications for colonial encounters. The prolonged conversation about transatlantic bodily difference provoked by the Columbus landfall is well known, but Earle situates the debate within the context of sixteenth-century Galenic medicine. According to Galenic humouralism, the variation among any group of human beings was a result of individual humoural divergence; individual temperament was to some degree innate. But the “non-naturals” of environment, climate, emotions, food, and behaviour could significantly alter the body. In our terms, culture trumped biology, which was subject to an incredible mutability. As Earle shows, humoural theory provided the underpinnings to understandings of difference, explaining everything from the paucity of Amerindian beards to the differences between Spanish and Indigenous emotional regimes.

Because food was one of the most important “non-naturals,” dietary difference became a significant concern among learned medical and religious men as well as popular healers. Two elements of the diets of Indigenous peoples—their overall frugality and the absence of “hearty” foods such as wine and meat—were considered to account for many of the observable differences between Europeans and Indigenous people. While Indigenous peoples’ moderation was often admired (and celebrated by religious writers in particular), many Spaniards viewed Indigenous bodies as essentially debilitated by environment. And the absence of wheat and wine, with their close links to transubstantiation, made Indigenous peoples’ diets suspiciously “unchristian.”

Earle’s subsequent chapters explore the implications of Spanish food anxiety for colonialism. First, ensuring settlers’ access to the elements of a proper European diet became a colonial obsession. Wheat bread, wine, and meat were seen as the foundation of Spanish health. The loss of health was one potential result of eating a diet unsuited to a Spaniard’s culturally and environmentally conditioned humours; another outcome might be physical “Indigenization.” Thus the introduction of European crops and livestock was both medically and culturally necessary. “Race,” Earle writes, “was in part a matter of digestion” (47).

European crops flourished, of course, at least in the highlands where the Spanish congregated after the conquest of Mexico in 1521. Spaniards in America now enjoyed access to a more healthful diet than their compatriots in the old country, particularly as regards access to meat. The thriving of these foods so necessary to colonizer health could be, and was, read as evidence of Spain’s providential mission. Indigenous peoples consumption of insects, snakes, and human flesh could similarly be read as evidence of corruption or even demonism. But at the same time, Earle argues, incorporation of Indigenous foods—chocolate, sweet potatoes, tropical fruits “more delicious than any European fruit” (127), chiles—into the settler diet challenged colonial complacency. How much of such foods should a Spaniard eat? Could an Indigenous person who ate only such foods ever be like a Spaniard (and, thus, a true man)? Earle reads these debates as evidence of anxieties about the mutability of bodies, but also about the fate of the colonial enterprise itself.

It should surprise no one that, given the theories discussed above, some Spaniards attempted to promote the introduction of European agriculture and diet to Indigenous people. However, others noted that Indigenous people sickened and died when forced to relocate and work for Spaniards; many believed such mortality to be caused by unfamiliar climate and European food. Earle links these concerns to...