In 1687, Hans Sloane, the Irish born collector, antiquarian,
and botanist, traveled to Jamaica as the personal physician of the newly
appointed Governor of Jamaica.
 |
| Hans Sloane: 1660-1753 |
Sadly,
the Governor died the following year and Dr. Sloane, bereft of his noble
patron and probably eager to dodge suspicions of medical malpractice, traveled around
the West Indies for the next 15 months.
In 1707 he finally published a compendium of his observations about these distant English colonies, entitled A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados,
Nieves, St. Christopher’s and Jamaica.
Many scholars have shared my fascination with Sloane’s book, and have analyzed everything from his attitudes towards
slavery to his meticulous, semi-obsessive collections of insects and plant
specimens.[1] (Sloane was pretty much the quintessential
early modern hoarder. Yet unlike the
people portrayed on A&E, his bizarre and compendious collection of
curiosities eventually became the British museum.)
 |
| A 17th Century Map of Jamaica |
My interest in Hans Sloane is slightly different. I’m interested in what kinds of food Sloane
encountered during his time in Jamaica and how these foods informed his
impressions of the people he met there.[2] At first glance, Sloane didn’t seem terribly pleased
with what he saw (or tasted). Take basic
English staples: beef and veal. Not only
were these products terribly overpriced (due to the fact that meat rotted in a matter of hours under the oppressive Jamaican sun – meat markets
were usually sold out by 7am) but English imports often tasted terrible to begin
with. This, Sloane surmised, had to do
with the Calabash Tree Leaves that
grew everywhere in Jamaica, which infected cow’s kidneys and milk to the extent
that “Everything made of Milk tasts … so strong of it that there is no using
with pleasure any thing made therewith.”[3]
Neither could Sloane stand the cassava bread, so dry that it
had to be dipped in sugar-water to be palatable at all. (Sloane did acknowledge, nevertheless, that
it kept men healthy in spite its insipid taste.) The black slaves, cattle and poultry happily
fed on maize (Indian Corn) but Sloane had qualms about its suitability for Europeans.
 |
| Sloane wasn't a big fan of cassava bread He called it "rank and poisonous" |
So alien were these Jamaican foods, so distasteful were they
to the European palate, that Sloane began to ponder the very definition of food in the first place. After all, Sloane surmised, there was no hard and fast rule separating "food" from "non-food." What was unique about mankind, Sloane
reasoned, was his ability to extract nourishment from pretty much
anything. Good to keep in mind during a
famine, “should it please God to inflict the like Calamity.” Thankfully, God had also equipped man with the
tools needed to deal with such situations –– teeth, spittle, digestive fluids –– enabling men to extract nourishment from nearly anything. “[T]hough Stalks and Leaves afford no great
Nourishment,” Sloane confessed, “they have sometimes kept many from
starving.” Indeed, Sloane points out,
the hungry will even eat inanimate objects such as shoes and belts “soak’d and
eaten” when man found himself in dire straits.
Even though the dietary divisions between man and beast
collapsed under threat of hunger, Sloane didn’t see anything cruel or
unjust about this inevitable state of nature.[4]
“All these several differing Bodies;
which, when no other are at hand, must be the Food of Mankind in the places
where they are produced,” he wrote, “are
… digested by the Artifice of Nature into good Sustenance to repair its Losses,
and propagate its Kind.” To the
contrary, man’s ability to turn non-food into food was knowledge worth
learning and passing on to future generations.[5]
But necessity alone does not determine one’s taste
preferences. [H]owever strange to us,” Sloane continues, strange and un-food-like
foods “are very greedily sought after by
those us’d to them. Thus Person not us’d to eat Whales, Squirrils, or
Elephants, would think them a strange Dish; yet those us’d to them, prefer them
to other Victuals.”
 |
| Sloane noticed raccoon-meat for sale in Jamaica Ralph Beilby, A General History of Quadrupeds (1790) |
Why, Dr. Sloane wonders, do people willingly eat foods that taste disgusting? As Sloane wandered the towns, markets, and
plantations of Jamaica, he recoiled at the sight of snakes and lizards relished
by polite and supposedly “understanding” people “with a very good and nice
Palate.” Rats and raccoons –– bred among
the sugarcanes to sweeten their meat –– were sold in local markets as good
meat. His Jamaican observations sent
Sloane straight to his gigantic English library, where he found many instances of gross-out foods consumed throughout history.
–– Ancient Greek grasshoppers “eat
like shrimps.”
–– Peoples of the East Indies
dining on bird’s nests
–– Hottentots enjoying the guts of
cattle and sheep
While 17th century scientific literature often attributed racial and cultural differences to the distinct climates of foreign lands, taste-preferences could not be explained this way. The American Indians, displaced African
slaves, as well as the ancient Romans apparently considered Cossi (Cotton Tree Worms) “so great a
dainty” in spite of their distinct cultures and geographical origins.
But neither were new tastes so quickly learned. Slaves from the East
Indies were less desirable to plantation owners than the Jamaican born Creoles, Sloane pointed out, as the former arrived in Jamaica with a taste for meat and fish as opposed
to a cheaper diet of yams, plantains, and potatoes.
Are we in fact what we eat?
It’s a well-worn adage, but Dr. Sloane didn’t seem to think so. In fact, precisely because the definition of
food was so malleable, Sloane concluded that one’s dietary preferences should not be a pretext to classify, categorize
and enslave other peoples.[6] The Spanish very unjustly enslaved the Aztecs
because “the Indians … eat Piojos [lice], and Gusanos [larva], and intoxicated
themselves with their kinds of wines … and the smoak of tobacco:” incredibly
flimsy justifications for extermination. Sloane did not know how to explain the acclimation and habituation of taste preferences, but he knew that they did not conform to one's moral or cosmological worth. Indeed, several scholars have pointed out that early modern conceptions of identity, such as race and gender, were far more fluid and mutable than we now believe them to be.[7] Where does the sense of taste fit into the discussion?
[1] See, for example, Kay Kriz’s Curiosities,
Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane’s ‘Natural History of
Jamaica’ in The William and Mary
Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Jan., 2000), pp. 35-78 and James
Delbuorgo, “Sir Hans Sloane’s Milk
Chocolate and the Whole History of Cacao”
Social Text (2011) 29:1:106 pp.
71-101. Sloane is often credited
with the invention of chocolate milk, althought the “Sloane Brand” was actually
invented in the 1750s.
[2] I share this curiosity with the high Tory satirist
William King, who published a satirical send-up of Sloane’s interest in
Jamaican food, entitled “Concerning several sorts of odd dishes used by
epicures and nice eaters throughout the world” in Useful Transactions (London, 1700).
[3] The Calabash plant was even rumored to kill horses by
the fruit “sticking so fast to their teeth that they are not able to open their
Chaps to feed.”
[4] My favorite book about early modern famine is
unquestionably Piero Camporesi’s Bread of
Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1989) orig. 1980. But while Camporesi focuses on the divisions between the fed and the hungry, emphasizing the latter's wretched, drugged-out, state –– bran, for example, “soaked in hot water and formed into a bran mash for the pig-men, so reduced to wallowing as to resemble snuffling animals” (38) –– Sloane focuses on famine as a natural calamity that men should learn to deal with their reason and ingenuity.
[5] Sloane cites some well known “famine guides,” such as
Joachimus Struppius’s Anchora Famis
(1578) that advises making bread out of almonds, hazelnuts, and pine-kernels,
as well as the work of the Bolognese cleric Giovanni Battista Segni, who
documented instances of cannibalism in his work (1602). talks about veg and animal productions made
use of in times of famine – “most attentive and sensitive treatise writers on
hunger and its excesses” -
[6] Lest we be too hasty with the praise of Dr. Sloane as an enlightened cosmopolite, I
should point out that he married a Jamaican planter heiress and owned
slaves. Just sayin!’
[7] See Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth Century England (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004) and Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
[7] See Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth Century England (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004) and Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
.jpg)