Political Gastronomy: Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World

I have been a fan of Michael LaCombe’s work since reading his June 2010 article in the American Historical Review, “‘A continuall and dayly Table for Gentlemen of fashion’: Humanism, Food, and Authority at Jamestown, 1607–1609,” which I regularly assign to my classes. The central argument of Political Gastronomy, like the article, is that the harsh American environment, where the balance of power favored the American Indians, was an arena of experimentation in which leaders and settlers used food to evaluate the competing ideologies about authority and governance that they brought from Europe. LaCombe’s adviser, Karen Kupperman, depicted early Jamestown in similar terms in her 2007 book The Jamestown Project, but Lacombe’s scope is significantly broader; he convincingly shows that, as in Virginia, leaders in New England, Bermuda, and Newfoundland constantly improvised using a stockpile of European tropes and models of social structure. He traces these adaptations from the first English explorations in the late sixteenth century to roughly 1660, when the English were no longer dependent on the Algonquians and operated in a less fluid context.To understand power in early America, LaCombe, who argues that in the Atlantic and Algonquian worlds “authority was rooted in a leader’s control of the food supply” (66), analyzes how settlers and Native Americans shared, withheld, presented, and wrote about food. Using a considerable range of texts, such as poems, legal codes, husbandry manuals, broadsides, and scientific treatises, LaCombe methodically uncovers transatlantic meanings of food-related terms and practices such as reciprocity, hospitality, appetite, hand washing, cannibalism, hunting, and theft. LaCombe reveals that these terms had multiple meanings and leads the reader through an exhaustive, though at times dizzying, hunt across discourses for different interpretations of the same word.While food was central to structuring society in England, the skewed quantity of food in all of the early settlements (from scarcity in Virginia to abundance in Bermuda) and its daily necessity, made procuring and distributing food a particularly fraught ritual that offered abundant avenues to individuals trying to seize power. For instance, despite his relatively low rank, John Smith was able to establish himself as a leader by supplying Jamestown with food and adopting a humanistic model of sharing his food equally with the community instead of a patriarchal model in which rank determined consumption.No group was able to use food to flex its power more effectively than the American Indians, and revealing their dominant role is the biggest payoff of the book. In early America “the threat of hunger and the inability to impose English claims to authority on native groups necessitated negotiation” (21), which made the English so uncomfortable that, as chapter 4 demonstrates, they devised a number of ways to whitewash this dependence in their accounts and letters home. But this negotiation is not the type one finds in Richard White’s Middle Ground, in which creative misunderstandings are key. LaCombe is insistent that Europeans and American Indians all agreed on the symbolism of food and knowingly employed and manipulated these meanings to gain power. Political Gastronomy forwards the historiographical movement that emphasizes the similarities between Europeans and indigenous groups.LaCombe does not explicitly engage anthropological literature, but at times his method resembles an anthropologist’s. For instance, in chapter 6, which examines how the English and Algonquians shared meals, he artfully plots out where the Narragansett leader Miantonomi and his party sat when they dined with Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop from 1636 to 1642. Ostensibly, this does little but reinforce the standard narrative about New England and Narragansett relations during this time period, but this deep analysis of seating practices, like much of the rest of the book, is able to unveil the ability of Miantonomi (and other Native Americans) to insist that they sit at the governor’s table and thereby to control where they stood in the colonial hierarchy. This revelation alone, and the concrete ways LaCombe presents it, makes this book an important contribution to the history of early America.

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