Consuming Narratives: Food and Cannibalism in Early Modern British Imperialism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the early modern period, a time of global exploration, Europeans often included descriptions of foodways in their exploration narratives. Indeed, one of the most striking features of early modern travel narratives is the amount of space devoted to foodstuff and eating patterns, and “Consuming Narratives” argues that Europeans, and specifically the English, focused on food because they understood foreign people and places, themselves, and their world through a discourse of foodways. If an Englishman noted a foreigner eating a specific dish, he might infer the temperament of the foreigner by means of the humoral theory; deduce the wealth or status of the foreigner by the perceived cost of the food; or conclude the civility of the foreigner by his manner of eating or by the way the meal was prepared. Beyond the descriptions of customary foodways, stories of foreign peoples eating human flesh proved to be a recurring theme in which Europeans presented themselves as superior, while recordings of English cannibalism at Jamestown and Newfoundland reflected English anxiety about their position in the global world. Thus, descriptions of foodways reveal more than mere victuals. Food and eating provided a language to express, and simultaneously shape, English assumptions and anxieties about otherness, status, sovereignty, and power.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".