Civilization begins with agriculture. Whether wine and beer came first or that similar product of fermentation, bread, the securing of a stable supply of food and drink meant the end of nomadism and the beginning of permanent settlement, and along with permanent settlement whole new ways of social and cultural organization. From settlement, among other things, came property, and from property came hierarchy, divisions of labor, and institutions like the state and state religion, not to mention the vast networks of cultural habits and codes required to mediate social relations, including how people shared, prepared, and ate their food. I write this description of the agricultural origins of civilization using twenty-first-century language, but even in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, well before the invention of the language I am using, educated people understood these things; they were commonplaces of humanist thought and folk culture alike.
When English explorers and colonists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came to the coastal regions of North America, however, they encountered societies where the rule of thumb of civilization did not seem to apply. In the northern regions, some Native American societies were still largely nomadic, dependent on hunting and gathering. In some of the north and most of the south, groups lived in permanent settlements, but only part time, practicing a kind of mixed economy of seasonal migration, where the sowing, supervision, and harvesting of agricultural products was only one among many strategies of food provision. But still, whether in the north or in the south, Native Americans proved to possess strong senses of place and personal belonging, and even of territorial borders, based on reliable food supplies and systems for keeping them reliable. Most societies seemed awash in plenty. Though they did not live in houses built of stone or brick, or use metal tools, they were sophisticated farmers, foragers, hunters, and fishermen, and they seemed to have developed an elaborate sense of hospitality, the sharing of food as both a moral requirement and a means of generating sociality. Meanwhile, when the English arrived in the New World, their own assumptions about food provision and civility were at risk, because the infrastructure of English life had yet to be built and because the apparently reliable rules of authority, deference, and cooperation were not so reliable under conditions of military incursion and colonization.
Michael Lacombe's Political Gastronomy is a canny investigation of this problem. How could military leaders and colonial governors maintain their authority when food supplies were so unstable? How could they cooperate with or dominate the local populations, given that the local populations had the food? How could the English understand their own perplexities over these issues? Sometimes the natives seemed not only better supplied but also better behaved. Sometimes the behavior of the natives was humiliating to the English, especially during starving times, when not a few settlers turned to theft and the natives could rightly express (whether in words or in violence) their indignation at the perfidy of the English. Sometimes food culture was just plain troubling: when the English and Indians dined together, they were not only cooperating but also struggling against one another through practices of table etiquette that were also trial assertions of hegemony.
LaCombe has not uncovered new ground in this study. He has rather mastered the voluminous literature left behind by early English travelers and the even more voluminous literature generated by scholars of early English colonization, and he has turned it to a new topic. Political Gastronomy is a well-focused synthesis of what we have known or should have known about the role of food in the period, and it is a valuable addition to our understanding of English colonization. “Authority” is the subtheme, for again and again LaCombe shows how control of food provision either reinforced or subverted relations of power. When natives supplied English settlers with gifts of deer, they not only provided needed sustenance but also entered into an exchange system, where an English symbol of aristocratic privilege (venison, and generally the right to hunt for it) was turned on its head. When the aristocratic George Percy, dressed in expensive English finery, invited fellow Virginia colonists to dinner, he not only circulated an important commodity that was at his disposal but also asserted a form of government and deference that did not, and was not supposed to, benefit colonists equally. He was not universally loved for it. The unaristocratic Captain John Smith was the great democratic food provider at Jamestown, and he was admired for it. That was probably one of the reasons why the authorities had to get rid of him.
Political Gastronomy suffers from repetitiveness. The same scenes are gone over and over again; the same key figures—Arthur Barlowe in Roanoke, John Smith in Jamestown, John Winthrop in Boston—are returned to again and again, and key ideas are repeated many times without development. For example, on page 133 we are told, relative to George Percy's flamboyance, that “the symbolic weight of food . . . was a feature of everyday life.” Well yes, but we have already been told that, and more important shown that, many times before, going back to page 1.
This book can be seen to have tried to pin a conceptual study of the culture of food onto a conventional narrative framework of colonial history, where the personalities and fates of key figures, the great men and writers of the period, bear the main load. One would have hoped for something a little more innovative and pertinent, with more information about the Native Americans and the American ecology of food practices. One would also have liked at least one mention of a dimension of food culture that the study altogether ignores: pleasure. This book is an accomplished work that never quite delights, and has nothing to say about delight, either. It never leaves the reader hungry.
