Write a paper of at least 1,000 words (including notes and bibliography) based on the essays by Rebecca Earle and Enrique Rodríguez Alegría, which are available on the library course reserve page. Your paper should answer the following question: Which author, Earle or Rodríguez Alegría, offers a more convincing account of cross-cultural dining in early New Spain?
To answer this question, you first need to set out the basic historical problem, did Spaniards and Indians generally eat together in colonial New Spain? What were the social meanings attached to the foods, cooking utensils, and dinnerware of each group, and did people from different social groups regularly share a common table? The next step is to summarize the rival interpretations of each author. What logical arguments do they make and what primary source evidence do they use to support their conclusions? Once you understand both positions, you should explain which author provides a more convincing historical argument.
As with all argumentative papers, you must include a thesis statement, summarizing in one sentence (preferably the last sentence of your introductory paragraph) the entire argument of your paper. Please italicize or underline the thesis as an aid to both the grader and yourself. Although you only need to use the two papers, be sure to include a bibliography of all the sources you use, as well as footnotes to all quotes and significant references. This paper will be worth 10 percent of your final grade.
“If You Eat Their Food…”: Diets and Bodies in Early Colonial Spanish America
Author(s): REBECCA EARLE
Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 115, No. 3 (JUNE 2010), pp. 688-713
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23302943
Accessed: 13-05-2020 03:10 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
Oxford University Press, American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR
to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
“If You Eat Their Food . .
Diets and Bodies in Early Colonial Spanish America
REBECCA EARLE
In January of 1494, Christopher Columbus found himself in the
sition of having to explain to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and
many of the European settlers on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola
and died. The explanation was simple, but it had alarming implicati
cent Spanish colony: Europeans did not thrive in the very different en
the New World. The “change in water and air,” Columbus believed, was
cause of the dreadful ailments afflicting the small Spanish settlement.
he explained, the mortality would cease once the settlers were prov
foods we are accustomed to in Spain.”1 European food, Columbus
counteract the deleterious effects of the New World environment and make feasible
the dream of colonization. He was not alone in this belief. Columbus’s assertion that
European food was vital to the survival of such settlements forms part of a vast
current of discourse that links diet to discussions of Spanish health, Indian bodies,
and overseas colonization. Diet was in fact central to the colonial endeavor. As we
shall see, food played a fundamental role in structuring the European categories of
“Spaniard” and “Indian” that underpinned Spain’s colonial universe in the early
modern era. Beyond this, attending to food’s place within that universe illuminates
the profound but incompatible desires that characterized Spain’s colonial mission,
which sought simultaneously to make Amerindians like Europeans and to keep them
separate.
Many aspects of early modern colonial expansion proved unsettling for its Eu
ropean protagonists. The encounter with entirely new territories and peoples raised
doubts about the reliability of existing knowledge and also posed theoretical and
practical questions about the proper way for Europeans to interact with these new
peoples and places. Far from being an enterprise based on an unquestioning as
sumption of European superiority, early modern colonialism was an anxious pursuit.
This anxiety is captured most profoundly in the fear that living in an unfamiliar
environment, and among unfamiliar peoples, might alter not only the customs but
also the very bodies of settlers. Perhaps, as Columbus suspected, unmediated contact
with these new lands would weaken settlers’ constitutions to such an extent that they
I would like to thank Trevor Burnard, John Chasteen, Tamar Herzog, Emma Spary, Claudia Stein, and
Camilla Townsend for their exceedingly helpful comments.
1 Christopher Columbus, “Memorial que para los Reyes Católicos dio el Almirante a don Antonio
de Torres” (January 30, 1494), in Ignacio Anzoátegui, ed., Los cuatro viajes del almirante y su testamento
(Madrid, 1971), 158. See Noble David Cook, “Sickness, Starvation and Death in Early Hispaniola,”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 3 (2002): 349-386, for discussion of the ill-fated settlement.
688
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
“If You Eat Their Food . .. ”
689
died. Or perhaps it might instead transform the European body in less lethal but
equally unwelcome ways, so that it ultimately ceased to be a European body at all.
Scholars have long recognized the challenges that unfamiliar climates, in par
ticular, were believed to pose to the European body, and lately several attempts have
been made to link such early modern concerns about colonial environments to the
emergence of racial ideologies. The transformation of looser medieval concepts of
difference into rigid nineteenth-century models of “race” has often been attributed
to the impact of colonialism on European thinking, but scholars have generally
viewed this transformation as a modern, rather than early modern, phenomenon.2
Attempts to connect European anxieties about colonial environments in the six
teenth and seventeenth centuries with the evolution of racial ideologies appear to
have revolutionized this chronology. For example, the historian Jorge Cañizares
Esguerra has proposed that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish colonists
(and their descendants) articulated an early form of embodied racial discourse in
their efforts to explain the supposedly different impact of the New World climate
on Europeans and Amerindians. He asserts that settlers posited a radical discon
tinuity between European and indigenous bodies because they could not otherwise
account for the fact that Europeans appeared to thrive in the American environment
while Amerindians sickened and died. European and indigenous bodies, he suggests,
therefore began to be conceptualized as incommensurably different and fundamen
tally incomparable. Cañizares-Esguerra’s attention to the significance of climate and
indigenous health in the early colonial era has been mirrored in scholarship on Eng
land’s North American colonies. Joyce Chaplin, in particular, has advanced similar
arguments about the attitudes ot ünglish settlers in seventeentn-century Angio
America. These scholars, in short, argue that “race”—a fixed, bodily condition—
began to emerge in the early colonial era as a result of Europeans’ encounter with
the New World’s climate and inhabitants.3
Such research highlights the dilemmas that overseas colonization posed to Eu
ropeans, and helpfully refocuses attention on the fact that early colonial actors as
cribed great significance to the differences they perceived between their bodies and
those of Amerindians. Nonetheless, it accords a disproportionate importance to cli
2 “It was the colonial encounters which produced a new category, race,” writes Catherine Han;
“Introduction: Thinking the Postcolonial, Thinking the Empire,” in Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire: Col
onizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries—A Reader (New York, 2000),
19. For a pithy review of the debate over colonialism and the origins of race, see Kathleen Wilson, The
Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003), 11-15.
3 Joyce Chaplin, “Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing
English and Indian Bodies,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 54, no. 1 (1997): 229-252; Jorge
Cañizares-Esguerra, “New Worlds, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Cre
ole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600-1650,” American Historical Review 104, no. 1 (February
1999): 33-68; Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American
Frontier, 1500-1676 (Cambridge, 2001); and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation:
Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, Calif., 2006). Other works according
Spanish colonialism an important role in the formulation of European ideas about difference include
Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in
the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54, no. 1 (1997): 103-142;
James Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” ibid., 143-166; and Maria Elena Mar
tinez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford,
Calif., 2008). See also Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cam
bridge, 2003).
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
JUNE ZUIU
690
Rebecca Earle
mate as a challenge to the European body. Climate was but one of a number of fo
believed by Europeans to affect health and character, and it does not assist
analysis of the early modern colonial experience to isolate climate from these oth
forces. In particular, we should not overlook the role of food. Food was in fact ce
to the early modern discourses about human difference that structured Eur
efforts at understanding the Americas and their inhabitants.4 When we attend t
place of food within these discourses, it becomes clear that fluidity, rather than f
was the hallmark of the early modern body, and that this fluidity had striki
plications for the coherence of colonial ideology.
Food shaped the colonial body in a number of ways. To begin with, the right f
protected Europeans from the challenges posed by the New World and its e
ronment. Spaniards believed that they would not suffer from the excessive damp
dangerous heavens of the Americas if they ate European food. For this reason
onizers and settlers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish America
consistently concerned about their ability to access European foodstuffs, and
erations of chroniclers noted the deleterious effect of the indigenous diet o
ropeans unwise enough to consume it. More fundamentally, food helped creat
bodily differences that underpinned the European categories of Spaniard a
dian. Spanish bodies differed from indigenous bodies because the Spanish die
fered from the Amerindian diet, but these differences were by no means perman
Bodies could be altered just as easily as could diets.
In other words, the role of diet is considered here not in the performanc
European colonial identity, but rather in the construction and maintenance o
Spanish body. By probing the space that early modern Spaniards imagined to
between their bodies and those of Amerindians, we can measure the distance
separated the one from the other and map the routes whereby one could beg
transform into the other, using a variety of sixteenth- and seventeenth-cen
sources. This chronological span captures the era in which the principles of h
alism governed European understandings of the body, which provide a coher
in regard to ideas about corporeality notwithstanding the many transformations
dergone by Spanish and colonial society during this period.5 The many source
illuminate this topic, which range from medical handbooks and legal treatise
chronicles and official and private letters, were of course written to serve differ
purposes, and we should not assume that they form part of a coherent corp
discourse as regards their ostensible subjects. Nonetheless, one feature they
is a vision of the human body as essentially porous, in active dialogue with i
vironment. Indeed, it is precisely through the analysis of a range of disparate sou
that we have the best opportunity to uncover early modern body concepts
4 My focus here is the attitudes of Spanish settlers, but there is every reason to believe that colo
from other parts of Europe held similar opinions. For suggestive analysis of the attitudes of sett
British colonies, see Trudy Eden, “Food, Assimilation and the Malleability of the Human Body in
Virginia,” in Janet Lindman and Michele Tarter, eds., A Center of Wonders: The Body in Early A
(Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), 29-42; and Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural Hist
the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), esp. 77-102.
5 Humoralism’s period of dominion is discussed in Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renai
Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, 1990); and Lawrence Conrad, M
Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter, and Andrew Wear, The Western Medical Tradition, 800 BC to A
(Cambridge, 1995).
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
[UNE 2010
“If You Eat Their Food ..
691
broader implications of these concepts can then be considered in light of the con
tradictory aims at the heart of early modern colonialism.
Spaniards who traveled in the Indies in the early modern era quickly determined that
Amerindian bodies differed from their own in all sorts of ways. Indians were somewhat
darker-skinned and had distinctively straight hair, and the men generally lacked beards.
In addition, they suffered less from stomach ailments, were generally timid, rarely went
bald, and almost never developed gallstones. Spaniards, in contrast, were of a proud
nature, possessed light skin and delightful beards, and were afflicted by numerous di
gestive disorders.6 Such differences were evident to all: “it is clear,” noted the German
physician Nicholas Pol, “that the climate, bodies, complexions, etc. of the Spaniards are
different from those possessed by the Indians.”7 Learned men generally categorized
Indians as phlegmatic, according to the tenets of humoral theory. This made Amerin
dians similar to women, who were also believed to be phlegmatic, although some argued
that Indians were instead melancholic.8 In any event, everyone agreed that they were
different from Spaniards, who were choleric.9 The melancholy and phlegmatic Indians
6 Francisco López de Gomara, Historia general de las Indias (1552; repr., Barcelona, 2006), 62, 131,
149, 337, 372-373 (chaps. 26, 68, 79, 193, 216); Juan de Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, ed. Guillermo
Lohmann Villena (1567; repr., Paris, 1967), 16-17; Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España
e islas de la Tierra Firme (ca. 1570), ed. Angel Garibay, 2 vols. (Mexico, 1967), 1: 5 (prologue to vol. 1);
Lope de Atienza, Compendio historial del estado de los indios del Peru (1583), published as an appendix
to J. Jijón y Caamaño, ed., La Religion del imperio de los Incas (Quito, 1931), 58-60 (chap. 10); Juan
de Cárdenas, Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias (1591; repr., Madrid, 1945), 219 (book 3,
chap. 11); Agustín Farfán, Tractado breve de medicina (1592; repr., Madrid, 1944), 1-3 (book 1, chap.
1); Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza, Sumaria relación de las cosas de la Nueva España (1604), ed. José
María de Agreda y Sánchez (Mexico, 1970), 63; Gregorio García, Origen de los indios del Nuevo Mundo,
ed. Franklin Pease (1607; repr., Mexico, 1981), 70-74; Juan de Torquemada, Monorchia yndiana, 3 vols.
(Seville, 1615), 2: 609-614, 620-621 (book 14, chaps. 18, 19, 24); and Bernabé Cobo, Historia del Nuevo
Mundo (1653), in Cobo, Obras, ed. Francisco Mateos, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1956), 2: 10-14 (book 11, chaps.
2-3). Note: I have included the book, chapter, and part numbers for many of the primary sources in
parentheses, to make it easier for others to locate this material.
7 Nicholas Pol, On the Method of Healing with the Indian Wood called Guaiac the Bodies of Germans
who have Contracted the French Disease (1517), in Max H. Fisch, ed., Nicolaus Pol, Doctor, 1494 (New
York, 1947), 59.
8 For comparisons between Amerindians and women, see Laura Lewis, “The ‘Weakness’ of Women
and the Feminization of the Indian in Colonial Mexico,” Colonial Latin American Review 5, no. 1 (1996):
73-94.
9 For the view that Amerindians were phlegmatic, see Francisco Hernández, Antigüedades de la
Nueva España (ca. 1574), ed. Ascensión H. de León-Portilla (Madrid, 1986), 97 (book 1, chap. 23);
Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, Crónica de la Nueva España (ca. 1560) (Madrid, 1914), 30 (book 1, chap.
16); “Relación de la ciudad de Guamanga y sus términos” (1586), in Marcos Jiménez de la Espada, ed.,
Relaciones geográficas de las Indias: Perú, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1965), 1:185; Luis Heironymo de Ore, Symbolo
catholico indiano, en el qual se declaran los mysteriös de la Fe (Lima, 1598), 30r; García, Origen de los
indios del Nuevo Mundo, 72-74; Atienza, Compendio historial, 29-30, 131 (chaps. 3, 35); and Gerónimo
de Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica indiana (ca. 1596), ed. Joaquin García Icazbalceta (Mexico, 1971), 222,
438 (book 3, chap. 17; book 4, chap. 21). For Amerindians as melancholy, see Durán, Historia de las Indias
de Nueva España, 1: 5 (prologue to vol. 1); Diego Cisneros, Sitio, naturaleza y propriedades de la ciudad
de México (Mexico, 1618), 112r (chap. 17); Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 16; and Atienza, Compendio
historial, 132 (chap. 35). For Amerindians as phlegmatic and sanguine, see Henrico Martinez, Reportorio
de los tiempos e historia natural desta Nueva España (1606; repr., Mexico, 1991), 262, 281; and Cobo,
Historia del Nuevo Mundo, 2: 15-16 (book 11, chap. 4). Bartolomé de las Casas,
Indians’ superior nature, insisted that they were sanguine, “which is the most
complexions,” while Diego Andrés Rocha, who believed that they were descended
that they, like their Iberian ancestors, were choleric. See Bartolomé de las Casas,
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
who argued for the
noble of all the four
from Spaniards, said
Apologética historia
JUNE ZUlU
Rebecca Earle
692
were therefore constitutionally quite unlike the choleric Spaniards. Why, however, wer
they so different?
Undoubtedly, one of the reasons Indians and Spaniards were so different was that
they lived in very different environments. Early modern medical thinking accorded
a central role to climate in shaping constitutions and bodies.10 Climate, for example,
was thought to play a key part in determining skin color. The Spanish Dominica
Gregorio García, writing in the early seventeenth century, explained that Ethiopians
had dark skin, although they were, like all men, the sons of Noah (who was presumed
to have been white), because they lived in the heat of the torrid zone. “There i
nothing new in men changing the color of their body, and their hair, in conformity
with the climate of the region where they live,” he observed.11 In addition to pr
voking changes in skin and hair color, climate was also believed to affect individu
health. As a consequence, educated Spaniards living in the Americas were highl
attuned to the potential impact of the air, stars, and temperature, which were liable
to provoke all sorts of undesirable transformations. This fear was well expressed by
the Spanish physician Francisco Hernández, who in the 1570s served as New Spain
protomédico, or chief medical officer. “Let us hope that the men who are born fi
Europe] and who begin to occupy those regions, whether their parents are Spanis
or of different nations, do not in obedience to the heavens degenerate to the poin
of adopting the customs of the Indians,” he noted in his study of New World materia
medica.12
The clearest evidence for the deleterious impact of the American climate was
provided by Amerindians themselves. Virtually all European writers of the time be
lieved that Amerindians had at some point in the past migrated to the Americas from
the Old World. The precise place of origin and the mode of transport remained in
dispute, but Christian teaching made it clear that all men were descended from a
common ancestor. Hence it was important to explain why people who had originated
in the Old World now differed so much from the Spanish in both behavior and
appearance. For example, Spaniards asked themselves, why did Amerindian men
generally lack beards? In an extensive discussion of this question, Gregorio García
hypothesized that the hot, moist climate of the New World impeded the growth of
sumaria (ca. 1552), in Las Casas, Obras escogidas, ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela Bueso, 5 vols. (Madrid, 1958),
3: 124 (chap. 37); and Diego Andrés Rocha, El origen de los indios, ed. José Alcina Franch (1681; repr.,
Madrid, 1988), 215. For the Spanish complexion, see Cárdenas, Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las
Indias, 175,179 (book 3, chaps. 1-2); Cisneros, Sitio, naturaleza ypropriedades, 112v (chap. 17); Martinez,
Reportorio de los tiempos, 262, 281; Ore, Symbolo catholico indiano, 30r; Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica
indiana, 222,438 (book 3, chap. 17; book 4, chap. 21); and Agustín de Vetancurt, Teatro mexicano (1698;
repr., Mexico, 1971), 12 (tratado 1, chap. 6).
10 Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from An
cient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1967); Siraisi, Medieval and Early
Renaissance Medicine; and Carmen Peña and Fernando Girón, La prevención de la enfermedad en la
España bajo medieval (Granada, 2006). Early modern understandings of climate derived fundamentally
from the writings of ancient scholars. See in particular Hippocrates, “On Airs, Waters and Places,” in
The Genuine Works of Hippocrates, trans. Francis Adams (London, 1849), http://classics.mit.edu/
Hippocrates/airwatpl.html; Galen, Galen on Food and Diet, ed. Mark Grant (New York, 2000); and
Aristotle, Problems, trans. W. S. Hett (London, 1961).
11 García, Origen de los indios del Nuevo Mundo, 69.
12 Hernández, Antigüedades de la Nueva España, 97 (book 1, chap. 23); emphasis added. Or see
Baltasar Alamos de Barrientos, Discurso político al rey Felipe III al comienzo de su reinado, ed. Modesto
Santos (Madrid, 1990), 16.
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
June 2010
“If You Eat Their Food .
jy3
facial hair. This raised the terrifying prospect that the Spanish, too, might lose their
prized beards as a result of living in the same environment. (Beards were considered
a signal mark of manhood by early modern Spaniards. Writers insisted that they were
a gift from God to beautify and adorn the male face.)13
Yet help was at hand. Garcia explained that this alarming possibility was in fact
remote. The Spanish were unlikely to lose their beards because the “temperance and
virtue that the Spaniards born in the Indies inherited trom their rathers and grand
fathers” were continually reinforced through the consumption of Spanish food. Their
constitution, he explained, was protected by “good foods and sustenance such as
lamb, chicken, turkey, and good beef, [wheat] bread, and wine, and other nourishing
foods.”14 This long list consists almost entirely of Old World foods that had been
lacking in the New World before the arrival of Europeans. Indians therefore could
not possibly have protected their beards from the destructive effects of the American
climate, all the more so given that the foods that were available were singularly
inadequate, consisting as they did of cassava, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and other
foods “of very little nourishment.”15 It was through eating this inadequate food, as
much as through the impact of the climate, that the Indians had lost their Old World
temperament. The result was the disappearance of their beards. Climate was thus
important in shaping bodies, but so too was diet. The Spanish chronicler Gonzalo
Fernández de Oviedo, who after many years’ residence in the Caribbean composed
a lengthy “official” history of the New World in the mid-sixteenth century, explained
this clearly when he listed the challenges posed to novice conquistadors. On arriving
in the Americas, he wrote, they would find themselves obliged to “fight in such dif
ferent airs and in such strange regions, and with such different foods.”10 hood could
not be separated from the environment. Colonial writers throughout the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries agreed that “those who come from other climates through
[eating] new foods generate new blood, which produces new humors, [and] the new
humors [create] new abilities and conditions. 17 A change in rood, like a change in
climate, was liable to provoke a change in both body and character. Food, in other
words, helped distinguish Spaniard from Indian, but it could just as easily turn proud,
bearded Spaniards into timid, beardless Indians. Such corporeal differences were
real, but impermanent.
These attitudes reveal the widespread dissemination of an understanding of the
human body based fundamentally on the principles of humoral theory. Learned
thinking in the early modern period held that good health required a balance of the
13 Cárdenas, Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias, 188 (book 3, chap. 4); Atienza, Com
pendio historial, 59, 133 (chaps. 10, 35); and Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Sexual Politics and the
Making of Modem Science (London, 1994), 120-125. Indigenous people, too, seem to have viewed the
beard as a distinctive Spanish trait. See, for example, Titu Cusi Yupanqui, History of How the Spaniards
Arrived in Peru (1570), ed. and trans. Catherine Julien (Indianapolis, 2006), 10, 18 (chap. 2).
14 García, Origen de los indios del Nuevo Mundo, 70.
15 Ibid.
16 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela
Bueso, 5 vols. (1535-1557; repr., Madrid, 1959), 2: 358 (book 23, chap. 3).
17 Vetancurt, Teatro mexicano, 11 (tratado 1, chap. 6). This is a paraphrase of Martinez’s 1606 trea
tise, which Vetancurt cites as a source. Or see Juan Huarte, Examen de Ingenios; or, The Examination
of Mens Wits (London, 1594), 21-22; Miguel de Çepeda Santa Cruz, December 9,1626, Santa Fe, Archivo
General de la Nación, Bogotá, Colonia Médicos y Abogados 11, 853r; and Parrish, American Curiosity,
79. I am grateful to Linda Newson for the reference to Çepeda.
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
JUNE ZUlU
694
Rebecca Earle
four humors that governed the body: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile,
of which was associated with relative degrees of heat, cold, dryness, and mois
Individuals possessed a particular humoral makeup that helped determine th
“complexion,” a term that referred equally to their character and their bodily
ities. Each person was born with a particular complexion, but a variety of ext
forces could alter one’s humoral balance. Climate (“air”) was one of them; food
another. These, together with levels of exercise, sleep and wakefulness, evacu
(which included such things as bloodletting), and the emotions, constituted th
non-natural things” whose impact on human health and character most early mod
scholars regarded as profound.18 This significance of the six non-naturals w
plained clearly by the German cosmographer Henrico Martinez, who spent a num
of years in Mexico City in the late sixteenth century. In his 1606 Reportorio
tiempos e historia natural desta Nueva España, Martínez asked why it was that peo
living under the same stars might have different complexions. The answer,
plained, was that complexion was determined by many factors, including “th
versity of the foods with which people sustain themselves,” different exerc
gimes, and different emotional states, not to mention the fact that it tended to
during the course of an individual’s life. These factors together explained the
variety in complexions and characters within a single locale.19
Food, in other words, played an important role in maintaining a healthy c
plexion and in correcting imbalances. Phlegmatic people, who were excessively
and damp, could improve their condition by eating hot, dry foods such as
pepper. Melancholies (cold and dry, and governed by black bile) were advised
hot, moist foods such as sugar. A change in diet, like a change in environment, co
transform an individual complexion. Such transformations, however, were fr
with danger. Giovanni de Medici, for instance, was held to have expired in 14
a direct result of drinking excessive quantities of cold water, which induced a ph
matic complexion.20 Only with great care should people use diet—or indeed
other non-natural intervention—to alter their basic complexion, thereby acqu
a “second nature.”
The human body was thus in a state of constant flux; the complexion needed to
18 For an introduction to humoral theory and its links to diet, see Galen, Galen on Food and Diet;
Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley, Calif., 2002); and Peña and Girón, La prevenció
de la enfermedad. For the influence of humoralism in Spain and its colonies, see J. M. López Piñer
Ciencia y técnica en la sociedad española de los siglos XVI y XVII (Barcelona, 1979); Luis Grangel, La
medicina española renacentista (Salamanca, 1980); George Foster, Hippocrates’ Latin American Legacy
Humoral Medicine in the New World (Amsterdam, 1994); Enrique González González, “La enseñanz
médica en la ciudad de México durante el siglo XVI,” in Juan Comas, Enrique González, Alfredo Lóp
Austin, Germán Somolinos, and Carlos Viesca, El mestizaje cultural y la medicina novohispana del siglo
XVI (Valencia, 1995); Luis García Ballester, La búsqueda de la salud: Sanadores y enfermos en la Españ
medieval (Barcelona, 2001); and Linda Newson, “Medical Practice in Early Colonial Spanish Americ
A Prospectus,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 25, no. 3 (2006): 377-386.
19 Martínez, Reportorio de los tiempos, 303; Cárdenas, Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias
179 (book 3, chap. 2); and Cisneros, Sitio, naturaleza y propriedades, 46r, 52r, 58v, 77r-85v, 108v, 114r
(chaps. 9, 11, 15-17). For other New World medical texts based on the tenets of humoral theory, se
Alonso López [de Hinojoso], Summa, y recopilación de chirugía, con un arte para sa[n]grar muy util y
provechosa (Mexico, 1578); Farfán, Tractado breve de medicina’, and Gregorio López, Tesoro de medicin
para diversos enfermedades (1673; repr., Madrid, 1708). Las Casas offered an extensive discussion o
humoral theory, including the importance of diet, in his Apologética historia sumaria, 3: 72-140, esp. 7
86, 105-106 (chaps. 23-41).
20 Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance, 50-51.
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
¡UNE 2010
695
“If You Eat Their Food
be maintained through an individualized regime of diet, exercise, purging, and rest.
Moreover, because of the influence of food and air on the human constitution, bod
ies, far from being hermetically sealed off from the outside world, were continually
open to the impact of their external environment. “All bodies are Transpirable and
Trans-fluxible, that is, so open to the ayre as that it may easily passe and repasse
through them,” noted the English medical writer Helkiah Crooke in 1615. Indeed,
as Gail Kern Paster has observed in her study of humoralism in early modern Eng
land, “solubility” was the “sine qua non of bodily health.”21 This solubility, however,
was capable of provoking quite dramatic transformations, such as had occurred when
the ancestors of the Amerindians first migrated to the Indies. Humoral bodies—and
for early modern Europeans, all bodies were humoral—were thus inherently un
stable and mutable.
Travel to new environments—whether to a different city or a different conti
nent—which subjected the body to unfamiliar climates and constellations and to
unusual foods, therefore required particularly careful attention. Even travel within
Europe posed serious challenges to individual health. Sixteenth-century English
travelers in Spain fretted about the impact of alien airs and foods in much the same
manner as did Spanish settlers in the Caribbean.22 Any change in location, in other
words, could easily place an individual’s health at risk. It is little wonder that Spanish
settlers in the Indies worried about their diet.
Humoral theory thus provided a model for explaining why Indian bodies and the
bodies of Spaniards resident in the Indies were different, despite the common en
vironment. They differed because they lived under different exercise regimes (In
dians were generally acknowledged to be more active), and, critically, because they
ate different foods.23 This view was offered as an ad hoc explanation for the Indian
character from the earliest days of the conquest. The inhabitants of the Caribbean,
noted the Italian Michele da Cuneo, who accompanied Columbus on his second
voyage, were “cold people, not very lustful, which is perhaps a result of their poor
21 Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615), 175; and
Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modem England
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), 9.
22 J. N. Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, 1500-1700: The Formation of a Myth (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2000),
13, 16.
23 The only example I have found in which the different humoral makeup of Indians and Spaniards
is not ascribed at least in part to the consumption of different foodstuffs is Cobo. He noted that although
Spaniards and Indians lived together in the same environment and used “the same water and almost
the same foods,” there were great differences between them. He nonetheless concluded that it was
impossible to determine whether Amerindians’ character and appearance was the result of “their natural
complexion, or their food and drink”; Historia del Nuevo Mundo, 2: 13, 16 (book 11, chaps. 3-4). Juan
de Cárdenas appears similarly to discount the importance of food in shaping complexion in one passage
of his Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias, where he asserts that Amerindians and Europeans
“use the same waters and even the same foods.” In fact, as this claim dramatically contradicts his re
peated insistence that food was one of the key features shaping complexion, it is clear that in this instance
Cárdenas was aiming to focus attention on the very specific argument that he posited to explain Am
erindian men’s lack of beards; ibid., 185 (book 3, chap. 4). For the centrality of diet, together with
exercise and the frequency of sexual acts, in shaping complexion elsewhere in Cárdenas, see ibid., 179,
184, 210, 219 (book 3, chaps. 1, 2, 3, 9, 11). Some writers stated that it was impossible for mortals to
understand why color varied so much among people, concluding that it was a mysterious act of God.
See, for example, López de Gomara, Historia general de las Indias, 372-373 (chap. 216); Cobo, Historia
del Nuevo Mundo, 2: 11 (book 11, chap. 1); and Torquemada, Monorchia yndiana, 2: 610-613 (book 14,
chaps. 18-19). Thanks to Christián Roa for the reference to López de Gomara.
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
June 2010
Rebecca Earle
696
diet.”24 The importance of diet, alongside climate, in differentiating Spaniards from
Indians was explained with great clarity by Diego Andrés Rocha in his 1681 treatise
on the “origin of the Indians.” Rocha, a Spaniard who taught law at the Peruvian
University of San Marcos and also served on the Audiencia de Lima, advanced the
view that Amerindians were descended from ancient Spaniards who had traveled to
the New World in the remote past. Given their common origin, Rocha needed to
explain why it was that Amerindians now differed so dramatically from Spaniards
He argued that this was due to “the variation in places, climates, airs and foods,”
which, he wrote,
caused this change in color, size, gestures, and faces among Americans, who did not conserve
the color of the first Spaniards who came to these Indies … because their ancestors enjoyed
different climates, different waters, different foods, which at first were not very nourishing,
and it was a great achievement that they did not die of hunger until such time as they managed
to cultivate fruits and other forms of food, and this is what caused the variation among peoples
and in color.25
For Rocha, Amerindians thus provided living proof not merely that people from the
Old World might undergo dramatic transformations in the New World, but that
Spaniards, in particular, could turn into Indians.
Rocha stressed that alterations provoked solely by a change in climate occurred
extremely slowly. Thus the ancient Spaniards’ transformation into “toasted and dis
colored” Indians was not caused simply by the new climate, but rather by “the lack
of protection from the weather, bad foods, and over a long period.” For this reason
alone, creóles—people of European heritage born in the Indies—remained white
despite their lengthy residence in the New World. In any event, Rocha observed,
their European complexion was continually reinforced because “they are all raised
with much care and protection and with good foods, which was not the case with the
Indians and those who first came to this America.”26 Good food trumped climate.
A change in climate could thus be managed through careful attention to diet, but
the converse could not be said for a change in diet. The latter, Rocha stressed, could
have devastating consequences for the individual complexion, and for this reason it
was essential for creóles and Europeans living in the Indies to eat appropriately.
Eating the wrong food and living unprotected in the American environment had
turned ancient Spaniards into Indians, and contemporary Spaniards should take care
not to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors. “Here we have seen very white men
from Spain,” Rocha wrote, “who, on withdrawing into the hills and eating maize and
other Indian dainties, return so toasted that they resemble Indians.”27 As Rocha
explained, food was vital to maintaining the distance between Spaniards (and ere
24 Michele da Cuneo, “News of the Islands of the Hesperian Ocean” (1495), in Geoffrey Symcox,
ed., Italian Reports on America, 1493-1522 (Turnhout, 2002), 58. Cuneo thus provides an early example
of the view that Indians were either phlegmatic or melancholic, the complexions associated with cold.
25 Rocha, El origen de los indios, 212. Or see Cárdenas, Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias,
179,184, 210, 219 (book 3, chaps. 2, 3, 9, 11); and García, Origen de los indios del Nuevo Mundo, 68-78.
26 Rocha, El origen de los indios, 213-214. Conversely, because creóles ate virtually the same diet as
Spaniards, they had identical humoral makeups, in the view of the Spanish doctor Diego Cisneros;
Cisneros, Sitio, naturaleza y propriedades, 114v-115r (chap. 17).
27 Rocha, El origen de los indios, 212.
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
June 2010
697
“If You Eat Their Food, ..
oles) and Indians. Without access to European food, Spaniards would sooner or later
turn into Indians. “Race,” in other words, was in part a question of digestion.
These were not purely theoretical concerns of interest solely to medically trained
writers. European explorers constantly complained that they fell ill when they could
not eat familiar foods, and conversely asserted that only the restoration of their usual
diet would heal them. Recall Columbus’s 1494 letter to the Catholic monarchs. The
admiral’s son Ferdinand similarly insisted that the Spanish settlers in the Caribbean
were “made ill by the climate and diet of that country.”28 Such views were widely
shared by other colonial writers. In his own discussion of the disastrous settlement
on Hispaniola, Fernández de Oviedo agreed that the high European death toll was
due primarily to the change in diet. He summed up the dangerous features of the
New World as follows:
beyond the incongruity that the heavens there have with those of Europe (where we were
born), and the influence of the differences in the airs and vapors and nature of the land, we
found no foods in these parts that were like those that our fathers gave us: the bread—of roots,
the fruits—wild or unknown and unsuitable for our stomachs, the water—of a different flavor,
the meats—there were none on [Hispaniola], beyond those mute rodents or a few other
animals, and all very different from those of Spain.29
Unlike medically trained writers, Fernández de (Jviedo did not trame nis analysis
with references to Galen or Hippocrates.30 Rather, he presented his observations as
the outcome of firsthand experience in the New World, which had taught him that
the air, water, and food of the Americas were not suited to European bodies. Indeed,
sixteenth-century Europeans consistently claimed that direct experience demon
strated that the indigenous diet was unhealthy and dangerous (at least for Euro
peans).
These claims were made despite the fact that maize and other New World
starches clearly formed the bulk of the diet of most settlers. Explorers often reported
without comment that they provisioned themselves with maize and other New World
28 Fernando Columbus, Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus, trans. Benjamin Keen (New Bruns
wick, N.J., 1959), 122.
29 Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural, 1: 49, 134 (book 2, chap. 13; book 5, chap. 8). For
similar phrasing, see Peter Martyr D’Anghera, De Orbe Novo: The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr
D’Anghera, trans. Francis Augustus MacNutt, 2 vols. (New York, 1912), 1: decade 3, book 4, http://
www.gutenberg.org/zipcat.php/12425/12425-h/12425-h.htm; and López de Gomara, Historia general de
las Indias, 57 (chap. 22).
30 For other criticisms of the dangerous effects of New World foods on Europeans that do not make
specific reference to medical teaching, see Juan de Estrada and Fernando de Niebla, “Relación de
Zapotitlán” (1579), in René Acuña, ed., Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: Guatemala (Mexico, 1982),
42; Juan Cristóbal Calvete de Estrella, Rebelión de Pizarro en el Perú y vida de D. Pedro Gasea (ca. 1593),
2 vols. (Madrid, 1889), 1: 228 (book 2, chap. 5); and Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, “Milicia indiana,”
in Vargas Machuca, Milicia y descripción de las Indias, 2 vols. (1599; repr., Madrid, 1892), 1: 115 (book
2). For texts by medically trained writers that attribute illness among Europeans in part to the unfamiliar
diet, see Martínez, Reportorio de los tiempos, 285-286; Cisneros, Sitio, naturaleza y propriedades, 114
(chap. 17); Francisco Nuñez de Oria, Regimiento y aviso de sanidad, que trata de todos los géneros de
alimentos y del regimiento della (Medina del Campo, 1586), 7v, 42r-v; and Cárdenas, Problemas y secretos
maravillosos de las Indias, 184 (book 3, chap. 3). See also Martyr, De Orbe Novo, 1: decade 1, book 10;
decade 2, book 4.
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
JUNE ZUlU
698
Rebecca Earie
staples seized from locals; indeed, failure to provide expeditionary parties with fo
was accepted as a legitimate reason for attacking an indigenous village. Beyond
there is a wealth of evidence that from the earliest days of settlement, Span
drank atole (a maize porridge), ate tortillas, and consumed other indigenous starch
such as chuño, or freeze-dried potato, although unlike Amerindians, they sometim
flavored it with sugar.31 Archaeological evidence provides another perspective. St
ies of early Spanish settlements in Florida, for example, reveal the remains of a r
of indigenous foodstuffs, including maize and squash.32
Nonetheless, when illness struck, settlers immediately blamed the New W
diet. For instance, the diary of Felipe de Hutten, a German who participated i
conquest of Venezuela in the 1530s, indicates that his party relied on maize s
from locals for their food, but when a number of his companions fell ill, he reco
bitterly that maize and cassava were “damaging not only to the sick, but also to t
healthy who are not accustomed to such food.”33 Medical writers in Spain pr
ably drew on the reports of such men for their own pronouncements about the d
gers posed by New World foods. Francisco Nuñez de Oria, for example, reco
in his 1586 dietary manual that “the root called cassava, from which the Indians m
bread, is mortal poison to those from these parts who navigate over there.”34 Sim
concerns afflicted settlers in England’s New World colonies, who likewise wo
31 See José de Acosta, De procurando indorum salute, trans. L. Pereña, V. Abril, C. Baciero, A. G
D. Ramos, J. Barrientos, and F. Maseda, 2 vols. (1588; repr., Madrid, 1984), 1: 355 (book 2, cha
on legitimate causes for waging war. For varied discussion of the consumption of New World st
see Martyr, De Orbe Novo, 1: decade 1, book 1; decade 2, books 1 and 3; decade 3, books 2 and 4;
Fernández de Enciso, Suma de geographía que trata de todas las partes y provincias del mundo: En e
de las Indias (Seville, 1530), 72r; Nicolás Federman, Historia indiana, trans. Juan Friede (1557;
Madrid, 1958), 40, 43, 118, 121; Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias (ca. 1559), ed. A
Saint-Lu, 3 vols. (Caracas, 1983), 1: 454 (chap. Ill); López de Gomara, Historia general de las In
116 (chap. 61); “Relación general de las poblaciones españoles del Perú” (ca. 1572), in Jiménez
Espada, Relaciones geográficas de las Indias: Perú, 1; 127; Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, “Descri
breve de todas las Indias occidentales,” in Vargas Machuca, Milicia y descripción de las Indias,
(book 2); Antonio Leon Pinelo, Question moral si el chocolate quebranta el ayuno elesiástico (M
1638), 57, 63 (pt. 2, chaps. 9-10); Thomas Gage, The English-American: A New Survey of the West
1648, ed. A. P. Newton (Guatemala City, 1946), 166,197-198; Alonso de la Peña Montenegro, Itin
para parochos de indios en que se tratan las materias mas particulares, tocantes a ellos, para su
administración (Madrid, 1668), 454 (book 4, tratado 5, sess. 1); Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Ca
Voyage du tour du monde (1699), Nouv. éd. augmentée sur la derniere de l’italien, trans. M.L.N.,
(Paris, 1776), 6: 112 (vol. 6, book 1, chap. 7); and Jeffrey Pilcher, ¡Que vivan los tamales! Food an
Making of Mexican Identity (Albuquerque, 1998).
32 Kathleen Deagan, Spanish St. Augustine: The Archaeology of a Colonial Creole Community (
York, 1983), 151-185; Elizabeth J. Reitz and C. Margaret Scarry, Reconstructing Historic Subsistenc
an Example from Sixteenth-Century Spanish Florida, ed. Donna J. Seifert (Glassboro, N.J., 1985)
abeth Reitz and Bonnie McEwan, “Animals, Environment and the Spanish Diet at Puerto Rea
Kathleen A. Deagan, ed., Puerto Real: The Archaeology of a Sixteenth-Century Spanish Town in His
(Gainesville, Fla., 1995), 287-333; and Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, “Eating Like an Indian: Nego
Social Relations in the Spanish Colonies,” Current Anthropology 46, no. 4 (2005): 551-573.1 am gr
to several AHR referees for alerting me to Rodríguez-Alegría’s research.
33 Felipe de Hutten, “Diario,” in Joaquín Gabaldón Márquez, ed., Descubrimiento y conquis
Venezuela: Textos históricos contemporáneos y documentos fundamentales, 2 vols. (Caracas, 1962),
367.
34 Nuñez de Oria, Regimiento y aviso de sanidad, 7v, 42r-v. Such concerns were not prompted by
anxieties about the poisonous juice contained in bitter cassava, for Europeans were familiar with the
process whereby this substance was extracted. Writers often stressed that once bitter cassava had been
processed, it was perfectly safe, at least for Amerindians. See, for example, Fernández de Enciso, Suma
de geographía, liii; and Juan Sánchez Valdés de la Plata, Coránica y historia general del hombre (Madrid,
1598), 124 (book 3, chap. 2).
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
PUNE 2010
“If You Eat Their Food .
that American foodstuffs would induce illness despite the fact that they relied upon
them for nourishment.35
Even when it did not induce illness, reliance on a wholly indigenous diet was apt
to provoke profound changes in the individual constitution, as was revealed by the
experiences of the Spaniard Jerónimo de Aguilar. Aguilar had been shipwrecked off
the Yucatan Peninsula in 1511 and lived with local Maya Indians until his rescue by
Hernán Cortés in 1519. Following his return to Spanish society, he was offered Eu
ropean food, but to the surprise of his rescuers, he ate only sparingly. When asked
why he was so moderate, he explained that “after so much time he was accustomed
to the food of the Indians, and his stomach would regard Christian food as foreign.”36
Long residence among the Indians had left his stomach unable to tolerate a normal
Christian diet. His digestive system had gone native; in humoral terms, he had ac
quired a “second nature,” and as a result, his body was not quite as Christian as it
had been prior to his shipwreck. He had begun to turn into an Indian. A diet based
on New World foods was thus viewed with suspicion both by medically trained Eu
ropeans, who feared its impact on the individual complexion, and by less learned
individuals, who, whatever their actual diet, insisted that lived experience demon
strated the sad consequences of relying on American foodstuffs.
For this reason, Spaniards went to great lengths to obtain health-giving Old
World foods, in particular the Iberian trinity of wheat bread, wine, and olive oil,
together with meats such as lamb, beef, and pork.37 Wheat bread and wine were
central to the ideal Iberian diet, and also played an important role in both medical
and religious thinking. Wheat bread occupied a significant place within humoral
medicine, as it was generally held to be the most nutritious food. Wine, in turn, was
regarded as supremely healthy, provided that it was drunk in moderation. Beyond
this, wheat bread and wine played a central role in the Catholic ritual of communion.
From the Middle Ages, Catholic doctrine required that communion be celebrated
using only wheat bread and grape wine. Thomas Aquinas stated clearly in his thir
teenth-century Summa Theologica that “the proper matter for this sacrament is
wheaten bread … [and] only wine from the grape.” He explicitly ruled out the use
of other grains such as barley, notwithstanding their frequent use in ordinary breads.
Pomegranate or mulberry wine was similarly disqualified, despite the fact that “vines
do not grow in some countries.”38 The Catholic Church’s position on the composition
of the Eucharist was thus clear: only wheat bread and grape wine had the potential
35 Chaplin, Subject Matter, 134, 149-150, 153, 211-212, 220.
36 Cervantes de Salazar, Crónica de la Nueva España, 114 (book 2, chap. 26). Thanks to Deborah
Toner for this reference.
37 For the early modern Iberian diet, see Libro de medicina llamado tesoro de los pobres con un
regimiento de sanidad (Seville, 1547), xxvi; Luis Lobera de Avila, Vergel de sanidad que por otro nombre
se llamaba banquete de caballeros y orden de vivir (Alcalá de Henares, 1542), esp. lviiiv-lxr; Nuñez de
Oria, Regimiento y aviso de sanidad, 229v-236r; Pedro de Mercado, Diálogos de philosophia natural y
moral (Granada, 1574), dialogue 4; Trevor Dadson, “The Road to Villarrubia: The Journey into Exile
of the Duke of Hijar, March 1644,” in Trevor Dadson, R. J. Oakley, and P. A. Odbur de Baubeta, eds.,
New Frontiers in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Scholarship: Como se fue el Maestro (Lewiston, N.Y., 1994);
Maria Angeles Pérez Samper, La alimentación en la España del siglo de oro: Domingo Hernández de
Maceras, “Libro del arte de cocina” (Huesca, 1998), 69-83; and Rafael Chabrán, “Medieval Spain,” in
Melitta Weiss Adamson, ed., Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe: A Book of Essays (New York, 2002),
125-152.
38 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, third part, question 74, http://www.newadvent.org/summa/
4074.htm; and Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991),
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
June zulu
700
Rebecca Earle
to become the body and blood of Christ. Moreover, in the Iberian Peninsu
possessed an additional Catholic resonance, for Islamic teaching forbade
sumption of any form of alcohol. Wheat bread and wine therefore served as p
symbols of the Catholic civilization that colonists aspired to represent.
These foods—along with a host of lesser ingredients, such as the chickpe
ons, and radishes that Columbus carried with him on his second voyage—w
important to the success of Spain’s colonizing mission in several ways. Medical
ing maintained that European foods were what prevented Spaniards from
erating into Indians, and individual explorers and settlers insisted—often in th
of considerable contrary evidence—that they sickened when deprived of
miliar diet. For these reasons, Columbus had requested that his men be pro
with supplies from Spain. He recognized, however, that the importation of Eu
food would not provide a permanent solution.39 Settlers needed to cultiva
items themselves if the colonial outposts were to survive. Attempts to gro
and other European staples were accordingly made from the 1490s, and E
livestock were introduced in both the Caribbean and the American mainland from
the earliest days of Spanish settlement.40 Crown officials were very concerned to
determine which Old World plants grew well in the New World, and in particular
whether “wheat, barley, wine and oil can be cultivated.”41 Geographical surveys re
ported explicitly on this matter, and many writers detailed the Old World crops that
did and did not thrive in particular regions. Cuneo, who had attributed the Caribbean
islanders’ phlegmatic nature to their poor diet, thus reported assiduously to his spon
sors that “for your information, we brought with us from Spain some of every kind
of seed, and we planted them all, and determined which do well and which do
poorly.”42
Although individual reports in fact reveal considerable variation in the actual
37-49. For the relationship between earthly and heavenly bread, see Carolyn Walker Bynum, Holy Feast
and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), 31-69.
39 In his letter to the Spanish monarchs, Columbus noted that European food should last “until wheat
and barley and vines should become established here.” Columbus, “Memorial,” 158.
40 For the introduction of Old World crops into the New World, see Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under
Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810 (Stanford, Calif., 1964), 323-325;
Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport,
Conn., 1972); Justo L. del Rio Moreno and Lorenzo López y Sebastián, “El trigo en la ciudad de México;
Industria y comercio de un cultivo importado (1521-1564),” Revista Complutense de Historia de América
22 (1996): 33-34; Prudence Rice, “Wine and Brandy Production in Colonial Peru: A Historical and
Archaeological Investigation,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27, no. 3 (1997): 455-479; and William
W. Dunmire, Gardens of New Spain: How Mediterranean Plants and Foods Changed America (Austin,
Tex., 2004).
41 This was question 25 in the questionnaire sent to colonial officials by the Spanish crown in 1577,
and again in 1584; see, for example, Estrada and Niebla, “Relación de Zapotitlán,” 29; and Antonio
Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empires and the Early Scientific Revolution
(Austin, Tex., 2006), 24-25. See also “Relación de Gil González Dávila” (1518), in Colección de docu
mentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y colonización de las posesiones españolas en Amér
ica, 42 vols., vol. 1, ed. Joaquín Pacheco, Francisco de Cárdenas, and Luís Torres de Mendoza (Madrid,
1864), 341-342; and “Mercedes y libertades concedidas a los labradores que pasaron a las Indias” (1518),
in Manuel Serrano y Sanz, ed., Orígenes de la dominación española en América: Estudios históricos (Ma
drid, 1918), 1: 580-582 (does. 61-62).
42 Cuneo, “News of the Islands of the Hesperian Ocean,” 55. See also “Relación de Querétaro”
(1582), in René Acuña, ed., Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: Michoacán (Mexico, 1987), 242-243;
Elinor Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge,
1997), 32-33; and Raquel Alvarez Peláez, La conquista de la naturaleza americana (Madrid, 1993), 425.
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
lUNE 2010
701
“If You Eat Their Food . .
success of these agricultural ventures, a consensus quickly emerged that European
crops flourished in the New World.43 “We are very certain, as experience has shown,
that both wheat and wine will grow well in this land,” insisted Columbus two years
after his landfall in the Caribbean, although this statement cannot have been based
on much actual evidence.44 Writers in both Mexico and Peru regularly recorded
wheat yields of more than a hundred measures for every one sown at a time when
typical Spanish yields were about five to one.45 “The Spaniards,” recorded an Italian
chronicler, “report amazing things about the fertility oí [HispaniolaJ, which 1 can
hardly repeat without blushing: they say that radishes, lettuce, and cabbages mature
within fifteen days of planting, that melons and squash mature within thirty-six days,
that vines produce grapes in a year, and that wheat (they were determined to try
everything), planted in early February, had ripened by mid-March.”46
Such implausible claims point to the significance of Europeans’ attempts to in
troduce their crops into the New World, for the ability of Old World plants to flourish
in the New World closely mirrored the ability of Old World people to flourish there.
Of course, Spaniards needed to eat nourishing Old World foods if they were to retain
43 For accounts describing only partial success in cultivating Old World crops, see, for example,
“Relación de la Isla Española enviada al Rey d. Felipe II por el licenciado Echagoian” (1560), in Colec
ción de documentos inéditos relativos, 1: 12; Francisco de Viana, Lucas Gallego, and Guillén Cadena,
“Relación de la provincia y tierra de la Verapaz” (1574), in Acuña, Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI:
Guatemala, 207, 221; and the varied reports in Jiménez de la Espada, Relaciones geográficas de las Indias:
Perú, vol. 1.
44 Columbus, “Memorial,” 158.
45 For Spain, see David E. Vassberg, Land and Society in Golden Age Castile (Cambridge, 1984),
201-202; and Abel Alves, “Of Peanuts and Bread: Images of the Raw and the Refined in the Sixteenth
Century Conquest of Spain,” in Francisco Javier Cevallos-Candau, Jeffrey Cole, Nina Scott, and
Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz, eds., Coded Encounters: Writing, Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin Amer
ica (Amherst, Mass., 1994), 62. For extravagant New World yields, see Toribio de Motolinía, Historia
de los Indios de la Nueva España (1541), chap. 18, in Joaquín García Icazbalceta, ed., Colección de
documentos para la historia de México, vol. 1 (Mexico, 1858), http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/servlet/
SirveObras/68048408217915506322202/index.htm; Las Casas, Apologética historia sumaria, 3: 62-63
(chap. 20); Agustín de Zárate, A History of the Discovery and Conquest of Peru, trans. Thomas Nicholas
(1581; repr., London, 1977), 30; Martín de Murúa, Historia general del Perú (ca. 1612), ed. Manuel
Ballesteros (Madrid, 1986), 463 (book 3, chap. 2); and Buenaventura de Salinas y Cordova, Memorial
de las historias del Nuevo Mundo Pirú, ed. Luis Valcárcel (1630; repr., Lima, 1957), 247 (discurso 2).
46 Marcantonio Coccio (Sabellico), “Book One … of the Account of the Happenings in the Unknown
Regions” (1500), in Symcox, Italian Reports on America, 69. For other enthusiastic reports, see Ales
sandro Geraldini, “Itinerary to the Regions Located below the Equator,” ibid., 127-128; Martyr, De Orbe
Novo, 1: decade 1, book 1; decade 1, book 3; decade 2, book 9; decade 3, book 7; “Mercedes y libertades
concedidas,” 580-581 (doc. 61); López de Gomara, Historia general de las Indias, 56, 166, 341-342, 361
(chaps. 20, 89, 195, 208); Las Casas, Apologética historia sumaria, 3: 9, 14, 19-20, 23, 32, 61-63 (chaps.
2,3,5,6,9,20); Cervantes de Salazar, Crónica de la Nueva España, 14 (book 1, chaps. 5-6); Tomás López
Medel, De los tres elementos: Tratado sobre la naturaleza y el hombre en el nuevo mundo, ed. Berta Ares
Queíja (ca. 1570; repr., Madrid, 1990), 13, 136, 143-145, 167, 183; Nuñez de Oria, Regimiento y aviso
de sanidad, 40r-v; Dorantes de Carranza, Sumaria relación, 49-50, 60, 74, 77; and Cobo, Historia del
Nuevo Mundo, 1: 6, 375-420 (prologue, book 10, chap. 1). Individuals who admitted that wheat and
grapes did not prosper in a particular region often went to some effort to explain that this was simply
because they had not been cultivated correctly. See, for example, “Relación de la Isla Española enviada,”
1:13,17; or Dorantes de Carranza, Sumaria relación, 49-50. Many writers also noted the ease with which
livestock multiplied; Martyr, De Orbe Novo, 1: decade 3, book 7; Fernández de Enciso, Suma de
geographía, Iii; Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural, 1: 79, 221; 2: 38-39, 71 (book 3, chap.
11; book 6, chap. 51; book 12, chap. 9; book 14, chap. 3); López de Gomara, Historia general de las Indias,
73 (chap. 35); “Relación de la Isla Española enviada,” 1: 17; José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History
of the Indies, trans. Frances López-Morillas (1590; repr., Durham, N.C., 2002), 230 (book 4, chap. 33);
Dorantes de Carranza, Sumaria relación, 50; Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo, 1: 377 (book 10, chap.
1); and, for a discussion of “ungulate eruption,” Melville, A Plague of Sheep.
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
June zuiu
Rebecca Earle
702
their health and their Spanish complexion. It was this pressing need for European
foods that led settlers in the Indies, as elsewhere, to attempt to “Europeanize” the
colonial landscape, to use Alfred Crosby’s terminology, by introducing Old World
plants and animals.47 In addition, because Old World plants responded to the same
climatic forces as did Spaniards, they functioned as a litmus test for the Spanish
colonial venture: If they thrived, Spaniards were also likely to thrive. Conversely, if
they failed, then it was unclear whether overseas settlement could endure.48
It was for this reason that Spaniards emphasized the ease with which Old World
plants grew in the Indies. Indeed, they explicitly associated their successful culti
vation of Iberian crops with the providential nature of the discovery and colonization
of the Americas. The abundance and fertility of Old World crops indicated clearly
that divine forces looked favorably on Spain’s presence in the New World. “In what
other land,” asked Fernández de Oviedo,
has one heard or known that in such a short period, and in lands so far from our Europe,
so much livestock and produce—introduced here from across such wide seas—should be
produced, and in such abundance as is seen by our own eyes in these Indies? These lands have
received [these crops] not as a stepmother, but as the truest mother, truer even than the one
who sent them, for some of them grow better here than in Spain.49
Such abundance was used by some writers to adduce that the New World was in fact
the location of the Garden of Eden. This fertility, which meant that “whatever fruits
are brought from Spain, and as many as are taken from Europe . .. grow with such
abundance throughout the year,” together with the benign climate, proved beyond
doubt, in the opinion of the creóle writer Agustín de Vetancurt, “that the Terrestrial
Paradise is hidden in some part of this region.” Other writers, beginning with Co
lumbus, entertained similar suppositions.50 The Americas, an earthly paradise, wel
comed the Spanish by providing them with abundant supplies of their own foodstuffs,
47 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge,
1986).
48 For the parallels between plants and people, see Bartolomé de las Casas, “Relaciones que hicieron
algunos religiosos sobre los excesos que había en Indias y varios memoriales” (1517), in Colección de
documentos inéditos, vol. 7, ed. Luís Torres de Mendoza (Madrid, 1867), 18; and Las Casas, Apologética
historia sumaria, 3: 77-78 (chap. 24). Animals, too, were affected by changes in diet and climate; Martyr
discussed an opossum that died as a result of “the change of climate and food” after being brought to
Europe. Martyr, De Orbe Novo, 1: decade 1, book 9.
49 Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural, 1: 8,71,79,80; 2:107,115,184 (book 1, dedication;
book 3, chaps. 8, 11; book 16, chap. 16; book 17, chaps. 3, 4; book 18, chap. 1). Or see Hernández,
Antigüedades de la Nueva España, 96-97 (book 1, chap. 23); and Juan de Solórzano Pereira, Política
indiana, 5 vols. (1647; repr., Madrid, 1930), 1: 15-18 (book 1, chap. 4, no. 44).
50 Vetancurt, Teatro mexicano, 17, 42, 44 (tratado 2, introduction, chap. 8). Vetancurt paraphrases
Buenaventura de Salinas y Cordova, Memorial, informe y manifiesto (Madrid?, ca. 1646), 17v (see also
18r). See also Christopher Columbus, “Carta a los reyes católicos” (October 18, 1498), in Anzoátegui,
Los cuatro viajes del almirante, 183-186; Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, 1: 385 (book 1, chap. 90); Cobo,
Historia del Nuevo Mundo, 1: 86 (book 2, chap. 14); Antonio de León Pinelo, El paraíso en el Nuevo
Mundo: Comentario apologético, historia natural y peregrina de las Indias Occidentales, Islas de Tierra
Firme del Mar Océano, ed. Raul Porras Barenéchea (ca. 1656; repr., Lima, 1943); John Leddy Phelan,
The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (Berkeley, Calif., 1970), 19, 49, 69—77; and
Cañizares-Esguerra, “New Worlds, New Stars,” 33-34. Europeans’ ecstatic response to the perceived
fertility of the New World surely reflects in part concerns about the declining fertility of western Europe.
See Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of
Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, 1995), 16-72. I am grateful to Emma Spary for this obser
vation.
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
JUNE 2010
“If You Eat Their Food . .. ”
703
so as to ensure their health and well-being. Settlers could thus retain their Spanish
complexion whatever the rigors of the climate.
Indeed, the very climate was said to be undergoing a process ot transformation
to make it more suitable for European bodies. Fernández de Oviedo reported that
since Europeans had arrived in the Americas, the climate in the areas of Spanish
settlement was becoming milder. In his view, this was because the European presence
moderated and improved the environment. “I have discussed this issue with some
learned men,” he reported. Their opinion was that “the region and its rudeness are
being dominated and tamed by Spanish dominion, just as occurs with the Indians and
natives and animals and all the rest of this land.”51 Not only were Europeans pro
tected against the dangerous effects of the American climate by the fecundity of Old
World crops, but the climate itself was becoming less hostile. Clearly, nature smiled
on Spain’s colonial ambitions.
What, however, of the many new foods that greeted Europeans on their arrival in
the Americas? Settlers suspected that they fell ill when they relied on a diet of New
World staples, but was any encounter with these new foodstuffs invariably detri
mental to the European body? Certainly Europeans looked with disdain on many
of the things eaten by Amerindians, and on occasion drew explicit comparisons be
tween the incivility of the food and that of the people who ate it. The fruit of the
mangrove tree was in Fernández de Oviedo’s view “a bestial food fit for savage peo
ple.”52 The consumption of insects attracted particular scorn. “They eat hedgehogs,
weasels, bats, locusts, spiders, worms, caterpillars, bees, and ticks, raw, cooked, and
fried. Nothing living escapes their gullet, and what is all the more amazing is that
they eat such bugs and dirty animals when they have good bread and wine, fruit, fish
and meat,” remarked the chronicler Francisco López de Gomara in 1552, after the
Spanish had introduced their superior foodstuffs.53 As Anthony Pagden observed,
the inability to distinguish between the edible and the inedible was a sure sign of
barbarism.54 Cannibalism was of course the clearest example of such a category mis
take.55
Such hostility, however, does not typify European responses to all New World
foods, and a number of items met with a very positive reception. Pineapples were
universally admired, chile peppers were approved for those with strong stomachs,
and by the late sixteenth century, cacao, in the form of chocolate, was widely con
sumed. Indeed, it was Spaniards who introduced tomatoes to South America and
chiles to Florida. A variety of New World meats were similarly praised by settlers
51 Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural, 1: 206 (book 6, chap. 46).
52 Ibid., 1: 235,286 (book 7, chap. 5; book 9, chap. 6); López de Gomara, Historia general de las Indias,
374 (chap. 217); and Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins
of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 1982), 87, 218 n. 180.
53 López de Gomara, Historia general de las Indias, 151 (chap. 79); and “Interrogatorio Jeronimiano”
(1517), in Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi, ed., Los dominicos y las encomiendas de indios de la isla Española
(Santo Domingo, 1971), 279, 302.
54 Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 87-89. See also Nuñez de Oria, Regimiento y aviso de sanidad, 7r.
55 The Spanish Jesuit Bernabé Cobo, who lived for many years in Peru, observed that Indians “eat
all living things, plants and animals, from the most noble, which is man, to the world’s most disgusting
bug or dirty thing.” Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo, 2: 20 (book 11, chap. 6).
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
June anu
Rebecca Earle
704
and chroniclers. Colonial officials carefully recorded which New World foods were
safe for Europeans to consume. Avocado, for example, was reported to be a “very
good fruit and healthy for Spaniards to eat.”56 Medical writers, in turn, classified
these new foodstuffs according to the tenets of humoral theory, although they often
disagreed with each other in their conclusions.57 Beyond this, despite the suspicion
with which maize and other New World starches were viewed, it was impossible for
most settlers to avoid them completely. Chroniclers and travelers noted the wide
spread consumption of “atole,pinole, scalded plantains, butter of the cacao, puddings
made of Indian maize, with a bit of fowl or fresh pork in them seasoned with much
red biting chilli,” and other local delicacies, by Spanish and creóle settlers alike.58
Spaniards not only ate these foods in the Indies, but also in a number of cases in
troduced them into the Peninsula, so that by the end of the sixteenth century, chiles,
tomatoes, and maize were a familiar sight in Spain itself.59
Given the important role that New World foods played in the diet of most settlers,
it is not surprising that writers sometimes found positive things to say not only about
pineapples but also about maize or cassava. The Franciscan bishop of Yucatán, Di
56 “Relación de Querétaro,” 243. Fernández de Oviedo agreed; Historia general y natural, 1: 297 (book
9, chap. 23). For pineapples, ibid., 1: 239-243 (book 7, chap. 14); Nicolás Monardes, Joyfull News out
of the New Founde World (London, 1577), 90; López Medel, De los tres elementos, 157; and Acosta,
Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 204. For chiles, see Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y
natural, 1: 235 (book 7, chap. 7); Las Casas, Apologética historia sumaria, 3: 37, 118 (chaps. 10, 35);
Cervantes de Salazar, Crónica de la Nueva España, 15 (book 1, chap. 6); and Nuñez de Oria, Regimiento
y aviso de sanidad, 308v. For chocolate, see Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural, 1: 267 (book
8, chap. 30); Cervantes de Salazar, Crónica de la Nueva España, 13 (book 1, chap. 5); López Medel, De
los tres elementos, 153; Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 210 (book 4, chap. 22); Sophie
D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (London, 1996); Ross Jamieson, “The Essence
of Commodification: Caffeine Dependencies in the Early Modern World,” Journal of Social History 35,
no. 2 (2001): 269-294; and Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and
Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, N.Y., 2008). For meats, see Fernández de Enciso, Suma de
geographía, Iii—liii; López de Gomara, Historia general de las Indias, 95 (chap. 51); Fernández de Oviedo,
Historia general y natural, 2: 32-35, 52-53, 58-59, 63-64, 122, 187, 248, 396 (book 12, chaps. 7, 28, 30,
31; book 13, chaps. 3, 4, 8, 9; book 17, chap. 9; book 18, chap. 2; book 20, chap. 8; book 24, chap. 3);
Las Casas, Apologética historia sumaria, 3: 35 (chap. 10); Matienzo, Gobierno del Perú, 89; López Medel,
De los tres elementos, 93,178,182,187; Diego de Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatan, ed. Angel María
Garibay (1574; repr., Mexico, 1973), 123; “Descripción de la tierra del repartimiento de San Francisco
de Atunrucana y Laramanti” ( 1586), in Jiménez de la Espada, Relaciones geográficas de las Indias: Perú,
1: 234; and Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 243-244 (book 4, chaps. 40-41). For the
colonial dissemination of New World foods across the hemisphere, see also Reitz and Scarry, Recon
structing Historic Subsistence, 64; and Janet Long-Solís, “El tomate: De hierba silvestre de las Américas
a denominador común en las cocinas mediterráneas,” in Antonio Garrido Aranda, ed., Cultura ali
mentaria de España y América (Huesca, 1995), 215-223.
57 See, for example, Hernández, The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernández, ed.
and trans. Simon Varey, Rafael Chabrán, and Cynthia Chamberlain (Stanford, Calif., 2000), 107-116;
Monardes, Joyfull News out of the New Founde World; and López, Tesoro de medicina.
58 Gage, The English-American, 197-198. Pinole is a mixture of maize and cacao. See also fn. 31.
59 For maize and chile, see Hernández, The Mexican Treasury, 109, 111; Las Casas, Apologética historia
sumaria, 3: 37 (chap. 10); Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 206 (book 4, chap. 20); Gregorio
de los Ríos, Agricultura de jardines (1592; repr., Madrid, 1951), 60; Monardes, Joyfull News out of the
New Founde World, 20, 104; John Gerard, The Herbal; or, General History of Plants: The Complete 1633
Edition as Revised and Enlarged by Thomas Johnson (New York, 1975), 346; Antonio Regueiro y Gonzá
lez-Barros, “La flora americana en la España del siglo XVI,” in Francisco de Solano and Fermín del
Pino, eds., América y la España del siglo XVI, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1982), 1: 209; José Pardo Tomás and María
Luz López Terrada, Las primeras noticias sobre plantas americanas en las relaciones de viajes y crónicas
de Indias (1493-1533) (Valencia, 1993), 145-146; and Antonio Garrido Aranda, “La revolución ali
mentaria del siglo XVI en América y Europa,” in Garrido Aranda, ed.. Los sabores de España y América
(Huesca, 1999), 207-208.
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
June 2010
705
“If You Eat Their Food ..
ego de Landa, for instance, noted that maize bread was good and healthy, except
that it is bad to eat cold.”60 In like fashion, the protomédico Francisco Hernández
praised maize as a healthy and useful food.61 Nonetheless, even the most enthusiastic
proponents of the indigenous diet vacillated in their endorsements. The Dominican
friar Bartolomé de las Casas stated on one page of his sixteenth-century Historia de
las Indias that “Indian bread” was healthier than wheat bread, and on another that
it made settlers ill.62 And despite his assertions that maize was healthy and useful,
Hernández maintained that it “generated profuse bile [and] blood,” and for this
reason was probably behind the devastating epidemic of cocoliztli that struck Mexico
City in 1576.63 As for pineapples and avocados, chroniclers insisted that they were
healthful only when eaten in limited quantities.64
Europeans thus fluctuated in their views about how much of the new American
environment they could incorporate into their own bodies, and by extension into
their culture. This uncertainty is revealed particularly clearly in their inconsistent
attempts at categorizing maize and other New World carbohydrates such as cassava
and potatoes. On the one hand, the Spanish quickly decided that these substances
played a role in indigenous cultures equivalent to that played by wheat bread in their
own. Maize, wrote the sixteenth-century Jesuit chronicler José de Acosta, was the
“bread of the Indies.”65 Many writers referred to maize as “Indian wheat,” and sim
ilarly described foods made from maize, cassava, and sweet potato as “bread,” re
gardless of the form in which they were prepared.66 Such comparisons are partie
60 Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatan, 37 (quote); Fernandez de Enciso, Suma de geographia,
72r; Monardes, Joyfull News out of the New Founde World, 104; Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the
Indies, 198 (book 4, chap. 16); and Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, Historia de Guatemala o
Recordación Florida (1690), ed. Justo Zaragoza, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1882), 1: 305-307 (book 9, chap. 1).
61 Hernández, The Mexican Treasury, 113, 111.
62 Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, 1; 610, 613 (chaps. 154-155).
63 Francisco Hernández, “On the Illness in New Spain in the Year 1576, Called Cocoliztli by the
Indians,” in Hernández, The Mexican Treasury, 84.
64 For concern about the consumption of New World fruits, see Martyr, De Orbe Novo, 1: decade
2, book 1; Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural, 1: 242, 273 (book 7, chap. 14; book 8, chap.
32); Cervantes de Salazar, Crónica de la Nueva España, 12-13 (book 1, chap. 5); and “Relación de la
Isla Española enviada,” 1: 14. See also Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural, 1: 234 (book
7, chap. 3); Las Casas, Apologética historia sumaria, 3: 39 (chap. 10); and Acosta, Natural and Moral
History of the Indies, 197-198 (book 4, chap. 16).
65 Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 151,197-198, 200, 202, 397 (book 3, chap. 22; book
4, chaps. 16-17; book 7, chap. 9). Sophie D. Coe observed that “the arriving Europeans instantly iden
tified maize as the equivalent to their own principal carbohydrate staple, wheat, and classified it as pan,
or bread, with all the religious and social connotations that that word implied”; Coe, America’s First
Cuisines (Austin, Tex., 1994), 9. This is an oversimplification, as I argue below.
66 Columbus, “Diary of the First Voyage,” December 13, 21, 26, 1492, January 15, 1493, in Anzo
átegui, Los cuatro viajes del almirante, 87, 99, 110, 130; Cuneo, “News of the Islands of the Hesperian
Ocean,” in Symcox, ed., Italian Reports on America, 55; Giovanni de’Strozzi, “Faith, Superstitions and
Customs of the Island of Hispaniola,” ibid., 65; Agostino Giustiniani, “Psalter” (1516), ibid., 78; and
Alessandro Zorzi, “Various Information about the Voyages,” ibid., 108; Martyr, De Orbe Novo, 1: decade
1, book 1; decade 3, book 5; Fernández de Enciso, Suma de geographia, 1-liii; Fernández de Oviedo,
Historia general y natural, 1: 48, 112, 119, 225-226, 228, 230-233, 243, 277; 2: 15, 39, 88, 222, 225 (book
2, chap. 13; book 5, chaps. 1, 3; book 7, preface, chaps. 1, 2,14; book 8, chap. 40; book 10, chap. 7; book
12, chap. 10; book 16, chap. 1; book 20, chap. 1); Las Casas, Apologética historia sumaria, 3:14-17,35-39,
41-42 (chaps. 3, 4, 10, 11); López de Gomara, Historia general de las Indias, 143, 341, 370-372 (chaps.
74, 195, 215); Cervantes de Salazar, Crónica de la Nueva España, 14 (book 1, chap. 6); López Medel,
De los tres elementos, 150; Hernández, Antigüedades de la Nueva España, 97 (book 1, chap. 23); “Relación
de Querétaro,” 243; “Descripción y relación de la ciudad de La Paz” (1586), in Jiménez de la Espada,
Relaciones geográficas de las Indias: Perú, 1: 344; Dorantes de Carranza, Sumaria relación, 67-73; and
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
June ZULU
Rebecca Earle
706
ularly significant because of the central place that wheat bread occupied in
Catholicism through its role in the communion service: bread is the substance that
becomes the body of Christ. Acosta’s comments on the similarities between New and
Old World breads highlight the religious implications very well. “The creator,” he
noted, “scattered his largesse everywhere; to this hemisphere he gave wheat, which
is the chief nourishment of man, and to the hemisphere of the Indies he gave maize,
which holds second place after wheat for the sustenance of men and animals.”67 The
identification of wheat with maize extended to the language of Christian prayer.
“May You give us now our daily tortillas,” reads a Nahuatl translation of the Lord’s
Prayer from 1634.68
On the other hand, perhaps the most characteristic feature of maize and other
New World starches was precisely that they were not wheat. Maize, that foodstuff
that harmed “not only the sick but also the healthy,” was not merely dangerous when
eaten in any quantity; it had also been declared incapable of transformation into the
body of Christ. New World catechisms followed European practice in stressing the
necessity of using wheat flour (and grape wine) in the communion service. Thus a
1687 Venezuelan catechism offered a clear answer to the question “Of what material
is the Eucharist consecrated?” The response was “of true bread, made with wheat
flour and water, and of true wine from grapes.”69 The vacillation between the views
that maize was bread and that it was not bread can be seen in the linguistic incon
stancy of Acosta’s comment that his chronicle would show “what sort of bread there
is in the Indies and what they use in place of bread.”70
It is tempting to construct a parallel between European uncertainty over whether
maize was or was not bread and the larger question of whether or not the Indians
were men. The news that a previously unknown people had been found in the Amer
icas prompted an intense debate in Europe about the nature of the Indians, and more
specifically their capacity to become Christians. The question was ostensibly settled
in 1537 when Pope Paul III issued a bull declaring that “the Indians are truly men
and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according
to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it.”71 Nonetheless, disputes
Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo, 1: 69, 76-77,159-160; 2: 21 (book 2, chaps. 8,11; book 4, chap. 3; book
11, chap. 6).
67 Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 20 (book 1, chap. 2). Or see Cobo, Historia del
Nuevo Mundo, 1: 159 (book 4, chap. 3).
68 Bartolomé de Alva,v4 Guide to Confession Large and Small in the Mexican Language, 1634, ed. Barry
Sell and John F. Schwaller (Norman, Okla., 1999), 162; and Francisco de Pareja, Doctrina cristiana muy
útil y necesaria, México, 1578, ed. Luis Resines (Salamanca, 1990), 4v.
69 José Rafael Lovera, “Intercambios y transformaciones alimentarias en Venezuela colonial: Di
versidad de panes y de gente,” in Janet Long, ed., Conquista y comida: Consecuencias del encuentro de
dos mundos (Mexico City, 1997), 67; emphasis added. A Peruvian catechism similarly admonished in
digenous parishioners that they should under no circumstances confuse the host with a simple “maize
cake or arepa”; Concilio Provincial, Tercero cathecismo y exposición de la doctrina Christiana (Lima,
1585), 75v. Or see Alonso de la Peña Montenegro, Itinerario para parochos de indios en que se tratan
las materias mas particulares, tocantes a ellos, para su buena administración (Madrid, 1668), 346-355
(book 3, tratado 6).
70 Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, 197 (book 4, chap. 16); emphasis added. For
comparable inconsistency, see Cuneo, “News of the Islands of the Hesperian Ocean,” 57, 60.
71 Paul III, “Sublimus Dei,” May 29,1537, Papal Encyclicals Online, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/
Paul03/p3subli.htm. The Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos raised this matter with particular
drama in a 1511 Christmas Day sermon in which he denounced Spanish mistreatment of the indigenous
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
June 2010
“If You Eat Their Food ..
707
about the character of the Indians continued for decades; the humanist scholar Juan
Ginés de Sepúlveda, for example, attracted considerable support for his thesis that
the Amerindians were natural slaves of the sort described by Aristotle. They were,
he maintained, “homunculi in whom you will scarcely find even vestiges of human
ity.”72 Writers in the mid-seventeenth century were still discussing whether Amer
indians were “men in our shape” or some other sort of being.73
Bread or not bread; men or not men? We would not be alone in positing a con
nection between these foods and the people who ate them, for colonial culture itself
equated eaters and eaten. “Indians aren’t people and cassava isn’t bread,” runs an
aphorism from colonial Venezuela.74 Perhaps these Indian breads were in essence
identical to Old World breads. In the late sixteenth century, certain New World
churchmen disputed the doctrine that only wheat flour could be used in communion
wafers, arguing that maize, too, could serve as the basis for the host.75 Perhaps maize
could become a communion wafer, and perhaps Indians had the same potential to
become Christians as did Europeans. Or perhaps the Indians were fundamentally
other, incapable of incorporation into the European world, just as the ersatz
“breads” of native culture could never be transformed into the true body of Christ.
Such parallels between the introduction of European foods and European re
ligion shaped the imaginations of colonial actors in the early modern era. The evan
gelization of the New World was often compared to agricultural practices: Chris
tianizing the Indians was akin to uprooting the weeds that had flourished prior to
the arrival of Europeans and replacing them with wholesome European crops.
“Never,” wrote the Dominican priest Diego Durán in the 1570s, “will we succeed in
teaching these Indians to know the true God if we do not first eradicate and totally
remove from their memory their superstitions, ceremonies, and false cults to the
false gods whom they worship, just as it is not possible to grow a good field of wheat
in mountainous and shrubby soil if you have not first completely removed all the
roots and growths that it naturally produces.”76 These injunctions were of course
both metaphorical and literal. Europeans were constantly enjoined by the crown not
only to catechize the Indians but also to plant wheat and vines wherever possible.
Yet what were the Indians supposed to eat? If their roots were to be replaced
with fields of wheat, what then would they consume? In fact, many settlers advocated
that Indians adopt the dietary habits of Europeans. For example, in 1551, an official
population and asked, “Are they not men? Do they not have rational souls?” Las Casas, Historia de las
Indias, 3: 13-14 (book 3, chap. 4). See Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race
Prejudice in the Modern World (London, 1959); and Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man.
72 Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Demócrates segundo o De las justas causas de la guerra contra los indios
(1548), ed. Angel Losada (Madrid, 1951), 35, 38, 63; and Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice
in the Conquest of America (Boston, 1965), 122.
73 See, for example, Peña Montenegro, Itinerario para parochos de indios, 273-279, quote from 277
(book 3, tratado 1).
74 Lovera, “Intercambios y transformaciones alimentarias,” 65.
75 López Medel, De los tres elementos, 156.
76 Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España, 1: 3 (prologue to vol. 1). For a seamless transition
from the need to evangelize to the need to cultivate European crops, see “Mercedes y libertades con
cedidas,” 580 (doc. 61). Bartolomé de las Casas captured well the multivalent importance of wheat
cultivation when he reported with satisfaction that wheat grown in Hispaniola had been used by fellow
Dominicans to prepare not only bread but also “very good hosts”; Las Casas, Apologética historia
sumaria, 3: 12 (chap. 2).
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
June 201Ü
708
Rebecca tarie
stationed in Guatemala wrote to the Spanish monarchs to describe the am
the small colonial outpost that he headed. His intention, he explained,
courage the Indians to adopt “our customs in eating, drinking, dressing,
and personal conduct.. . and finally our language.”77 The Franciscan fri
dino de Sahagún, who in the mid-sixteenth century compiled a vast ency
life in pre-conquest Mexico, was similarly explicit in his view that Indi
emulate European consumption practices. In a sermon delivered in Nah
indigenous audience, Sahagún proclaimed that Indians should eat
that which the Castilian people eat, because it is good
they are strong and pure and wise … You will become
if you are careful with your bodies as they are. Raise
eat Castilian tortillas [wheat bread]. Raise sheep, pigs,
food, that with which they a
the same way if you eat thei
Castilian maize [wheat] so tha
cattle, for their flesh is good
not eat the flesh of dogs, mice, skunks, etc. For it is not edible. You will not e
Castilian people do not eat, for they know well what is edible.78
The consequences that would accrue from a European diet are here set
plicitly. Indians would become like the Spanish were they to eat their f
Similar assertions were made by another sixteenth-century writer,
mented that as a result of eating a specifically European diet and shelte
the elements, the indigenous inhabitants of the Mexican village of Citl
begun to acquire a European constitution. “Their complexion has almost
verted into ours, because they have been given beef and pork and lamb
wine to drink, and they now live under roofs,” he wrote.79 Just as a diet of
New World foods had transformed the Indians into the pusillanimous,
beings they now were, so a return to nourishing European foods would
healthful European complexion they had lost over the centuries. The Sp
Juan de Solórzano Pereira explained clearly the connection between di
current condition of the Indians in his 1639 justification of Spain’s America
De Indiarum Jure. The Indians, he noted, were savage not “from birth or
from the air of their native place,” but rather from “a depraved education
span of time and from the practice, harshness and lack of instructions in t
of life and from the poor quality of the food they consume.”80 Indians sho
77 Carta de Tomás López a los reyes de Bohemia, Guatemala, June 9, 1550, Archivo
Indias, Seville, Audiencia de Guatemala 9A, N.68, R.17, fols. 5, 9.
78 Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Siguense unos sermones de dominicas y de santos en leng
(1563), cited in Louise M. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in
Century Mexico (Tucson, 1989), 166, emphasis added; and Pagden, The Fall of Natural M
Spanish regularly noted that one of the benefits Amerindians derived from the conquest,
salvation, was access to European food. For example, a 1573 ordenanza stated that Euro
remind Indians that colonization was beneficial to the Indians themselves because through
learned “the use of bread and wine and oil and many other foods.” “Ordenanzas de su mag
para los nuevos descubrimientos, conquistas y pacificaciones,” July 13,1573, in Colección d
inéditos, vol. 16, ed. Torres de Mendoza (Madrid, 1871), 183. Or see Juan Ginés de Sepúl
that the introduction of wheat and other Old World foodstuffs amply compensated the In
losses suffered as a result of the conquest; Sepúlveda, Demócrates segundo, 78. This assertio
in Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo, 1: 376 (book 10, chap. 1).
79 The author of the report ascribed this view to the local Indians themselves. “Descripci
de Citlaltepec” (1579), in René Acuña, ed., Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: México, 3 v
1986), 2: 200; and Alvarez Peláez, La conquista de la naturaleza americana, 348. Thanks to
for this reference.
80 Juan de Solórzano Pereira, De Indiarum Jure (1639), cited in James Muldoon, The Am
\MERICAN rilSTORICAL KEVIEW
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
UNE 2010
“If You Eat Their Food . .
709
encouraged to adopt the healthy diet of Europeans, for this in itself would improve
their level of civility.
This seemingly logical suggestion, however, contradicted basic elements of the
same humoral theory that underpinned it. Indians were advised to adopt a Eu
ropean diet so as to acquire (or restore) a European complexion, yet medical
thinking insisted that a change of diet could have devastating consequences for
an individual’s constitution. After all, changes in diet were blamed for illness
among European settlers in the New World. If it was so dangerous for Europeans
to eat Indian food, what would happen to Indians who ate European food? Would
they, too, not fall ill? In fact, many writers believed that it was precisely the
adoption of European food that explained the extraordinarily high mortality rates
that afflicted Amerindians after the advent of colonization. In Hispaniola, the
wave of epidemics that nearly exterminated the Taino people was blamed at least
in part on their adoption of European dietary habits, just as the ill health afflicting
Spanish settlers on the same island was attributed to the consumption of New
World foods.81 Likewise, the Spanish geographer Martin Fernández de Enciso
observed that certain Caribbean Indians, whose usual diet consisted solely of fish
and cassava, “die if they are taken to other places and given meat to eat.”82 Juan
de Cárdenas offered similar explanations as to why the Chichimec Indians, who
in their own environment were hardy and robust, sickened and died when in
corporated into colonial society. He attributed their mortality to various causes,
first among them “the change in food, in that they are deprived of the natural
sustenance on which they were raised, which, although it is very bad in itself, is
for them healthy and very good, as they are accustomed to it, unlike our food
which harms them.”83 Dreadful though the Chichimec diet was (Cárdenas ex
plained that it consisted largely of raw meat), it was better suited to their com
plexion than was European food. “As our food is foreign and harmful to them,
it does not give them strength to resist illness,” he concluded.84 José de Acosta
summed up the current orthodoxy when he observed in 1590 that “people at
tribute [the decline in the indigenous population] to various causes, some to the
fact that the Indians have been overworked, others to the changes of food and drink
that they adopted after becoming accustomed to Spanish habits, and others to the
Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 1994), 59;
emphasis added. I thank Jim Muldoon for his advice about Solórzano’s views.
81 “Interrogatorio Jeronimiano,” 284-285, 305, 307, 324, 343; and Cook, “Sickness, Starvation and
Death in Early Hispaniola,” 382.
82 Fernández de Enciso, Suma de geographía, Iii. Or see Bartolomé de las Casas, “Relaciones que
hicieron algunos religiosos,” 47; and López Medel, De los tres elementos, 155. Peter Martyr noted that
of the ten native interpreters taken from the Caribbean to Spain after Columbus’s second voyage, “only
three survived; the others having succumbed to the change of climate, country, and food.” Martyr, De
Orbe Novo, 1: decade 1, book 2.
83 Cárdenas, Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias, 202 (book 3, chap. 7). Other factors
included lack of exercise and “the sad rage and melancholy that overcomes them, on seeing themselves
among men whom they loath so much”; ibid., 203.
84 Ibid. Gerónimo de Mendieta explained that because Indians had begun eating “meat and other
foods that we Spaniards eat,” they now suffered from constant sneezing. Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica
indiana, 508-509 (book 4, chap. 35).
American Historical Review
This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Wed, 13 May 2020 03:10:44 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
June 2010
Rebecca Earle
710
excessive vice that they display in drink and other abuses.”85 In short, the Indians
should adopt a European diet, but doing so might kill them.
This paradox reveals something of the contradiction at the heart of Spain s co
lonial enterprise. On the one hand, generations of colonial officials yearned for the
Amerindian population to adopt “our customs” not only in eating but also in dress
ing, hygiene, language, and religion. The centrality of evangelization to the colonial
endeavor had of course been laid forth from the earliest days of the conquest, but
Spanish ambitions extended far wider.86 In his 1567 Gobierno del Perú, the Spanish
jurist Juan de Matienzo provided a catalogue of European customs that Peruvian
Indians should be obliged to adopt. Indians, for example, should abandon “the habit
of eating together in the plaza” and should instead eat separately in their own houses,
“like rational men.”87 They should also wear Spanish clothing. This, he insisted,
would bring multiple benefits:
Wearing Spanish clothing not only is not bad, but indeed is good for many reasons. Firstly,
because they will thereby grow to love us and our clothes; secondly, because they will thereby
begin to be more like men … ; thirdly, being dressed as Spaniards they will be ashamed to
sit together in the plaza to eat and drink and get drunk; and fourthl…