“If You Eat Their Food …”: Diets and Bodies in Early Colonial Spanish America

Abstract

In January of 1494, Christopher Columbus found himself in the disagreeable position of having to explain to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella why so many of the European settlers on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola had fallen sick and died. The explanation was simple, but it had alarming implications for the nascent Spanish colony: Europeans did not thrive in the very different environment of the New World. The “change in water and air,” Columbus believed, was the principal cause of the dreadful ailments afflicting the small Spanish settlement. Fortunately, he explained, the mortality would cease once the settlers were provided with “the foods we are accustomed to in Spain.”1 European food, Columbus insisted, would 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.

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