The Limits of Disgust

Eating the Inedible During Jamestown’s Starving Time

Bibliographic Data

ID13018342
AuthorsRachel Winchcombe (0000-0003-0439-0950, University of Manchester, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume11
Issue1
Pages1-23
Publication date2023-07-26
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGlobal Food History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2054-9555 • E-ISSN: 2054-9547
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/20549547.2023.2234252
OpenAlexW4385284783
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited40

This article reexamines the dietary choices made by English colonists during the notorious Starving Time of 1609–10. During moments of crisis, like the Starving Time, attitudes toward foods normally deemed disgusting, such as vermin and human flesh, could be recalibrated. Ideas of edibility and permissible dietary behavior were pliable, changeable, and grounded in a social environment in which hunger and ill health were pervasive but nonetheless considered preventable. As this article demonstrates, at moments when human life was in peril, disgust for certain foods was replaced with novel approaches to hunger relief, malleable beliefs about the health benefits of particular foods, and the conviction that most people who went hungry knew the limits of acceptable dietary behavior. Whether rhetorically or practically, disgust and its relationship to food had its limits

Anger · Disgust · American and British Literature Analysis · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Social Psychology

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