Eating Puerto Rico

Eating Puerto Rico is an illuminating historical exploration of the local, regional, and global dynamics shaping the material conditions and practices as well as the affective and symbolic needs that have led Puerto Rican people to associate specific foods with the nation. In this book, Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra grounds culinary culture in the logistics of conquest and colonization; migration; gender, class, and racialized struggles; climate and soil fertility; technological advances in cultivation, preservation, and transport; and the ebbs and flows of market exchanges and financial investments. He brings together all these elements while highlighting the historical agency of people, who create, adapt, and innovate as individuals and communities negotiate survival and weather transformations that they can rarely control.After extensive scholarly research, the author has identified a few general types of foods that are familiar to several generations of Puerto Ricans and that in many inspire a sense of home and tradition. As such, Ortíz Cuadra organizes the bulk of the book through chapters dedicated to one of these types (rice, beans, cornmeal, codfish, root vegetables, and meat), investigating the large variety within each type, describing the combination of structural factors that have led to the generalized preference of one variety over others, and examining the forms for preparing each (from savory to sweet dishes) and the combinations in which people consume them (rice and beans, cornmeal and codfish).An in-depth understanding of a culinary culture has, as our author does, to take into account complex matters, among them the feasibility of cultivation and preservation, chemical properties (providing bodies with energy or helping with hydration), nutritional value, medicinal uses, religious purposes (codfish instead of meat to meet Catholic fasting obligations), and flavor. He also shows us how foods acquire meaning as certain forms of preparation speak to the expertise of the cook (providing the opportunity for social recognition) and serve as markers of gender, class, and race (some ingredients were only available to those who could afford them). Most importantly, the reader learns about how these meanings are historically constructed in the midst of social processes dictated by Spanish colonization, economic transitions (from cattle ranching to sugar, and later coffee, cultivation), US control over the island, and the hyperconsumption and politics of food abundance of the current moment.Ortíz Cuadra employs an impressive range of sources and has creatively put together a multidisciplinary methodological apparatus to meet the challenge of historicizing symbolic practices such as taste, food preferences, and national belonging. He interrogates nineteenth- and twentieth-century cookbooks, nutritional booklets, and etiquette manuals, mines novels, short stories, paintings, and newspapers, and probes early colonial government documents such as trading records, municipal regulations, and correspondence from political administration and church officials. He puts all these materials in conversation with folk traditions, linguistic practices, and interviews while also borrowing from his personal ethnographic observations and from a wide range of newspaper and TV advertisements.Our author is deeply immersed in conversations with a growing body of scholarship by historians, anthropologists, nutritionists, economists, chemists, botanists, and political scientists, all focused on the politics of food. In order to produce a text that is both scholarly sound and appealing to nonacademic audiences, he sometimes steps outside disciplinary conventions and, at other moments, indulges in sophisticated theorization, such as that in the last two chapters. These chapters are a meditation—through the Puerto Rican case—on the global contemporary dynamics that have effected significant changes in diet and food consumption practices in today's world. Technological advancements in agricultural production and transportation as well as the unprecedented growth of food service industries have made food more readily available. At the same time, dramatic changes in the organization of labor have eroded the time available for the regular preparation of foods at home and have reduced families' ability to afford nutritious foods. In this context of restructuring labor, markets, and habits, Puerto Ricans have once again appropriated food as part of the cultural repertoire through which to claim belonging and recognition. Islanders may have reworked but have not abandoned their attachments to particular foods that many seem to identify as traditional, despite the innovations, adaptations, and negations that render them visible today.Eating Puerto Rico leaves the door open for other scholars to take on new paths of inquiry, such as a deeper consideration of how nineteenth- and twentieth-century migration routes from other Caribbean islands to Puerto Rico or between the island and US locations have transformed and complicated culinary cultures and national belonging. In sum, Ortíz Cuadra provides an innovative introduction to the histories of colonialism, struggle, and cultural hybridization that is useful in the classroom and beyond

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy) · Art · Economics · Identity (music) · Negotiation · Preference · Social science · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics) · Culinary Culture and Tourism