Fed Like So Many Pigs

When former slaves wrote narratives of their lives, they frequently dwelt on the food that they had eaten-or not eaten-in childhood. Far from an occasional subject, food is frequently mentioned in the narratives written by former slaves looking back at all stages of their lives, in large part because so many slaves in antebellum America often went hungry. Like enslaved people of all ages, children could be ingenious in their pursuit of extra food, but their efforts came at emotional and physical costs, from being forced to beg, to suffering from lack of sleep so they could hunt or gather or garden, to enduring brutal punishments if they were discovered taking forbidden food. By examining the daily experiences of the most vulnerable people in antebellum America, we see both the barbarous potential of capitalist logic and those aspects of slavery that are hardest to understand through capitalist logic alone

Animal science · Biology · Political science · Architecture, Design, and Social History · History · Race, History, and American Society