Political Gastronomy

In his book Political Gastronomy, Michael LaCombe takes up an element of early American history and culture that is still poorly understood—the function of food and its various ancillary activities such as the growing, eating, and exchanging of victuals. LaCombe focuses on the early English settlements around the Atlantic before 1660, which in his study means Roanoke, Jamestown, Bermuda, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay. Although LaCombe emphasizes the special status of food as both dietary necessity and symbolic value, the book primarily studies the symbolic meanings that English settlers and native peoples located and negotiated in their political actions, especially their continuous “struggle for precedence” (8), authority, and leadership. In order to sidestep debates about the alleged dysfunctionality of early English settlements, LaCombe asserts his interest in “what contemporaries envisioned as an appropriate social order, how that order should be manifest in everyday life, and how to respond when experiences diverged from the normative vision” (22). From the perspective of a literary scholar, it is refreshing to see a historian take seriously the efficacy of symbolism, especially the performative qualities of authority through the enactment of food and eating.While LaCombe acknowledges a differential in the power relationships between Indians and English settlers, his focus on exchange and symbolic efficacies of food leads him to certain euphemisms that obscure the ways in which English settlers destroyed Native American food sources during imperial warfare. While I laud LaCombe for not discussing the conquest as a foregone conclusion and for using the focus on food to replace the “familiar story” of dysfunction with “one of experimentation, a process of trial and error that eventually resulted in a durable model for English settlement” (21–22), one cannot help but assume that this “durable model” is ultimately a euphemism for colonial expansionism and Indian removal. Also, the preponderance of English perspectives on the meaning of food and the negotiation of authority is troubling, especially given recent scholarly innovations in the interpretation of Native American literacies and advances in ethnohistorical understandings of cross-cultural contact.As demonstrated by chapter 1 (“‘Commutative Goodnesse’: Food and Leadership”), LaCombe is most adept at situating colonial concepts of food and leadership within contemporary English social and cultural constructs. He demonstrates early modern English understandings of the close relationship between effective leadership and the abundance of food, relying in large part upon a reading of Thomas Tusser's Five Hundredth Points of Good Husbandry (London, 1587). On the colonial side, he somewhat strays from the focus on food when discussing the ways in which Virginia leaders used the humanistic concept of the via activa and the rejection of idleness to ground their claims to authority. The illustrations included here and throughout the book—such as an engraving on the stages of baking bread taken from John Penkethman's Artachthos (London, 1638)—are carefully chosen, but they provide a separate subtext without an explicit connection to the discussions in the main text.Chapter 2 delves into colonial deployments of food and specifically the control of the food supply to allow leaders to gain authority. LaCombe usefully distinguishes among sufficiency, qualitative consistency, and the proper control of the food supply as equally significant concerns for leaders to establish and settlers to accept claims of authority. Jamestown's tenuous food supplies during the early period and especially incidents of cannibalism witnessed during the “starving time” under council president George Percy take a central place in the discussion, but some of LaCombe's analysis appears fairly obvious. For example, he follows Percy's characterization of the famine via the inconceivable foods Jamestown residents ate—beginning with cats, dogs, and snakes and ending with human beings: “Its larger importance to the story of political culture in the early English Atlantic world lies in the fact that images of food conveyed a range of meanings that other aspects of social life cannot. Percy could find no other way to describe famine than by reference to eating” (53). Nevertheless, LaCombe's accounts of the starving time at Jamestown and the scattering of the Plymouth settlement through the lens of the food supply provide an appealing alternative to the great-moments-in-history approach that has dominated the popular imagination of early America.In chapter 3, LaCombe more explicitly considers food exchanges between English settlers and Indians. He locates a significant overlap in both sides’ understandings of food exchanges: “By showing power through the items they offered and received and their conduct while doing so, they purchased authority (or at least haggled over it)” (71). He usefully surveys the rationalist and idealist/Romantic interpretations of Indian motivations for exchange with the English. Whereas the former assumes that European goods filled basic needs better than the tools and materials already available, the latter posits that Indians fitted European objects into traditional uses. LaCombe furthermore elaborates on the gendered meanings of the labor behind specific foods, such as the binary between maize/meal/bread, associated with women's agricultural labor, and venison, associated with hunting and thus male labor. LaCombe here uses illustrations from the famous sixteenth-century Drake Manuscript. Yet, while the main text refers to Jamestown and Plymouth, the Drake Manuscript points toward the native Caribbean cultures the manuscript depicts. Absent also is a discussion of the complicated history of the Drake Manuscript, such as its production by French scribes and the unclear connection to Sir Francis Drake. The sparse index does not refer to the Drake Manuscript, and thus the reader is left wondering what status it has as evidence among or separate from those examples that receive a more sustained discussion in the chapter.In chapter 4, the book acknowledges more distinctly the disturbing elements of English and Indian exchanges of food, specifically the English obfuscation of their theft of Native American food sources through evasive nomenclature. Such theft, LaCombe emphasizes, underscored “the uncomfortable message ... that English leaders could neither adequately feed nor effectively control their settlers” (91). In order to shore up their own authority, English leaders ironically had to submit to Indian authority. From here, Political Gastronomy first moves back to considering the colonial leaders’ ability to control food, specifically their manipulation of early modern English concepts of hospitality. In chapter 5, therefore, the discrepant approaches to leadership and hospitality among three early Jamestown leaders—Edward Maria Wingfield, John Smith, and George Percy—dominate the discussion, especially Wingfield's alleged abuse of the common stores. For LaCombe, the Jamestown example illustrates that, “first, to accuse a leader of misusing the food supply was a potent charge, one that portrayed him as corrupt and tyrannical.... [I]t questioned a man's fitness to govern at the most basic level.... Second, the example shows that the symbolic weight of food—the way social and political relationships were, as Percy noted, encapsulated in meals—was a feature of everyday life” (133). Smith, LaCombe asserts, understood better than anyone the role that ordinary men and women played in legitimizing authority (134). Anyone familiar with the now copious scholarship on early Jamestown will recognize LaCombe's emphasis on food as a tweaking of a generally well-known story. Here and in the following chapter, readers would have hoped for more insight into the ways in which Powhatan Indians viewed food encounters with their English neighbors.Chapter 6 is the most promising of the book; here, LaCombe addresses more explicitly the ways in which both English settlers and Indians examined every feature of shared meals. After discussing the common English colonial stereotype that Indian women did all the drudgery and ascribing it to misunderstandings of Indian women's roles (143), the book recounts the fraught relationship between Massachusetts governor John Winthrop, Mohegan chief Uncas, and Narragansett chief Miantonomi. The reader here witnesses the fascinating contours of a shared meal that ultimately led to Miantonomi's betrayal and execution.In the book's conclusion, LaCombe looks ahead beyond 1660 and into the eighteenth century, where he locates “a more confident English presence” (169), a greater emphasis on food serving social distinctions among English settlers, and descriptions of Native Americans as more barbarous and savage as well as more “pitiable, helpless, hungry, and in need of charity” (171). LaCombe concludes with a discussion of two typical eighteenth-century commentators on food and legitimacy, namely, Sarah Kemble Knight and Dr. Alexander Hamilton. For both travelers, distinctions in food cultures served their preexisting understanding of their own elite status. Here as in the earlier period, English writers interpreted food in essentially the same way, “each summing up an entire people, capturing an entire culture, in a single meal” (177).Overall, LaCombe expertly accounts for the ways in which the various symbolical meanings of food participated in the creation of authority, the definition of leadership, and the negotiation of order in the English settlements of the early modern Atlantic. The selection of places, authors, and texts, however, seems too restrictive and appears to shut the door on a more reciprocal and balanced understanding of English as well as native meanings of politics and food. Political Gastronomy makes a promising foray into the political and cultural meanings of food in early America, but its limited and sometimes disjointed consideration of sources and its somehow unambitious handling of the Native American perspective leave the reader craving for some other fare

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