Rice in the Time of Sugar

Rice is an essential part of the Cuban diet; that much is clear to anyone familiar with Cuba or Cubans.But how and when did the Cuban palate become so hooked on a food whose consumption relies on imports?Rice in a Time of Sugar interweaves historical testimony with factual evidence to explain this paradox.This account makes clear that, like most things in Cuba, the history of rice is inseparable from the history of the sugar industry, which is itself inextricable from the history of Spanish colonization and U.S. economic and political domination, both of which generated the structural dependence on food imports that persists in Cuba today.Louis Pérez shows how food had taken on a political identity in Cuba by the nineteenth century when "the proposition of a distinctive Cuban cuisine entered the creole imagination" (p. 1).The meal espoused as the national dish, "ajiaco," represented the ethnic complexity and racial diversity of the Cuban people with its mixture of local ingredients (tubers, cereals, fruits, vegetables, and meats) variously associated with the populations of indigenous people, Europeans, Africans, and Asians; as such, "the stew offered an ideal metaphor for cubanidad" (p.4).Through la cocina cubana Creoles distinguished themselves from Spanish peninsulares (colonials); Cuban Creoles conspicuously drank black coffee and ate white rice and black beans rather than the chocolate drink, chickpeas, and paella favored by the Spaniards.The typical Cuban dish was invariably defined by rice, such that the staple became, "a way of life, an obligatory presence on the Cuban table" (p.13).A cookbook published in 1914 declared: "There is perhaps no country in the world, other than in China or India, where rice has come to signify the meal par excellence" (p.18).Indeed, by the early twentieth century, Cuba's per capita consumption of rice ranked among the world's highest for non-Asian countries.And yet, as Pérez.points out, "For all the vaunted and indeed celebrated centrality of rice in la cocina cubana, it is remarkable indeed to learn that the obligatory dish of the national cuisine ... has depended almost entirely on foreign imports" (p.21).Having introduced the enigma of the centrality of rice in the Cuban diet, Pérez goes on to describe the "utterly incomprehensible state of affairs," in which Cubans lost the capacity to feed themselves at some point in the nineteenth century (p.25).The book's chapters divide the narrative into broad historical periods.Each one shows how calls to increase agricultural production for domestic consumption of rice and other foodstuffs went unheeded

Biology · Creole language · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Ethnic group · Ethnology · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Cuban History and Society · History · Law · Philosophy