Caribbean Food History with Dr. Candice Goucher

Exploring Caribbean Culture through Foodways with Dr. Candice Goucher

In this episode Hema chats with guest Dr. Candice Goucher, author of "Congotay! Congotay! A Global History of Caribbean Food," about the dynamic and fraught history of Caribbean food and culture.

From the reconstruction of Caribbean culture, the contributions of Indigenous, African, Indian, Chinese, and European peoples to Caribbean culture & cuisine, and the significant role of food in preserving history and culture, Hema and Dr. Goucher discuss the concept of creolization, the impact of European colonization, and the importance of everyday cooks in the Caribbean narrative.

The period of colonization had a lasting impact on the food and culture of the Caribbean, and in her book Dr. Goucher shares the impact that the Caribbean nations had on global culture & cuisine.

Listen to this episode for the survival and adaptation of food traditions amidst historical adversities, how these have contributed to the culinary landscape, and insights into how food history can reveal complex cultural exchanges that shaped the Caribbean.

Dr. Goucher provides insights into Caribbean foodways and history from her perspective as an African historian and archaeologist, Professor Emerita of History at Washington State University, and author of many books on Africa, the Caribbean, and world history. She is a recipient of the World History Association's Pioneers in World History Award for lifetime achievement. Her books on food have won Gourmand awards, including Congotay! Congotay! A Global History of Caribbean Food (2014) and Picnics and Porcupines: Eating in the Wilderness of Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2024). 

Resources

Candice Goucher, Congotay! Congotay! A Global History of Caribbean Food (Routledge, 2014). 

Sharika D. Crawford, The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making, (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

Alyssa Sperry, 'Just a Dash of Salt:' Salt and Identity Formation in Historical and Contemporary Jamaica," (M.A. Thesis, University of Oregon, 2021). 

Candice Goucher, "Recipes for Resistance: Gourmet Gods at African-Caribbean Tables," Eaten no. 1 (2017): 88-93.

Candice Goucher, "Caribbean Ice Queens," Eaten no.9  (2020): 6-17. 

Referenced Episodes

Exploring Caribbean Culinary History with Dr. Keja Valens

Transcript

Candice:  What is Caribbean culture? V.S. Naipaul, a writer who hails from the Caribbean, actually argued that no, nothing was ever created in the Caribbean. It was only destroyed, it was pure destruction.  But I think others have looked at  the history of the Caribbean as one of the most creative reconstructions and deconstructions of cultural elements that has ever existed on this planet.

Hema [music] This is The Moreish Podcast where Caribbean history meets culture and cuisine.

Hema: Hello Candice, thank you so much for joining me today on The Moreish Podcast.

Candice: Hi Hema. It's wonderful to be here with you.

Hema: It has been a long time that I've been looking at your book and looking at the work that you've done. We have so much to talk about today. In particular, the framework is gonna be around your book and some of the thoughts and themes and research that you put forth in your book.

But before we even get started with our conversation, can you introduce yourself?

Candice: Sure, sure. Well, my name is Candice Goucher. I have a PhD in African History, from UCLA. So I approached the Caribbean as an Africanist, and the first time I travelled there in the 1980s, I was astounded by how familiar it felt. The red soil, the foods, the names of foods, just, it just felt welcoming as an, as a place and part of the African diaspora. So I'm trained as a historian and as an archeologist, so I have a big interest in material culture and especially food history.

Hema: And you wrote a book, which I referenced. Can you talk a little bit about that book?

Candice: Yeah, well the book is called Congotay! Congotay! A Global History of Caribbean Food, so that tells you a lot, some of it kind of hidden in the title. I approach the foods of the Caribbean as a world historian, as an Africanist through the lens of inequality, gender, social history, as well as political history. 

I think what makes food history so fun, but also able to convey the struggles of the past, is the fact that that food, unlike other parts of the material world, is something we consume. It becomes embodied. It's part of our real being. And so that makes women, who are mostly home cooks and the conveyors of food history, very important in this story.

And that's the story I try to tell in my book is how food can tell us the story of the past. And a story of the past that maybe honours and centres women and the voiceless in Caribbean history. 

Hema: You said a couple of times already that you are an Africanist. Can you explain that for us?

Candice: Yeah, so my training as an academic took place in Africa. I did field work in West Africa, in Ghana and Togo, in Nigeria, um, and so when I came to the Caribbean I brought an understanding of the African side of this very complex cultural history. And I think that being an Africanist also means being sensitive to following trails that maybe aren't necessarily written in the written records. You know, they don't appear in the archives, they don't appear in colonial records, as much as the perspective of Europeans. 

So I think it's, it means the way that I approach the past is through the material record, through an understanding of people through their food, through the objects that they made and constructed, through the way they organized their society.

And so archeology is very important, and living ethnographic history is very important. Language is important. So it gives me a different set of tools, maybe, as a historian and a different,hopefully, perspective on the past.

Hema: I've been doing this podcast for a couple of years now, and throughout the research and different guests, I see things differently through the learnings that I get from them. And reading your book really has so many little details that I just hadn't read or hadn't heard from anywhere else because you give a lot of big picture concepts, and then you throw in little notes like the meaning behind the title of your book, congotay, which I would love for you to share with us.

Candice: Yeah, well, congotay, like many things in African-derived cultures can mean many things. It means multiple things all at once. So it's not black or white, it's of these things all together in one big pot. And congotay can mean a cassava porridge that was eaten in many parts of the region as a very basic staple food. It can mean a game, a children's game and song that was really like mother hen and little baby chicks and people playing chase and, and protecting the little ones. So it was a, it was a childhood idea that was conveyed. It also is attached to a proverb that suggests that one day, one day congotay. One day justice will prevail. And that for me says a lot about food history that we can, we can look at the food on, on our plates and understand the past, and understand maybe some of the past and present inequalities, the changes that have taken place and the agency of people that are normally excluded from the historical record. So I love that about food history.

Hema: I'm really enjoying talking about history through the lens of food because it is, as you said, it's an everyday thing for us. It's on the plate. It's something we see every day and oftentimes we don't think about the history of what's on our plate, but it can tell us so much about culture and people, which is why I like to focus a lot on food in this, in this podcast.

If we're gonna talk about the Caribbean, we really need to go as far back as we can and start with the Indigenous people.

Candice: I agree, and I think that's a great example of how history has been distorted during the Colonial era, after the erasure of so many communities and so much history. Europeans came to the conclusion that they somehow owned the island spaces and they could trade them like they were players on a chess board, and they did just that. So the whole presence that was Indigenous and persistent and so heroic, filled with struggle and filled with wonderful foods, tended to, to get erased. 

And I think here's one example of where archeologists have been so important, particularly the archeologists who were looking at resistance history in the Caribbean, and they realized very quickly that there was a presence, an Indigenous presence that lasted through the period of African slavery and European colonialism and conquest. It wasn't always visible because people could hide their communities and could blend into other communities, but it was an essential part of survival for African peoples. And that interaction between the Indigenous populations and African populations is critical, I think, to understanding Caribbean history and understanding the, the foundations of resistance history across the region.

Hema: One of the things that you say in your book, and I wrote this down because it is not something that anybody really talks about or that I've seen, is in reference to the Indigenous people. You say they were also immigrants to the Caribbean. Tell me about that.

Candice: They were great travellers, they had seafaring skills, and I, I think that history really, is needed in the Caribbean to understand that the Caribbean was more than just a land-based experience and culture and history, that it was also maritime. And the Indigenous peoples were the first to arrive on these pieces of land in the Caribbean Sea.

Uh, they came from, mostly from South America, and so we can look at that history very differently if we think about maritime presence. Um, and they were the first of many peoples to arrive by sea, by boat, by canoe, by ship. But just the first of many.

Hema: When it comes to the Indigenous people of the Caribbean, very often we talk about the Arawaks and the Caribs and the Tainos possibly, but there are so many more groups that we don't talk about. 

Candice: Well, I think we know more and more all the time about that experience of being Indigenous in the Caribbean, because almost every archeological site now, we're beginning to recognize, contains elements of that past. And knowing how to recognize it and classifying it, categorizing it is complex, especially when you don't have all of the languages that remain behind to, to give clues to that past. But the DNA evidence is astounding and tells us a lot about the circulation of peoples within the Caribbean region and between the Caribbean and South America. So, yeah, it's, it's complicated and it's becoming more complicated every day, but that's exciting. But that's, that's what makes, I think history exciting. The idea that it's always changing.

Hema: That we're, we're still learning more, and the stories and the narratives that are written in the majority of the history books are changing based on what is being discovered and unearthed, I think is very exciting.

Candice: Yeah, when I, when I started researching this field there was next to nothing written about the history of food in the Caribbean. And yet here you had essentially the world's first global cuisine. And the ability to tell this history of globalization from the perspective of food was very unique. Since that period of time, 10 more than 10 years ago now, a lot more research has contributed to our understanding only complicating almost every subject matter.

Hema: It's, it's a complicated time to talk about these subjects because there's a lot of people stuck into the past and what they've learned in the past and, and struggling to understand the changes and why the changes and why what they're calling new history is being unearthed. And, and it's, it's challenging for some people to understand that, and hopefully through conversations like this we can shed a little bit more light on why that's happening and what the academics and the historians and the archeologists are discovering and sharing with the world.

Candice: Yeah, I think, I think science is so important, because we can have certain perspectives or hypotheses and approach the past, and then when we look at the evidence a completely different story gets told. So, the fact that that evidence for the past is constantly changing, we're finding new sources, translating new sources, using archeological excavations, using DNA evidence. Um, we're coming to some very different conclusions about, the importance of different groups and how they shaped this very complicated interaction of peoples and places and foods in Caribbean history.

Hema: When we talk about the Indigenous people, what was their diet like? What did they eat?

Candice: Well, um, they were farmers, some of them, they of course used the bounty of the sea. Uh, and we know that those traditions lasted a very long time, and, and enabled local people to use maritime resources to survive. And that was true of whether you were a pirate in Belize or an African escaping enslavement in Jamaica.

People used the sea, they became expert swimmers and used the technologies of their time to acquire what they needed from, from the ocean. Indigenous people were also farmers and we have many domesticated crops that were important as well as the resources that, that they could fish or hunt, or gather from land.

So, both the land and the sea needs to come into the picture when we think about those foods. 

Hema: One of the things that is told quite often, is that the Caribs were cannibals, and you talk about this in the book, about Indigenous people being depicted as roasting human flesh,and yet the evidence tells us different. So where did that come from and, and what can we learn from what we already now know about the Indigenous people. When it refers to can.

Candice: Well I think many cultures, if you look around the world, found ways to create other identities that were not of their own culture. So, for example, in Central Africa when people of the Congo region saw Europeans, they thought they were cannibals because they were on ships arriving out of nowhere, and they had these barrels with things that looked like blood and human flesh. Um, this was wine, barrels of wine and barrels of cheese. So, so they made up stories about the Europeans as cannibals. And similarly, Europeans made up stories about the peoples they encountered, I think in part, many of them to justify their conquest their so-called civilizing missions. 

They wanted to create an idea of somehow these peoples they were encountering as being less and being uncivilized.

Hema: Through all of your research, through Africa, through the Caribbean, through food history in general, have you encountered true cannibalism?

Candice: There has existed in times of scarcity, cannibalism. Very desperate times. There are also rituals and traditions in some parts of the world where human flesh was consumed for ritual purposes.

Hema: But not an everyday consumption. Times of scarcity or ritual.

Candice: No, a very unusual set of circumstances could bring this into motion. I think, you know, when we look at the deeper world history of food, the experience of day to day, that everyday experience was basically one of hunger, and you have two extremes. One is extreme hunger and one is feasting. So famine or feast um, were unusual moments in an experience that had largely depended on satisfying people, keeping societies alive and vibrant, and using food to do that. But the day-to-day experience of people, it was, it was being hungry. 

Hema: The next stage or the next part of history in the Caribbean after the Indigenous people is when Europeans started to quote unquote discover or make their way throughout the Caribbean. And that in itself really changed the trajectory of the food that was consumed, the culture, into what we can look for today.

There's so many influences that happened as a result of that part of history, and I would love to talk about this part of the food history and the history in general of the Caribbean, because it's such an important pivotal moment.

Candice: It is. Um, it is, and the, the Europeans were important for all of the wrong reasons. They, they were a terrible, destructive force. They brought pigs and cattle and animals, horses, I mean animals that completely changed the ecology of the region, destroyed crops and fields and vegetation. The Europeans also brought a lot of new foods from other parts of the world that weren't their own to begin with. They brought foods that, via Africa, that had originated, maybe been domesticated originally in Asia or parts of Asia, South Asia, East Asia. They brought a reliance on slave labour and that global export of racism and enslavement and indentured servitude, systems that they felt they needed to rely on for agriculture. also changed the world in some really negative ways. So, so you have a, a, you know, astounding variety of new foods and cultures that come into the Caribbean as a result of the European presence, but also a great loss. And I think historians are still debating whether was largely destructive or constructive and creative.

What, what is Caribbean culture? It reflects all of that. V.S. Naipaul a writer, who hails from the Caribbean, actually argued that no, nothing was ever created in the Caribbean. It was only destroyed, it was pure destruction. But I think others have looked at the history of the Caribbean as one of the most creative reconstructions and deconstructions of cultural elements that has ever existed on this planet.

So, I think there are just so many ways to look at that past, um, in terms of relative creativity and innovation and hybridity, you know, the blending together of these discrete ideas and concepts and foods and cuisines. So, it makes for a fascinating historical subject.

Hema: It is fascinating and there's so many nuances and, and little things that make up the whole. I did an episode with Keja Valens who wrote a book called Culinary Colonialism, and one of the things that she talks about in her book is that there is no going back, in the Caribbean, there is no going back to pre-colonial times. We just can't. It's, it's not available to us. But we've created in the Caribbean an entirely new culture, set of foods, dishes that are influenced from places all over the world. The majority of people that I talk to understand that the times of destruction were terrible. They were horrible there. They're things that, that are very difficult to talk about, but that the resilience of our ancestors to create what is this brand new culture we're very proud of, of.

Candice: Mm-hmm.

Hema: What, what we have now. 

Candice: Yeah, it’s you know, I think the meaning of Caribbean history comes down to teaching us how to adapt to change. And most people's idea of, of culture is that you want it to never change. You want it to be preserved somehow, but the preservation of a culture is not the same as having a living culture. And a living culture, the essence of it is that it is always changing. And so I think the Caribbean teaches us how to change. I mean, how to literally adapt, sift, select, embrace some things, reject other things. And what is so really interesting about food is who was doing that selection, that selectivity. And it was largely cooks.

It was, it was that everyday experience where every day people had to decide what to eat, how to put together the ingredients and resources that they had, and over and over again, engage in the vibrancy of cultural innovation, adaptability, and change. So, yeah, there are continuities that we can look at, but change is where it's at. Change is definitely a sign of the importance of Caribbean culture in understanding globalization.

Hema: You mentioned that the Europeans brought in cattle and sheep and goats and pigs, which destroyed quite a bit of land. And there was a part of your, of your book, I believe you mentioned, in Hispaniola, that they destroyed land and it's, and it, the repercussions are still being felt today.

Candice: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, we can look at, story of Haiti, for example, in so many ways um, a story of misery and suffering and oppression. The, the terrible side of history. And yet food traditions have survived. I mean, it's, it's quite amazing. 

Two examples of that survival outside of Haiti is World Central Kitchen, which is now a big player in providing meals to crisis points around the world. Whether it's places hit by hurricanes or like New Orleans or earthquakes like Haiti or Gaza today with violence. World Central Kitchen is a big player. They learned in Haiti to listen to local women, tell them how to make food, the food that would be comfort food, and there were special techniques of how to treat the beans and, and make beans and rice. And those very unique techniques were preserved and used by World Central Kitchen to model the need to listen to local voices. 

Today Haitian food is among some of the most celebrated food in great fancy restaurants. We have one here in Portland, Oregon. Gregory Gourdet's amazing restaurant kann is a celebration of, of the survival of Haitian food traditions, despite all odds. So yeah, we can, we can look at that story of the past, that destructive side, but then find an example like Haiti, where amidst that suffering, food traditions have been so important on a global scale, impacting the world.

Hema: During this time period that we're talking about where the Europeans were within the Caribbean, food changed. They went there and they discovered foods that were currently being eaten by the Indigenous people, but they had their own thoughts about what food was good, what they enjoyed, what they were used to, and then they had the enslaved people that they were bringing, which has three different cultures coming together around food. What, what was cuisine like in Caribbean at that time?

Candice: Well, I think, food and cultural life was dominated by the African experience, and there was no time more important than a crisis, like an environmental crisis, hurricane, the aftermath of the hurricane season, when people realized who they were really dependent on. And slave owners were dependent on enslaved peoples for their day-to-day food, their everyday food, but especially during crisis times. They dictated the ingredients. They negotiated and bargained for food in the marketplace. They grew the food. They grew crops that created profits that allowed society to continue i.e. sugar and all of its byproducts, rum, especially. That, that fueled the entire system that in which they, they lived. So there are so many contradictions in the experience of food, but an important one was the dependence of societies on the African cooks and farmers, for their livelihood, for their everyday meals on the table. 

Hema:  Were most of the cooks women? 

Candice: Many of them were women. There were also men who were cooks, or at least servants. Women were almost always in the kitchen though, and we see recipes being translated and, and conveyed sometimes by men. But women transmitted those cultural traditions in the kitchen to daughters, sometimes adopted daughters, and that the approach that many of them took was this tradition of, of oral literature. 

Um, you mentioned the wonderful study of on the history of cookbooks, but that's one piece of the puzzle because it's the, it's the written literate side of Caribbean history, in which women were late to participate, but which provided women an important outlet for recording their ideas and their thoughts and their attitudes towards food. Not just recipes for the food that appeared on the table, but recipes for life. 

Before those written cookbooks though, there were centuries of traditions that were preserved through oral tradition, transmitted from one woman to another within the household kitchen. And that amazing oral literature we're only beginning to really tap into. It's embedded in stories and folk tales and proverbs, from the American South to the Caribbean and parts of South America. A really important part of what we know about food history is coming out of those oral, oral traditions. 

Sometimes in African-derived religions as well, the practices of those religions often had women whose sole role within this religion was the preparation of food, um, foods for the deities, for the gods. And they had to be very particular about how certain vegetables were sliced or how foods were cooked, whether salt was used or not used, so there were these cultural rules that were transmitted in very formal systems of preservation and transmission across generations, within the body of, of religion.

Hema: Within this timeframe that we're talking about, comes the word creole and creolization, and I would love for you to talk about that because there's also a quote that is in your book, "creolization restructured not only language, but also other cultural elements including food ways along the way".

Candice:  Yeah, creolization, is a concept that has changed so much over time, both within Caribbean society, the way the term was used and is still used, and also outside of Caribbean society. Basically, it refers to the blending together of different cultural elements to reshape them into something new. So blending, whether it's language or food, for example. European languages, Africanizing them. Or African languages, Europeanizing them, making them something else, something new, but on a scale that that cultural element is shared amongst a large swath of people. So it's not an isolated instance, although it occurs on an individual basis as people choose words or learn words. And those vocabularies change over time. But it happens repeatedly within and among groups of people. 

I think although a lot of the theorists around creolization come out of literary studies, I think the really interesting work comes from linguists, the people who are studying languages and the changing ways of languages in this era of globalization. So beginning in the 15th and 16th centuries, you have hot pockets of places where people are speaking different languages and trying to make themselves understood in the port cities of the world. Those processes are incredibly important for understanding, changing culture, not just language is changing, but culture is changing too.

And it's, and it's a unique two-way street. You know, it's not one thing changing into something else and losing its own integrity. It's gaining from the addition of a new element. I think that's what creolization can show us. And there's some great scholars who have been working on Caribbean creoles. John Rickford at Stanford, Tucker Childs here in Portland at Portland State University was, was also an important scholar, understanding the, the rules of this change that was taking place in languages. 

And we can kind of use that to think about food as well. And my favourite part of that whole discussion is the idea of a continuum. That there's just not one thing. The English language or the French language and another Congolese or an African or Indigenous language, but there's a whole continuum that connects these languages in the world. And the borrowing, the extent of borrowing differs from one pole to the other, but, but it's a continuum of change, interconnecting people.

Hema: There's so much when it comes to the word creole, and I think that word might mean something slightly different for people depending on where in the world you live. A lot of people associate it with cooking in, in the Southern US. If you're from the Caribbean, you, it might mean something different, but in essence, it's everything that you've just explained in that change and that morphing into something new. 

Candice: Yeah, it can have a, in different places, in different times a very negative connotation. So, people were creole if they were born in the Caribbean, and so it was used in a derogatory manner to say, oh, you are Caribbean, you are lazy, you are a drunkard, what, whatever tags the outsiders placed on locally born people in the Caribbean, no matter what your skin colour was. 

But it also came to be attached to ideas of racial mixing and this intersection of different colours. So creole was often, brown skinned, lighter skinned people and foods that had, were not too spicy, but a little spicy. So the blending together of these elements had a lot of judgment attached to them, and creolization I think is probably most useful now in scholarly circles, at least as understanding this real complexity that changes over time in, in terms of its the interpretations it, it brings out.

Hema: I will leave, in the show notes, some of the scholars that you're talking about so that people can dive a little bit deeper into some of the research or books or articles if they're interested. 

In this, this time period, what's really interesting from a food perspective, from for me is because the Europeans were travelling to many different parts of the world, they were bringing foods to the Caribbean from all over the world, and some of these foods became staples.

And when we think about things like ackee, for instance, that comes from Africa. When I think about breadfruit or I think about things like, plantain for example, all of these things were a result of this time period, the colonization, the movement of these ships and what Europeans were bringing. 

Candice: Yeah, it's really quite astounding to think about how many of these foods that were introduced from Southeast Asia, from the Indian Ocean, from West Africa and Central Africa. They become part of the national identity of many islands to the point where the real history of those foods is kind of set aside because they have become rallying points for a commonality, a shared understanding of culture and, and community. Which is fine, but but as you, as you point out, the origins of those foods come from around the globe, and really reflect, I think more than anything else, the extent to which a maritime culture is dominating this period of time. Not just in the Caribbean, though, it shows up really big time there, but in, in many parts of the world. 

So there's, there's a movement of goods via maritime connections, and often creating, uh, some unusual cultural formations. For example, the Caribbean becomes this nexus point for curry, and yet curry is a British invention that comes out of India. And, and you know, how does that happen? Well, there are British officers moving between these different parts of the world, London and, and South Asia and the Caribbean, and they take a liking to the combinations of spices and they begin to reduce that to what they understand curry to be.

And curry is born and then exported and re-imported and has a mobility all, all its own. Um, the extent to which people in the Caribbean have embraced curry and roti or chow mein from China, from Asia, is, is quite astounding.

Hema: A lot of these foods, I sort of think of them in two categories. A lot of the foods were brought over to the Caribbean as inexpensive ways to feed the enslaved people. And then there were foods that the Europeans brought over because it's foods that they really enjoyed, ingredients that they wanted, they brought over for their own enjoyment.

Candice: Yeah. Well, let's start with curry because, there definitely is a British sensibility around curry and a preference for eating curry for breakfast in many parts of the world. And the British military spreads this to not only parts of the Caribbean, but to places, uh, like London or Japan or, other, other parts of the world. So South Africa. And, and the prevalence of these flavours then take over and dominate culinary traditions beginning in, oh, late 18th century really. 

But then there are other foods that are promoted quite accidentally, and curry is odd because it also falls into that category. The movement of people on British ships and on French ships was regulated by provisioning laws that the governments dictated what people could eat, and what they should be fed on ships, whether they were transporting indentured servants or enslaved peoples. There were rules about those diets, and those diets became very important determinants for what people ate and how they saw themselves as gaining a singular identity. 

So here I'm thinking of the South Asians who were transported as labourers from the Indian Ocean to the Caribbean, were treated all as one. They came from many different cultures and cuisines, but they were treated as one singular identity and fed the same food. And in creating that singular identity, culture started to change and adjust and adapt, so that you have an East Indian cultural identity in Trinidad or in Guyana that isn't like anything in the Indian Ocean or in South Asia. It's like many things. It's been translated and retranslated. 

So I think there are examples from maritime culture of the commonality, and suppression of cultural traditions and the reshaping of them into singular ideas and singular identities. Taking the multiple and making it smaller and more limited. Yeah, it's part of the story of globalization.

Hema: It is, a part of the story and I think to get a full picture, is, as we described, the Europeans were not going from Africa directly to the Caribbean. They were sailing all over the world at different times for different reasons, which meant that not only what they were doing, did that influence culture and food in the Caribbean, but the culture also went the other way and influenced what was happening in European cultures. 

Candice: Exactly. Foods were moving such a dizzying way. I think what the Caribbean had going for it, it was exotic, it was tropical, and the foods that came out of the Caribbean were reshaping cuisines all over the world. Um, peanuts in China, in Chinese cuisine, chili peppers in parts of Europe and West Africa. 

The pineapple is an example, a wonderful example because these poor specimens of pineapple arrived in Europe. Just, I mean, you can only imagine after months at sea they were just pathetic examples of this wonderful fruit. And yet people went crazy for them because of their rarity and exoticism. Um, pineapples somehow became symbols of hospitality as they sat on the great tables of European elite society. And it was only in the 18th century, a woman actually in near Amsterdam was able to take from a clipping a plant, of the pineapple plant, a slip and produce a fruit in a hot house. And that made then hot houses in European botanical gardens very popular because they could grow tropical fruit like pineapples on all on their own. 

But pineapples got carved into beds, they were symbols of, like many other foods, of aphrodisiacs and enhancing people's sexual lives, in, at least in their heads.

Um, so foods ha have played a very important role coming out of the Caribbean, not just going through. And we know the, the so-called Colombian exchange was truly an exchange of continental, global dimensions where African foods and Asian foods and European and North and South American Caribbean foods were changing different parts of the world.

Hema: This is, is really a time period that, it changed so much in the Caribbean in different parts of the world. And I pulled out another quote because there was so much in your book that I highlighted, "since 1492, the distinct cultures, people's and languages of four continents met in the Caribbean waters and intermingled in wave after wave of post-Colombian encounter". And you go on to reference both food and language

Candice: You know, I, I'm astounded by the extent to which the sea continues to play this role, of changing, I mean literally the waters of all of these continents, intermingling what is happening in one place eventually is going to have an impact somewhere else in the world. And, and it's really, when you think about it, the land is very fixed and relatively stable except in serious earthquakes, which the Caribbean has its share, but the waters are constantly in motion, are constantly churning and moving and drawing new elements and expelling elements. 

One of my favourite recent books is Sharika Crawford's book on the history of turtles and the, hunting of turtle meat, in the Caribbean, especially the Cayman Islands. And she shows how even this turtle population is a global population that moves tremendously all around the world.

And yet Cayman Islands in the Caribbean becomes a centrepiece for turtle hunting and, and the expertise that is needed to, to hunt and harvest these turtles. Turtle meat, then, takes over the world. Um, all of the elite tables, whether you are dining in East Asia or London, you want to eat turtle meat to the point that turtles become nearly extinct, at least threatened as, as populations and mock turtle soup becomes a popular substitution. Even in places where turtles once swam in, in the water. 

So there's this whole, sort of, ecology that is understood and the echo cultural networks that were created in this period of time have a real lasting impact on very distant places and times. 

Hema: You wrote your book, or the book was published in 2013?

Candice:  Yeah, yeah. 2014 by Rutledge. 

Hema: 2014. So I'm gonna leave a link down in the show notes to the book and some of some more information about you and your biography. 

But I wanna ask you, in that time, we've, we've been talking about how new things are being unearthed, historians, academics, archeologists are, are still doing the work, things are being uncovered.

In that time, since you wrote your book and now, are there any big discoveries, changes that you wanted to talk about?

Candice: Oh, there are just so many. Um, when I started researching Caribbean food there really wasn't a field of food studies that included much of Africa or the Caribbean. Um, despite what we've been talking about as the Caribbean being so critical to the story of globalization, nobody had really thought about the food. They took it for granted that that was Caribbean food and it was always there, and I think that the African component was underrepresented generally in food studies. Uh, if you look at some of the world histories of food, there was almost nothing about Africa. Africa was not thought to have cuisines at all, even at the beginning of the 21st century, there was very little that had been done. So yeah, there are so many great studies that of are coming out based on archeology, the history of cookbooks, the history of particular foods, like the pineapple, like the, the turtle, turtle soup and turtle meat. So much more, uh, is available now than when I was, I was originally writing this book.

Hema: And the, the book is such, I said this earlier, it's history, it's stories you're, you're telling so much in here that, that it does take a little bit of time to read and digest. And a couple of things that I wanted to point out is, you know, you talk a little bit about Anansi in, in the book, one of the things that came out of the book that I found fascinating was when you were talking about the salt production in the Caribbean by the Dutch, you reference that salt wasn't something that the enslaved Africans were used to, and this folklore came out of it, that consumption of salt inhibited their ability to fly back to Africa.

Candice: Salt is a great topic and it's one, I have one of my former students, Alyssa Sperry, has worked tremendously on salt, especially in Jamaica and the history of salt. 

If we look at the movement of Europeans around the globe, they almost always had an expert on salt making because salt was so important for the human diet and it was necessary. Any place that Europeans thought that they were gonna stay very long, they needed a, a source for making salt. Obviously, in the Caribbean there were a lot of places where salt could be manufactured and was, but as in other parts of the world, government controls over salt making led to the decline of artisanal salt making.

So in Jamaica, for example, there were lots of beliefs about salt, either to use it or not use it, to use it in certain rituals, situations, or not use it. But the government control over salt making led to the decline of local salt production, which it's likely came out of Indigenous cultures. And the recommendations of, and, and like sighting points of certain parts of the island for salt production was most likely a legacy of those Indigenous peoples giving way to African techniques of, of salt evaporation, solar evaporation and and whatnot. 

Um, but yeah, salt, salt is so important for the human diet in tropical areas, and was an important, the most important way of preserving a lot of foods, of course, during, during this era, including salted fish, saltfish, codfish, um, very important.

Hema: As I dig more and I hear more, when you talk about something like salt and you talk about how important the story is and the history of salt is, it's one little thing that we take for granted that we use every single day. But there's so much to learn about salt, right? And, and how it pertains to history.

It's not just something that's being produced and for our tables, but there's a whole history behind it, depending on where in the world you are.

Candice: I think, for me that's what makes the history of food so compelling as a, as a subject, because yeah, it's every day that we interact with food, it's part of the story of ordinary people, of women. Um, so important to human agency and survival, of course, but at the same time, it's so connected with these important stories about the operation of major states and the globalization of the world's economies, the increasing inequalities, in that are also a part of those stories come out on the dinner table around the world as well. 

Hema: Dr. Goucher, we've been talking for an hour and I could continue to have this conversation with you because there is so much to talk about, but we can't have hours and hours of conversation. Um, tell everybody again the name of your book and where they can find it.

Candice: Congotay! Congotay! A Global History of Caribbean Food is available still from the publisher, which is Rutledge, and I think you can order it online. Don't fall for those very expensive, rare editions that you might find on certain websites, but go to the publisher.

Hema: I will also leave a link to the book on the publisher's website so people can at least have a direct link to the book, and from there, figure out where they can they can purchase it because even though it was written quite some time ago, the information is so robust and so interesting that it's not just focused around food, but there's language, some folklore, culture.

It touches on so many different parts of, of the conversation that I have on this podcast that I was really excited to have you join us today to talk about all of these things and I do encourage people to seek out the book to learn more than we can talk about here today.

Candice: Thank you, Hema. It's, it's been a pleasure.

Hema: Thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time. 

[music]  Thanks for joining me for today's episode of The Moreish Podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating. It really does help in getting the podcast in front of more people. Follow on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube for videos and more, and I'll see you for the next episode. [music]