Imperial Recipes · Food in the Spanish and British Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century: Encounters, Exchanges, Identities

Food in the Spanish and British Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century: Encounters, Exchanges, Identities

Imperial Recipes research concern the discourse on food in the British and Spanish colonies of the nineteenth century. More specifically, it deals with how food was employed to build one or more colonizers identity and how the encounters of different food cultures interacted to develop and imperial ideology that acted through food, too. Besides being a topic only relevant for historians, the subject of food and the related negotiations, appropriations, rejections and interactions of various food cultures and practices could also have an interest in our contemporary Europe and its relations with the global world and the present phenomenon of increased and constant migrations. The demographic changes subsequent to extra-European migrations seem to favor an increased sense of insecurity, a strenghten debate on how to define a European identity but also a discussion on the permeability of the European border. Even if history cannot completely solve the present dispute, this analysis on how the discourse on food was employed in the colonies, areas in which the encounters with diversity were the norm, present a useful cause of reflection, and has been one of the main objectives of this research, on the many migrants' communities that live nowadays in Europe.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union