Slave Diets

I attended a lecture in the UA Poetry Center presented by Dr. Jerome Dotson (an instructor in Africana Studies) on October 8th. The speaker, who obtained an MA in African American Studies and a PhD in History, presented information on the diets of slaves, and specifically within that, the connotation of pork in their meals. Dr. Dotson introduced the topic with a video of Kunta Kinte’s visual explanation of the meaning of food in a slave’s life. The video highlighted what slaves ate, which consisted of grits, roughly ground corn, and pork. Kinte’s video also presented yet another tragedy behind slavery—the nature of chronic underfeeding and hunger. The slaves worked for long hours, and in return often received only one meal a day. The video

In the Antebellum US in the 19th and 20th centuries, pork dominated the plates of those eating and remained the most common meat in the region dubbing the south a “hog-eating confederacy”; through this hog meat ingestion, class, race, and gender were analyzed. Information such as what types and cuts of pork, the quantity consumed on a regular basis, and how ways eaten generated a distinct southern class structure; the diet of these people reflected the variety of social distinctions within the culture. For instance, white southern planters owned dozens to hundreds of slaves, and they consumed fresh pork (a luxury for a lot of southerners in the Antebellum region). Commonly they fed on hams, pork terrines, multiple cuts of pork, and different iterations in the same meal, and this reflected their position at the top of the social southern

A lack of resources to other healthier types of meat or nutrition created a higher pork intake. However the cuts had significantly higher bone and fat content than other social classes. Looking at the health of the slaves provided proof of this; they had diseases of the lungs caused by malnutrition, such as “Negro Consumption”, and their lifestyle forced rationing. At this point, Dr. Jerome explained that owners weighed out slaves’ food for the week. They were forced to eat the food given, because they could not receive extra. Consequently, what slaves consumed reinforced slave’s inferior status and created divisions within the slave community. Furthermore, eating specific foods added meaning to those foods and the slaves. Specific slaves worked in the Master’s house, ate the same food as the Master and family, creating an automatic higher rank in the social hierarchy due to what they consumed. Trained partially through their dietary restrictions, slaves began to view themselves as different groups of people. The regulation of pork consumption allowed owners to have control, which acted as a marker of race and