The Dietary Regimes of the Enslaved in the French Caribbean

The inability to create a stable and nutritionally adequate food supply capable, in the long-term, of maintaining colonial populations dominated by enslaved members points to fundamental contradictions in the institution of Caribbean plantation slavery itself, primarily contradictions between labor needs and land needs that resulted from profit-seeking colonial export-oriented agriculture. The precarious system of food provision that evolved over these centuries was rooted in two fundamental separate but deeply overlapping practices: first, the creation and expansion of provision grounds within and on the margins of plantation grounds to grow food crops locally; and second, the development of intercolonial and transatlantic trade networks that brought both foreign crops and foodstuffs to the Caribbean to meet the growing need for food that could not be met locally. The efforts made by the African and African-descended communities of the French Antilles to overcome the enormous deficiencies of this system and to influence its development are the foundations of the complex cuisines that exist today across the Caribbean.

The Code noir, the principal document that legislated the lives of enslaved laborers of African descent and their communities until the final abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1848, was promulgated in March 1685 nominally to protect enslaved communities from the worst abuses of planter neglect, although evidence of its enforcement is negligible. Eight of the code’s 60 articles deal with the provision, purchase and sale of food, and these articles perfectly encapsulate the intertwined nature of these two provisioning practices. Article 22 deals most explicitly with food, outlining the following weekly ration for adults: “two and a half pots, using local measures of volume, of manioc flour, or three cassavas weighing two and a half pounds each at least, or the equivalent, with two pounds of salt beef or three pounds of fish…”  In this passage, the reference to manioc and cassava points to the importance of local provision grounds and the reference to salt beef and (salt) fish to the long duration of and continuing need for Atlantic-wide trade networks that brought to the Caribbean the salted provisions that had originally featured in the dietary regimes of the mariners who manned the vessels in this age of sail.

The institution of plantation provision grounds grew out of the designation of land marginal to commodity production by plantation owners or overseers on one hand, and by the selective adaptation by the French of complex Amerindian subsistence systems based around manioc as a staple crop, on the other. In terms of provision grounds, the land set aside for provision cultivation could either be directly managed by the plantation owner (either dedicated plots, or in-between spaces such as road- and walkways as well as in rows embedded within the plots devoted to export agriculture), or was the nominal control of enslaved workers themselves, located either around their houses (jardins de case), or at a distance from their house and the lands supporting export crop cultivation (jardins particuliers.) In the second case, these worker-controlled provision grounds played an enormously significant role in the development of the dietary regimes of enslaved populations: the land around slave houses often supported the raising of small livestock such as chickens and pigs, and provision grounds could vary greatly in size, sometimes attaining extensive dimensions. Even more significant than the size of these gardens was the control over the crops that were cultivated; these gardens were a site where African-descended workers selected, according to availability, taste and needs, the variety of provisions that were grown.

The system through which enslaved workers were allotted these parcels and a day off in which to work them in exchange for planters relinquishing their obligation to provide them with food was known as the Brazilian system. This model of enslaved labor/food provision migrated northwards to the Caribbean from Brazil in the mid-seventeenth century along with experienced Dutch sugar planters fleeing the Portuguese colony after losing their struggle to control the north-eastern region of Recife in 1654. Although some French colonies, in particular Saint-Domingue (Haiti), supported entire plantations dedicated only to provision cultivation in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they were few in number compared to the growing colonial, and especially enslaved, consumption needs. As the colonial period advanced and the price of sugar and then coffee (the premier export crops) rose, the diversification of plantation agriculture to include non-export crops dwindled with the result that local cultivation of food crops was increasingly restricted to only the types of provision grounds described here.

In all kinds of provision grounds, enslaved laborers in French colonies quickly learned to cultivate and process the bitter variety of manioc (Manihot esculenta) that was most commonly consumed by indigenous Kalinago and Taino peoples across the Greater and Lesser Antilles. These gardens were the sites of tremendous agricultural diversification: other commonly cultivated crops that featured in the diets of enslaved communities were varieties of yam (Dioscorea trifida,) potato (Ipomoea batatas), peas (Phaseolus vulgaris or lunatus), malanga or chou caraïbe (Xanthosoma sagittifolium), taro (Colocasia esculenta), squashes and gourds (Curcurbita), chili peppers (Capiscum), maize (Zea mays), leafy greens such as callaloo (Xanthosoma brasiliense), and fruit trees such as papaya (Carica papaya) and guava (Psidium goyava), all of which are native to the Americas although many bear witness to long histories of hemispheric dispersal.

The origins of numerous other staples of French Caribbean provision ground cultivation, however, were transoceanic.  They arrived as the result of two broad overlapping patterns of movement: the first, the trans-Atlantic voyages that brought captive Africans to the French colonies in the Caribbean between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, which connected to the second, an expansive trans-imperial history of the deliberate circulation of food plants to feed enslaved populations that was global in nature. The list of crops cultivated and consumed by enslaved communities in the French Caribbean that had direct origins in Africa, Europe, Asia (or some combination of these) was extensive: bananas and plantains (Musa acuminata and balbisiana) were of primary importance, but the list also included Asian/African varieties of yam (D. alata), rice (Oryza glaberrima et sativa), and legumes such as pigeon peas (Cajunaus Cajan). Like many of these crops, the route of breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis), which arrived in the Caribbean at the end of the 18th century, was both circuitous and deeply embedded in the political economy of early modern empires. In many cases, the familiarity of African crop varieties ensured their rapid diffusion across the Caribbean when and where African-descended workers were able to select crops for provision grounds under their own control.

Despite the successful adaptation of manioc, French colonies rooted in slave labour could not incorporate the profoundly important hunting and fishing activities central to Kalinago and Taino subsistence to the degree necessary for nutritionally balanced diets. The result was ongoing crises of malnutrition and high mortality rates due to the lack of a stable and adequate protein source in the dietary regimes of enslaved communities. Nevertheless, certain indigenous practices, such as seine fishing, were indeed inherited, integrated into dietary practices and exist to this day throughout the circum-Caribbean, including in Guyana. There was also regional variation in the availability of meat: it was more obtainable in Saint-Domingue than smaller colonies like Martinique and Guadeloupe because of illicit trade with the Spanish in Santo Domingo, and its larger area supported more livestock raising. Salt beef produced in Ireland and North Atlantic salt fish, (the commodities to which the Code noir refers) were insufficient and often scarce substitutes for local meat and fish. Irish salt beef had featured in early naval diets and arrived via longstanding trade networks connecting Ireland to France and its Caribbean colonies; the salt fish was often a grade rejected from sale in Europe by the lucrative North Atlantic cod fishery. 

The diets of enslaved workers of African descent continued to be dominated by the multiplicity of crops that could be grown locally on plots of land located on the peripheries of export crop cultivation. In point of fact, these Afro-Caribbean provision grounds, known today as “creole gardens” and the object of multiple scientific studies, attest to the creativity and determination of enslaved workers to shape actively their subsistence practices to the greatest extent possible. The participation, although constrained by regulations contained in the Code noir, of African-descended colonial subjects in the local markets which existed in all the French colonies in the Caribbean had a number of considerable consequences in this regard: the proliferation of foodstuffs available to augment restricted diets; the increase in markets for the sale an increasingly wide range of foodstuffs of all kinds (vegetables, meats and grains); the possibility for enslaved colonial subjects to build savings, which was formally banned by the Code noir; and in so doing, breaking down the always precarious separation between the formal and informal colonial economies that took shape in plantation societies. All factors considered, contemporary French Caribbean cuisines, in all their complexity and sophistication, bear witness to these overlapping histories: histories of colonization, enslavement and dispersal, certainly, but also of creativity, innovation and survival.

Published in december 2024