Food, Gender and Cultural Hegemony - Kennesaw State University

Cualli 131
many foods. Before corn became the basis for the common meal and the tortilla it was
already the basis for chicha (the sacred maize beer in the Chavin culture). Corn was
also a crop that required intensive labor, both in cultivation and in processing.
Women were intimately associated with the enormous labor of grinding the corn and
producing tortillas and tamales. A good housewife was defined as a woman who fed
her family well. Newborn girls were told at birth: “Thou wilt become fatigued, thou
wilt become tired; thou art to provide water, to grind maize, to drudge,” (Sahagun
6:172; 10:12). Another indication of the high symbolic importance of maize is that
corn ears are often found in burial mounds (Hastorf and Johannessen 427-443; Coe 9;
Soustelle 145).
Bread made from wheat had a similar level of cultural salience in Europe.
Bread and wheat also had that dimension of versatility or ambiguity that came to
signify sufficiency or prosperity. It stood for the idea of the just price and its
availability was seen as a basis for the moral economy (Magagna 66). Europeans
expected that bread would be available for a good diet, even that it should be an
entitlement, and if it was not made available by those responsible for the bread supply,
there could be protests and even food riots. Also, similar to corn, bread was the basis
of sacred power. After the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the official doctrine of
transubstantiation determined that during the Latin Mass “the substance of the bread is
transformed into the actual body of Christ,” (Albala 2). For Victor Magagna this
cultural dimension was intimately related to the fact that wheat was a cereal-based
food culture ubiquitous in Europe that also required milling and processing. This
labor dimension then gave the producing household substantial rights in the chain of
food production and distribution. The government was seen as responsible to fulfill
the moral (indeed sacred) obligation to provide the people with bread.
Jack Goody emphasizes the relationship of food and cooking to “the
distribution of power and authority in the economic sphere, that is, to the system of
class or stratification and to its political ramifications,” (Goody 37). This idea brings
us to the relationship of food to power for the societies involved in the conquest. The
Spanish crown was intensely aware of its moral obligation to provision the Spanish
colonists in the New World. This was extremely obvious in the early years when
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