Food, Gender and Cultural Hegemony - Kennesaw State University

Cualli 133
Spaniards was imperative" Foster argues that colonial culture was "blocked out" and
became "crystallized" (Foster 232-233). 1
This analysis is also pertinent to the incorporation of indigenous cuisine into
the Spanish creole culture, and of Spanish foods into the indigenous diet. According to
Richard N. Adams, "The major change in the diet of Meso-America…is not a result of
a gradual diffusion of European products into the older Meso-American system, but of
a gradual and differential shift of the entire culture to a new tradition," (Adams 8). If
some easily accepted food ways were transferred quickly in those first decades (i.e.
chickens into indigenous culture; turkeys and tomatoes into Spanish culture), other
foods less similar to that of the recipient culture took longer to be accepted.
II. Spain and Mexico: pre-contact period
Food is an important aspect of culture, though it is also unavoidably connected
with climate and place. As Daniel Roche wrote, [eating practice] "is perhaps the
domain in which needs, symbolic forms and class oppositions intersect with the
greatest intensity," (Roche 22). In the early modern period biology (and nutrition) was
seen as intimately related to the capacity for civilized behavior. The common Spanish
idea of blood as a vehicle initially of religious faith and later as a mark of social
condition is probably related to medieval physiological theory according to which the
mother's blood fed the child in the womb and then, transformed into milk, fed the baby
outside the womb as well. A child's substance was provided by the mother's blood.
Hence purity of blood meant descent from Christian women (Bynum 182). The origin
of the idea of "clean blood" dates from the emergence of the issue of religious purity
in the fifteenth century (Kamen 321-56). That was gradually transformed into the
principle of race. Consistent with these views was the belief that certain foods were
appropriate and necessary for Christians and for a civilized life. Roche points out that
"Religious metaphors and the terminology of the Gospels conveyed this cosmic
symbolism: fishing, harvesting, the wine-harvest, the bread and wine of the Lord,"
(Roche 247). Culinary customs related to Christianity were even imposed on the
natives believing that this would allow them to reach salvation (Parasecoli in Kumin
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