Had a conversation with my mother while she was cooking oxtail, about how it was $100 for a single pack since it’s a luxury. I go “Crazy how it’s a luxury now, you know the history right?”
She just nods. “Tough meat that white people didn’t have the patience or know-how to properly cook down.”
That made me think, back then. My ancestors probably didn’t have much free time, and slave masters weren’t that concerned with our health and wellbeing, even if it lead to us working harder for them. So a lot of our cooking culture revolved around shit we could find in the soil or leave slow roasting over the day or even overnight until we were able to come back to it.
The oxtail in particular. The toughest, least flavorful part of the animal that they threw at us like trash because they felt wasting it was a sin (But owning humans wasn’t 🤔)
Did slave masters behave like class A school bullies everytime slaves tried to arrange a proper meal for themselves or did they just not care?
Did they provide food for “Better performance” or “Upkeep”? Did they copy or learn from it? Did they force us to eat a certain way for our sake or theirs? What kind of jobs could I have gotten that revolved around feeding/maintaining slaves if I were born white and educated back then?
I’m asking for all of the Americas. United States, the Caribbean, etc.
But If you’d like, feel free to delve into other instances of slavery. Like Roman slavery, Slavs, South Africa, Vikings, etc. in fact I feel there’s more records on those than this.
Comments
Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.
Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.
We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to the Weekly Roundup and RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension. In the meantime our Bluesky, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
So… it varies by region, by time and even from one place to another. In many places it made sense for slaveholders to allow enslaved people time each day and a little bit of land to grow their own food, as well as to raise chickens or pigs, for example, to supplement whatever food was provided by the slave holder.
We have good records from Mount Vernon, for example, where we know that Washington provided enslaved people with 1 quart of cornmeal and 5 to 8 ounces salted fish (usually shad or herring) daily— and that was it. That said, enslaved people hunted and trapped – some of them even seem to have had access to guns – so the supplement of their diets with wild game, as well as foraging for wild plants, and they also had time to garden and were able to keep animals – they sold some of the surplus at markets in Alexandria, such as melons, honey, and chicken. Washington himself, interestingly, appears to have paid his enslaved people cash for any game birds they brought in.
https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/food
Some studies, however, have discovered that even when overall nutrition was provided, it wasn’t provided equitably among the enslaved people.
“…there are some reports that suggest that slaves were generally well fed to ensure high levels of productivity on plantations. Other reports suggest there were differences in the nutrition of slaves based on their status. Slaves who worked in the fields or otherwise had a heavy workload were fed a little more, while slaves who did not have the heaviest workload, like women and children, were not as well fed. As a result, malnutrition was the leading cause of death for babies and children of slaves.”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/820455/summary
Once we get to the 19th century and to the cotton south, however, where land is at an absolute premium and every inch is planted, you see enslaved people far more dependent on what slave owners provided, which was generally a nutritious but monotonous diet. This dissertation makes the point that there was a tradition among Southern whites of the “laden table,” and that the parts of the vegetables/animals that the slaveholders didn’t want to present on their table were usually left for the enslaved people, so organ meats, oxtails, and the rest.
(This dissertation is all on foodways and some of the culture surrounding them, including stories):
https://asset.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/HYODMZYTBBTK48T/R/file-8aeae.pdf
However, and despite their value on the market, children continued to be brutally shortchanged when it came to nutrition, with some guesses of infant mortality ranging as high is 50% in the first year alone.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-history/article/abs/dreadful-childhood-the-excess-mortality-of-american-slaves/9939921054619619B002248A64D4E3B2
[removed]