Lee Johnson 2025 Mixing Memory & Desire: How History Shaped the Foods of the Caribbean. Kingston, Jamaica & Miami, Florida: Ian Randle Publishers. xxi + 334 pp 6″x 9″, illustrations by Lee Johnson. Foreword by Bridget Brereton. ISBN 978-976-8339-56-0 (pbk).
Antonio Lauria-Perricelli (NYU Gallatin School, Retired. Independent Scholar)
This is an excellent book about a very daunting topic. It succeeds in presenting the social history and the food of the British Caribbean in a single relatively short book. Johnson presents a discussion of the indigenous peoples and the complete catalogue of folk who constituted the various labor forces for the planters and merchants of European derivation who controlled the land base in the Caribbean. Thus he writes about the entire list of in-migrants, either exploiters or exploited, that came to populate the Caribbean: English, Jews (Sephardic, Spanish converso, Askenhazi), Irish, West African, French (Revolutionary, Royalist, Republican, Bonapartist, Statist), Madeirans, Cantonese Haaka, Northern Indians & Pakistanis, Syrio-Lebanese, Portuguese, Spanish from different regions, North American (U.S.A. and Canada), all atop the Taino and Kalinago indigenes. Even more staggering is the full variety of foodstuffs and food preparation techniques which taken together constitute the many local cuisines of the region. As Bridget Brereton tells us in her Foreword, there is great erudition in this book. The bibliographic sources this author controls are enormous, covering both the classics of Caribbean Studies and the most up-to-date works of the last quarter century.
Johnson’s thesis is simple enough: the social history of the region is built upon the production of export crops (principally sugar, coffee, cacao, cotton) for British and other European marketplaces; the food items are cooked, elaborated, and developed by the cooks – mostly women – of the exploited masses of laboring folk in the region: these include conquered indigenes, indentured White Europeans and Asians from China and Northern India, African chattel slaves, contract laborers, and waged workers from all these places, as well as the inter-island movement of both proletarians and skilled waged laborers seeking new jobs and better work conditions. The profit-seeking sugar-exporting planter-merchant bloc is built upon conquest and African slavery. After the Emancipation process implanted by the imperial center, the area and its cuisine are immensely diversified by the successive waves of new immigrants brought into the region to fulfill the demand for laborers within the breadth of a world-dominating British Empire. With it comes enormous diversity of both ethnic groups and food items among the poor and exploited.
This main thesis is clearly laid out in his Introduction:
“This melting-pot of food styles differed substantially from the culinary cultures of either the settled European colonizers or the newly arriving immigrants in one significant way: it was the food of the poor. In most cultures, cuisine is a manifestation of the rich/poor divide. Food has traditionally been a marker of social class and social differentiation. Indeed, up until the end of the nineteenth century, the foods eaten by the upper classes in Europe had more in common with each other, regardless of nationality, than they had with the food of the working classes or peasants in their own countries. This was also the reality among the plantocracy in the Caribbean. The planters were certainly familiar with and might have sampled the food of their enslaved workers, but the food they ate was not the same. However, this general global norm – that food culture either originates with the rich and filters down in a compromised version to the poor, or is radically different from what the poor eat – was not the Caribbean norm. As we shall show, the reverse happened. This food was created amid poverty and deprivation; it was a cuisine of resistance and fortitude and making-do. And its diffusion, and eventual acceptance by all strata of society, went upward from the poor to become the food of everyone, including the rich. The haute cuisines of the Caribbean lie in the pepper-pots of its humblest dwellers” (xv-xvi).
Elsewhere he has told us that this food was contrived in a plantation culture in which it was easier and cheaper to ‘burn slaves’ and import new ones so that the food cooked by the enslaved was a way to
“create a community and a culture through shared meals. The food that emerged, despite the hostility of their environment, was rooted in memory, in nostalgia, and in the need to preserve identity. It combined the familiar – the traditions and produce of home even as it appropriated the unfamiliar: the peppers, spices, and crops that were already there. The enslavers may have sought to erase this culture; the food helped maintain it” (xiv-xvi).
This cuisine, developed in a practice of maintenance, resistance and struggle, becomes the cuisine which marks the entire area – and it is the product of an intricate, convoluted, and sometimes contradictory process of creolization dominated by the working masses, not by their masters. The cuisine itself is part of a very localized identity-process, so that the food is felt and sensed and named in the very making of the immediate locality itself (i.e. of Barbados or Jamaica or St. Kitts, for instance).
Johnson also documents the price paid by the peoples of the Caribbean who must live within these conditions: the death-ships that brought each of the laboring contingents; the very high rates of diabetes and hypertension disorders; the plague of mosquitos conveying the spread of infectious diseases; the deforestation of the lands, with its destruction of the local pest-resistant hardwoods. One might add the enormous changes in the hydrology of these territories: irrigation and drainage for the sugar canes, rice paddies and fields, and the attendant water-borne diseases denounced in all of the imperio-linguistic areas by public-health reports and surveys.
Johnson does all this in 24 chapters, each named after a specific dish or foodway; these chapters are often emblematic of one or another immigrant ethnicity. There is also a set of appendices: “The Pathways of Food and Produce” which contains a very valuable listing of the crops grown in the West Indies for both the export ladder and the local cooking; a glossary; and a full bibliography of references cited in the book.
As an anthropologist, I would have liked greater attention to the social underpinnings of the cultural forms he shows us: to the many social forms within the various territories with their social relations and social networks, and to the ongoing inter-island links of schooners, steamers, barges and canoes. But I know that this would have required another book, as would a book that embraced the full variety of the many inter-imperial/inter-lingual shufflings of Caribbean lands. The author has wisely restricted this tome to the Anglophone British territories which he knows best, so his book treats the biggest and best documented places (especially Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Guiana) in greater detail than others.
This book, the very well-written work that Johnson has given us, is often as surprising in many of its details as it is erudite. Even old Caribbean hands can learn from it. It is indeed a gift, and this author, his advisors, associates and colleagues, as well as his publisher, merit our praise and our pleasure.