The bitter taste of imperial legacy

Tóxcatl Massacre, from Códice Durán, circa 1521-30

The bitter taste of colonialism flavours many of the foods that we eat today. To better understand how our pantries are impacted, our course Food Cosmogonies Foundations’ 12th session, Food and Colonisation, explores the cultural histories and social impacts of colonialism.

At a basic level, colonialism can be understood as the seizure of territory from which to extract resources. The inhabitants of these territories, once under the colonial yoke, are forced to serve through labour, land, and tribute. Colonialism has been a common practice throughout human history, and has led to the rise of such recognisable empires as the Mongol, Aztec, Roman, Ottoman, or Chinese. These historic empires built their wealth on their colonies, the extracted riches of which were opulently flaunted. Each left with us unique legacies of their prosperity, whether real or imagined, through the tales and lore that trailed them. 

However, despite each of these empires’ impacts, their influence pales in comparison to the European colonial expansion that has swept the globe for the last 500 years. Early European colonialism was heavily influenced by these previous histories of contact, and the supposed wealth of these ancient empires and the territories they occupied fuelled European expansion to extract their resources. During this era, Europeans shaped colonialism anew. Instead of merely conquering and presiding over a territory, colonists now altered a territory’s cultural and economical landscapes to better form it around the colonisers' needs. 

One defining characteristic of colonialism is a demarcation between the colonised, and the coloniser. This is facilitated by the colonised being classified as inferior to their colonisers, often through enslavement, restriction, and subjugation. This practice has seen numerous iterations throughout history, the most resounding being racism. Racism ‘others’ one people from another by their heritable features—skin colour being a most recognisable example. This ‘othering’ of people reflects what scholar Abdul JanMohammed calls the Economy of Manichean Allegory, in which a discursive opposition between races is produced. Manichaeism is a dualist approach to cosmology, defined by the binary opposition of light and dark. Such opposition was key to constructing ideas of not only what non-Europeans ‘others’ were, but also what it meant to be European itself, from which these 'others' were distinguished.

Slaves Waiting for Sale by Eyre Crowe, 1861

The construction of race legitimised a hierarchy of classification, which, among other things, enabled the extraction of labour. This was upheld by the Christian tradition, which, despite its universalist belief that all humans are the children of God, tarnished non-Europeans—non-Christians or people of colour—as sinners who had incurred God’s wrath and needed to repent. Conversion offered non-Europeans an ascent, enshrining the European as aspirational, and further solidifying notions of racial superiority that helped uphold the colonial chokehold. Concurrent notions of ethnography further facilitated this, backing cultural ideas of racial superiority with pseudoscience.

Non-European labour was conscripted to help meet the demands of an increasingly avaricious European market. One example of this is the plantations of desirable crops in the Americas, that were laboured by enslaved Africans, displaced via the Middle Passage of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The goods grown on these plantations were then taken back to Europe as commodities. Colonialism enabled an unbalanced flow of goods and wealth that helped keep colonised territories under the empirical yoke, laying the foundations of capitalism upon which our societies are now built.

Tile painting depicting chocolate making in Spain in the 1700s

This colonial legacy is writ large on our menus. Though we might not know it, a plethora of our foods have come to us through colonialism, including potatoes, cane sugar, tomatoes, chillies, peppers, pumpkin, squash, tea, coffee, and chocolate—to name but a few. Fraught with histories of enslavement, extraction, and erasure; these foods have travelled far to get to our plates, and, should one ruminate on them long enough, will elicit an unpleasantly imperial aftertaste. Many of these foods have been masked by European tastes, and assimilated beyond recognition into our daily diets. A leading example of this is chocolate. Refined and sweetened into the brown cubes we know and love, from dark Belgian delicacies to milky Swiss bars, its European iterations are universally enjoyed. However, these sweet flavours belie their bitter roots.

Chocolate is made from cacao, a seed from the pods of a tree native to Mesoamerica. ‘Cacao’ is the Spanish corruption of a word from the Aztec language of Nahuatl: cacaua, root form of cacahuatl: ‘bean of the cacao-tree.’ The word ‘chocolate’ first appeared in Mexican Spanish around the 17th century, from the Nahuatl chocola-tl. Whereas chocolate was prepared by the Aztecs with cold water, the Spanish used warm water. As -tl means ‘water,’ and chocol is Mayan for ‘hot,’ it has been suggested this is whence our contemporary ‘chocolate’ derivates. 

Among the peoples of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, chocolate was a luxury of the ruling classes. Cacao beans were used as currency, and their consumption was reserved for the elite. The cacao plant is agriculturally limited to the deep fertile alluvial soils of river valleys, requiring 90% shade, around 177 cm of annual rainfall, and a high average temperature. These regions were thus coveted for their cacao production, and wars were fought to secure the ideal growing territories; the conquered communities of which supplied tribute in the form of cacao.

With the Spanish conquest, epidemic, imperial, and cultural devastation was wrought on the peoples of Mesoamerica. Within three decades of their arrival, the Spanish had gained control over vast tracts, including most of the important cacao growing regions. The Spanish extorted tax from the Indigenous in the form of cacao, which was then exported to the European market. For a century or so, cacao remained under Spanish monopoly, but as a taste for it spread, so did its distribution. Around 1820, Dutch chemist Coenraad Johannes van Houten discovered that treating cacao with alkaline salts reduced its bitterness, and The Netherlands became the first major producer of chocolate. This innovation was followed by the Swiss addition of milk, eponymously linking chocolate to Switzerland. Without its bitterness chocolate could be enjoyed by all, and its popularity soured.

Open any given larger, and there is likely to be a bar of chocolate, or a tin of cocoa. The food is so ubiquitous that its origins have become obfuscated. Like chocolate, many of the products in our pantries are the produce of colonial pasts. In their commodification, these foods have been processed beyond recognition, yet their histories should not be masked and instead acknowledged and understood as part of food’s cultural and culinary heritage. For no matter how much we sweeten cacao’s astringency with milk and sugar, chocolate will still bear the bitter taste of its imperial legacy.

You can learn more by joining our Alternative MA or our Food Cosmogonies course.

A chocolate house in London, circa 1708