Gluttony, excess, and the fall of the planter class in the British Caribbean

Food and rituals around eating are a fundamental part of human existence. They can also be heavily politicized and socially significant. In the British Caribbean, white slaveholders were renowned for their hospitality towards one another and towards white visitors. This was no simple quirk of local character. Hospitality and sociability played a crucial role in binding the white minority together. This solidarity helped a small number of whites to dominate and control the enslaved majority. By the end of the eighteenth century, British metropolitan observers had an entrenched opinion of Caribbean whites as gluttons. Travelers reported on the sumptuous meals and excessive drinking of the planter class. Abolitionists associated these features of local society with the corrupting influences of slavery. Excessive consumption and lack of self-control were seen as symptoms of white creole failure. This article explores how local cuisine and white creole eating rituals developed as part of slave societies and examines the ways in which ideas about hospitality and gluttony fed into the debates over slavery that led to the dismantling of slavery and the fall of the planter class

Public perception of a range of potential food risks in the United Kingdom

This study aimed to use a standard questionnaire to obtain a nationally representative sample of opinions on a range of potential food risks. Participants were a national sample of 1182 subjects selected using three different approaches: random and sentinel postal samples and a telephone survey. A modified psychometric questionnaire (the Perceived Food Risk Index) was administered to subjects on three occasions, spanning five time-points. Baseline data collection was undertaken from October to December 1998 (phase 1). The second wave of data collection was undertaken over three time-points in February, April and July 1999 (one-third of respondents to phase 1 at each time-point – data combined as phase 2), and the final phase of data collection was between October and December 1999 (phase 3). Principal components analysis was used to assess the intercorrelations between the items on the questionnaire. Two main components were identified as ‘dread’ and ‘knowledge’. Saturated fats were perceived as the least dreaded and the most known of the potential risks considered, while bovine spongiform encephalopathy and Salmonella were the risks dreaded the most. There was a slight perception that the potential risks had become more known over the year, especially for growth hormones. This study has raised a number of important issues for risk communicators. Despite current policy aimed at reducing fat intake, this will be difficult to achieve at a population level since people are not worried about its impact, yet food safety continues to be a significant concern to the public

Journal of a lady of quality; being the narrative of a journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the years 1774 to 1776.

"The manuscript from which the present text is printed is known as Egerton 2423, and is...in the British museum."--p. [1]"Published from the income of the Frederick John Kingsbury memorial fund in conjunction with the North Carolina society of the colonial dames of America."Maps on lining-papers.Mode of access: Internet

Et in Arcadia ego: West Indian planters in glory, 1674–1784

The decline of West Indian planters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was both remarkable and, to an extent, inexplicable outside the context of a determined abolitionist onslaught against them. During the eighteenth century, planters in the biggest and most important West Indian colony, Jamaica, created a highly profitable plantation economy in which annual returns on investment were satisfactorily high, debt levels manageable, and productivity rapidly improving. Jamaica on the eve of the American Revolution was one of the wealthiest places in the world. Planters were justified in thinking the future for their colony, for slavery, and for the plantation system was rosy in both the short and long term. © 2012 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC