Introduction: Colonial culinary encounters and imperial leftovers

Empire on a plate

The invitation by Burkina Faso’s late President Thomas Sankara to look closely at the content of our plates is a powerful reminder that the purchase, preparation and consumption of food may be banal acts, but eating is by no means a neutral, conflict-free practice. Food becomes us and we cannot function without it. Furthermore, alimentation and cuisine, the work of eating and the work of feeding, anchor us in deep, inescapable and contradictory ways to our families, our societies, our (agri)cultures, our food systems and the hegemonies that produce them. As President Sankara suggests, not only are global and local issues articulated on our plates, this is also where economic exploitation and power relationships become tangible. In addition, the plate is the last step before the incorporation of food, a pleasurable and perilous process that ‘simultaneously constitutes and breaches identity’ (Cruickshank, 2014: 367), thus suggesting that imperialism shapes not only tastes but also bodies. This said, President Sankara’s forceful and seductively straightforward declaration may be an overstatement. Pierre Barrot, who cites the late Burkinabe president, cautions us that in contemporary urban West Africa the ubiquitous soft wheat baguettes and rice introduced by French colonisation sit alongside Lebanese shawarma (a Levantine food popularised throughout the former Ottoman empire and introduced by the Lebanese diaspora), specialties from neighbouring African countries, such as Cameroonian foufou (cassava flour) or Ivorian alloco (fried plantain) (1994: 26), and traditional dishes.

Imperial domination constitutes only one of many ingredients on our plates. Furthermore, its inner workings, agents, intermediaries, beneficiaries and consequences have become harder to identify and more muddled, due to political decolonisations, the internationalisation of food chains from farms to fork, and culinary hybridisation. Yet as Jean-Pierre Poulain and Laurence Tibère suggest, foodways provide a useful tool to study how cultural exchanges and domination continue to be negotiated, between (partial) adoption, adaptation, creolisation, opposition and revulsion (2000: 238), for empires, as agents of globalisation, brought forth various degrees and types of culinary métissage.

Although globalization is an old, multi-centred, regional phenomenon, it expanded to an unprecedented scale and level of complexity with the Columbian exchange and the push for industrialisation. ‘Securing greater access to food was a driving force behind colonial expansion and imperial power’ (Nütznadel and Trentmann, 2008: 1), so in ‘the course of the nineteenth century, exports of crops from the southern hemisphere to Europe increased rapidly’ (2008: 5). This new phase of globalisation inaugurated a period of lasting overall abundance in Europe and North America, while hunger and undernourishment persisted in dominated regions of the world. It also came with ‘the development of a core set of racially shaped beliefs that linked food, progress, and empire’ (Guy, 2012: 186).

Against this wider historical backdrop, this special issue of French Cultural Studies focuses on the understudied relationships between ‘Food and the French Empire’. It gathers ten articles that explore the production, trade, processing, ingestion and representation of specific crops, foodstuffs and cuisines and what they teach us about the establishment, maintenance, limitations and legacies of French colonisation. ¹ Using multidisciplinary approaches, these texts focus on various geographical locales in France and its former empire from the early empire to post-immigration.

The ‘social life’ of Banania

The biography of Banania, the popular chocolate drink mix created in France in 1915, provides a useful vignette to capture the complexity of the issues surrounding colonial leftovers. Tracing the ‘social life’ of this brand, its various forms, trajectory and uses, ‘illuminate[s] its human and social context’ (Appadurai, 1986: 5). A breakfast mainstay that shaped the tastes of generations of French children and remains a lasting source of gustatory nostalgia for French adult consumers, the brand used to carry the image of a smiling African colonial infantry soldier, a tirailleur sénégalais. Its well-known racist slogan, ‘y’a bon Banania’ as if spoken in pidgin French by the African soldier, dates from the First World War when colonial troops played an instrumental role in securing victory. The phrase conflates the taste of childhood with the alleged cultural inferiority of the colonised soldier, whose smiling face conveys innocent benevolence. Marketing campaigns for the energising drink successfully welded cocoa, cereals and bananas – the ‘first (and still the biggest) globally-traded fresh fruit commodity’ (Freidberg, 2010: 260) – with the metaphoric vigour of the French empire and the sacrifice of its West African soldiers in the service of the nation’s grandeur. Banania was presented as a concoction that fostered patriotic sentiment through imperial expansion and ingestion.

Likewise, Sandrine Lemaire (2004) shows how private interests promoted by the colonial lobby colluded with national interests defended by state agencies to shape the tastes of French consumers for colonial foodstuffs. Using innovative advertising campaigns, they encouraged French eaters to ‘eat colonial’ and strove to turn a remote empire into a familiar, nurturing presence. However, these attempts to create a French appetite for overseas foods did not always succeed. As Lauren Janes (2013) demonstrates, the colonial lobby’s efforts to encourage the consumption of Indochinese rice by marketing rice-flour bread failed, thus showing the limits of the imperial enterprise and rhetoric of integration. In the case of Banania, both the slogan and the figure of the soldier remained part of the French culinary ‘colonial unconscious’ (Ezra, 2000). Promotional objects produced by Banania have now become collectibles, ² and the brand cleverly taps into this sense of nostalgia to appeal to the parents of young consumers. ³

Banania’s popularity has endured despite the fact that the brand changed hands several times in the twentieth century, following the movements of international capital, as French imperialism was subsumed in larger global systems. Acquired by Clin-Mindy, a French group, in 1967, Banania dropped the slogan and the image of the tirailleur. Bought by the American Bestfoods in the 1980s and then acquired by the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate Unilever, its sales dwindled and were passed by competitors Poulain (Cadbury) and Nesquik (Nestlé). In 2003, the brand was sold to French conglomerate, Nutrial. Nutrimaine, the company that owns Banania, revived the image of the African colonial soldier, part of the brand’s ‘historical capital’, under the guise of his fictional grandson: a young, hip character, wearing shorts, the same fez and short waistcoat in the national blue and red (Lecluse, 2004; Jullien, 2009; Achille, 2013). The young character and his two white friends engage in adventures featured on the back of the containers, while the old tirailleur reappears only sporadically on a few ‘traditional’ products. Critiques of this marketing reincarnation have pointed to the child’s enlarged lips and wide eyes, a perpetuation of the racialised depiction and exaggerated features of his ancestor (Mbouguen, 2005). In 2006, Nutrimaine was sued by the Collectif des Antillais, Guyannais, Réunionnais (Collectifdom) to stop using both the racist slogan ‘Y’a bon’ and the image of the tirailleur. A settlement was reached and Nutrimaine agreed to withdraw the slogan, even though it had not been used since the 1970s. Another trial in 2011 reaffirmed the court’s decision after products featuring the slogan were found in stores not licensed by Nutrimaine. Like the old boxes of chocolate powder, Banania’s racist legacy has continued to circulate well after ‘geographical decolonization’, as several scholars in French and Francophone studies have shown (Achille, 2013: 213; Donadey, 2000; Rosello, 1998). A 2008 court dispute between Nutrimaine and Milan Music Edition over a CD entitled ‘Au beau temps des colonies’, featuring Banania’s tirailleur, confirmed that the image is no longer Nutrimaine’s property but belongs to the public commons (Michel, 2014).

Recent developments corroborate this, with a twist. Well after Martinican revolutionary Frantz Fanon and Senegalese poet Leopold Sedar Senghor first used the image and name of Banania to denounce discrimination and racism in France, anti-colonial activists have continued to use this icon in their combat (Achille, 2013: 209). Since 2009, Sortir du colonialisme, originally an umbrella organisation for various militant associations, has featured a spoof of its slogan, ‘Y’a bon colonisation’, and visual parodies of Banania on posters advertising its annual ‘Semaine anti-coloniale’, a series of cultural events and conferences critiquing past and present imperialist appetites around the world. ⁴ In February 2013, the association organised a ‘colonial tour’ of little-known Parisian lieux de mémoire connected to the slave trade under the aegis of Louis-George Tin, president of the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires (CRAN). A poster featuring Banania was the rallying banner for the event and hot Banania was served in tongue-in-cheek fashion (Béguin, 2013). In November 2013, following a spate of racist insults, French-Caribbean politician and Justice Minister, Christiane Taubira, was depicted as the face of Banania on the Facebook page of a local right-wing UMP politician, who was later suspended (Haufman, 2013). These examples show how food branding can serve as a common visual idiom to both condemn and recirculate imperial racist legacies. In the meantime, Nutrimaine strives to reinvent the brand and regain market share: in 2006 it adopted a new slogan, ‘C’est tout bon’, and recently the lips of young Banania, no longer bright red, have been thinned. This marketing strategy aimed at making the brand more palatable and fit for ethical consumption corresponds with new opportunities: the brand is now providing the chocolate beverages sold by McDonald’s in France and is expanding its exports in the Netherlands, Morocco and Algeria (Latinovic, 2014). Through this business partnership with McDonald’s and the pursuit of new market shares, the lingering taste of the former colonial empire feeds into a new type of transnational domination, that of the fast-food industry.

What are (post)colonial food studies?

The biography of Banania as an edible icon of colonisation demonstrates that ‘by focusing on crops and cuisines, one can uncover some of the dynamics of the colonial phase of globalization’ (Gupta, 2012: 42), as well as the global structures of political and economic control that govern the flow of commodities. This special issue contributes to the dialogue between studies of empire and food studies, two expanding and relatively recent fields of scholarly enquiry, by reassessing the understudied and critical role of food and foodstuffs in the ‘long history of globalization’ (2012: 30). In a recent article on the ‘“colonial” in French Studies’, historian Emmanuelle Saâda suggests that understanding ‘the long-term legacy of colonization’ is a central issue that requires the development of an ‘objectified history’, a term she defines by citing sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as ‘history that has crystallised over time in things, machinery, buildings, monuments, books, theories, customs, laws, etc.’ (2014: 37).

Food and foodways are a crucial addition to this list of elements of material culture in which imperial histories have ‘crystallised’. Constructing a history of food practices requires including different sources such as cookbooks and commercials. Additionally, scholars need to read materials differently, looking for and putting together titbits about food and consumption, particularly when looking into the foodways of dominated and marginalised groups. However, as Gupta suggests, ‘food preparation and consumption as the most intimate, everyday household activity, is a wonderful metric for the “depth” of globalization’ (2012: 35–6), which measures the power of empires as ‘assertive shapers of production, communication and culture in the world’, as well as indicating their limitations (Burbank and Cooper, 2012: 240).

Although previous works, mostly in anthropology and sociology, have included discussions of food, ‘food was an instrument for the study of other things’, as historical anthropologist Sidney Mintz puts it (1996: 3). Food studies, on the other hand, focuses on the food itself; it is a largely multidisciplinary field ‘concerned with the social and cultural aspects of food, from production through consumption’ (Deutsch and Miller, 2007: 7). Indeed, in his ground-breaking work (1985), Mintz showed that sugar production fuelled momentous global upheavals, from the establishment of slavery in the Caribbean to the reconfiguration of the rhythms of daily life for the British proletariat. In this respect, as Erica Peters suggests, ‘colonial food studies’ is a young field that allows for approaches that ‘acknowledge but also transcend the specificities of national imperial histories’ (2010: 279). The notion of empire can therefore be understood as ‘a traditional colonial empire as well as the broader theme of differential development and the consequent relation between the center of the industrial world and its periphery’ (Freedman, 2010: 215). As Susan Friedberg understands it in her history of the colonial roots of fresh food, empire encompasses ‘formal colonial occupation’ as well as ‘informal’ domination wielded by instruments such as ‘finance, commercial treaties and often the implicit threat of military force’ (2010: 260). More broadly, when Rachel Laudan writes about cuisine and empire in her wide-ranging work of global food history (2013), she refers to the diffusion of whole culinary systems by the most powerful political entities, as well as through conversions and migrations, for cuisines also travel across imperial boundaries (2013: 5). By studying food and empire together, insights are gained into the articulations of the global, the national and the local, as well as into the materialisations of power relationships in daily food consumption habits (Mintz, 1996: 17–32). Eating, indeed, brings about commensality and exchanges, but it also contributes to the intimate construction of social and racial stratifications, ethnic delineations, gender differences, religious identities and national distinctions.

The empire of French food: gastronomy as culinary civilising mission

In Accounting for Taste, sociologist Priscilla Ferguson traces the birth of gastronomie in France to the early nineteenth century. ‘Taken as the systematic, socially valorised pursuit of culinary creativity’ and defined as a ‘given practice of consumption’ (2004: 84), this is a normative discourse on how, what, where and with whom to eat, which participates in the ‘civilizing of appetite’ (Mennel, 1996: 39). A phenomenon set in motion by political regime change in 1789, economic prosperity, relative political stability and the democratisation of culinary culture, the emergence of the category of gastronomy also relied, Ferguson suggests, on ‘a secular culinary tradition’ (2004: 85, 89). This ‘conceptual autonomy presupposed the consideration of food for its own sake and the subordination of religious, symbolic or medical concerns to the gustatory’ (2004: 89). Ferguson credits the writings of French chefs and gastronomes with the textualisation of the culinary. Through print capitalism (Anderson, 1991), they established a discourse that went beyond cooking and eating and reached social and political dimensions. In this respect, gastronomy was a discourse of conquest. The work of Rebecca Spang (2000) and Amy Trubek (2000) couples the emergence of gastronomy with that of the restaurant and the professionalisation of chefs, which all contributed to fashion a sense of French culinary exceptionalism and superiority through what could be called a universal, secular ‘culinary civilising mission’. Following the precepts of chef and culinary entrepreneur Antonin Carême (1784–1833), exotic ingredients as well as foreign preparations were ‘assimilated’ and ‘francisés’ (Saillard, 2007: 762, 764). Furthermore, as Spang astutely remarks, ‘the early nineteenth century menu presented the entire world on a single sheet’ (2000: 191); the menu (i.e. ‘la carte’) became a map of sorts through which restaurants accounted for the whole edible world. By standardising the names of dishes, she adds, the menu disseminated a reproducible language that became universal in the world of haute cuisine. ‘The restaurant’, as Spang puts it, ‘civilized the customer’s desires by codifying them’ (2000: 193). French chefs, in France and abroad, played a crucial role in this national mission, as shown by Trubek (2000). They codified and systematised cuisine, held influential positions at the helm of prestigious hotels, managed international competitions, and created schools that disseminated their model abroad in a project of culinary takeover that was both nationalistic and imperialistic, for as the famous French chef Escoffier is reported to have said, ‘French cooking was a branch of diplomacy’ (Burton, 2004: 56).

Conversely, Freidberg calls attention to:

how the processes and sites of food production, like those of food consumption, express and seek to inculcate cultural norms both in and beyond the workplace. At its most imperially ambitious, the labour of food production not only demonstrates but cultivates civilization. (2003: 5)

Such ‘cultivation’ of civilisation was discernible in the new patterns of imperial food provisioning described by Kolleen Guy:

Early empire brought ‘exotic’ products previously unavailable to the mass of European consumers such as tea, coffee, sugar, and later tropical fruits. The nineteenth century, however, brought a major shift in the relationship between European metropoles and the colonies … Imports from extra-European sources substituted for agricultural produce previously grown domestically. (2010: 219)

Therefore wine production in Algeria was not only meant to supplement wine production in metropolitan France; it was also considered a part of the civilising mission that posited French colonists as the rightful heirs to their Roman predecessors in North Africa.

Richard Burton finds echoes of the French culinary civilising mission in contemporary discourses about gastronomy. ‘In a time when the trade of information and goods is blurring national borders, the French, who see their cooking as a defining trait of their national identity, use French cuisine as a tool to fight the encroachment’ (2004: 58). He sees proof of this in the lack of gastronomic reverence for cuisines from former colonised countries. Though these cuisines are increasingly popular among the French public, as shown by a growing market for ethnic offerings, they have not, according to Burton, benefited from the same creative attention and reinvention from French chefs as Indian cuisine has by British chefs. ⁵ In November 2010, the UNESCO cultural heritage programme recognised the ‘gastronomic meal of the French’ as an intangible cultural good. Prior to this success, an alliance of French state agencies, cultural elites, chefs and scholars had failed to have French gastronomy protected and distinguished by this label (Pelletier, 2010). Their first proposal was turned down in part due to its elitist nature, which did not fit UNESCO’s criteria for collective, ritualised social practices. Other member countries argued that their cuisines were just as gastronomic. The new proposal formalised and classified the category of the multi-course ‘gastronomic meal’, prepared to celebrate meaningful occasions and centred on the art of ‘bien manger et bien boire’ – a fairly bourgeois construction and ideal. Although UNESCO officials specifically emphasised that the recognition they bestowed was meant to highlight that single specific meal as a culinary tradition of the French, the French press and French officials quickly celebrated this recognition as a victory for French gastronomy (Pelletier, 2012).

This effort in heritage diplomacy to procure international recognition and an economic advantage demonstrates how, to this day, cuisine is intimately linked to a sense of French national identity, distinction and superiority. While this manoeuvre was indeed beneficial for the tourism industry and France’s prestige, it can also be seen as an attempt to curb the incontrovertible popularity of fast food and the influence of another empire, that of ‘McDomination’, within France itself, now the most profitable market for McDonald’s in Europe (Willging, 2008: 207). Thus, France provides a unique historical and cultural context in which to critically re-examine the interconnections between foodways, national discourses, transnational food trade and imperialism, in the metropole and its former colonies, from the late eighteenth century to the postcolonial present.

While scholarship generally tends to emphasise France as the capital of gastronomy, this issue places a singular emphasis on the central role of food within the French empire and thus contributes to the growing body of work in food studies focusing on France and its former empire. The ten articles summarised below focus on lesser-studied cases, and offer the perspectives of six historians, one anthropologist and three literature and cultural studies scholars. All the contributors to this special issue demonstrate that the study of food affords a unique vista into the variety of forms taken by imperial power within and across empires and that such study helps us understand the longevity of colonial forms of domination.

Food and the French empire

Blake Smith investigates the imperial ramifications of the French Enlightenment’s new science of diet in relation to the conquest of India. In ‘Starch wars: rice, bread and South Asian difference in the French Enlightenment’, he argues that in the last years of the eighteenth century, doctors, political theorists and journalists reinforced racial and sexual hierarchies between European conquerors and the people of the Indian subcontinent, basing their notions on the purported effects of different staple grains on the body and the body politic. Wheat, nutritious although harder to digest, was supposed to impart strength and vigour to the Europeans who were also ‘hardened by hunting and shepherding’. Rice, on the other hand, was assumed to grow easily in tropical climates and promoted laziness. Easily digestible rice weakened those who consumed it, thus explaining the conquest of ‘effeminate’ India by virile French and British troops fed on bread and meat. According to Smith, among Enlightenment critics of European imperialism, the work of journalist Simon-Henri-Nicolas Linguet stands out for developing ‘a critical gastro-political stance, a way of seeing the foodways of his own society as being connected to social inequities, physical and psychological ailments, and the tensions of empire’. Pursuing the integration of dietary science with political theories about types of government, Linguet based his critique of the political ills of the ancien régime and his anti-colonial stance on the Indian alimentary utopia according to which rice-eating peoples and polities were more peaceful, and oriental despotic regimes paradoxically more egalitarian. From grains to flour to bread, wheat processing required a series of transformations, and thus, according to Linguet, was ‘subject at multiple sites to the “tyrannie lucrative” of surcharges – as well as contamination’. Rice, on the other hand, was easy on the stomach and could be processed by one single household, doing away with middlemen and social stratification. Linguet’s attacks on bread were both political and dietary, and presented imperial conquest as a ‘symptom of bad digestion’. As Smith puts it: ‘If Enlightenment ideas about food did not contribute to French empire in the subcontinent, they were integral in maintaining a French conceptual emprise, a sense of superiority to and mastery over peoples who had once been imperial subjects.’ Such notions were instrumental in the expansion of colonial conquest in the nineteenth century.

In ‘Le vin et la viticulture en Tunisie coloniale (1881–1956) : entre synapse et apartheid’, Nessim Znaien demonstrates how the establishment of a wine industry in Tunisia during the French protectorate was intended to consolidate French rule, encourage the settlement of French vine-growers, and provide labour for Tunisian natives. Before the protectorate, vineyards were almost non-existent in Tunisia, a Muslim country whose inhabitants are, theoretically, forbidden to drink alcohol. Tunisians were deemed incapable of making wine and, from the beginning of the protectorate, colonial rhetoric inscribed wine production as a mythical continuation of the Roman empire. Although the wine industry was less central to Tunisia’s economy than it was to Algeria’s, it remained the country’s most lucrative agricultural production. Originally used for blending, efforts were made to improve Tunisian wines after the Second World War. Tunisia exported most of its production (equivalent to about a third of Algeria’s) to France. The rest was consumed locally. Using administrative records as well as literary narratives and journalistic sources, Znaien makes the case that despite an official colonial apartheid that forbade the natives from consuming alcohol, wine production and alcohol drinking created links between the locals and French colonists, as both attempted to contravene these laws. New discourses emerged and new confrontations took place between colonised Tunisians and colonists, each accusing the other of being degenerate and responsible for the natives’ increased alcohol consumption. The colonial administration fined Europeans who sold alcohol to natives and punished public drunkenness. Underlying these laws, Znaien argues, rested the notion that Tunisians were unable to consume alcohol and other goods such as tea, in moderation. This, in turn, was linked to a lack of civilisation and called for the monitoring of natives, especially to maintain public order against disruptions caused by intoxication. In addition, French colonial authorities used these laws as signs of good will and respect for Muslim beliefs and practices, to please religious elites and public opinion. Despite these prohibitions, Tunisian consumers purchased alcohol in city cafés, in clandestine locations, and directly from the home of Europeans settlers. A colonial hierarchy based on drinking habits emerged; this scale differentiated strong spirits such as whisky, from local fig liquor and wine, to separate Europeans from the Jews and Muslims. Znaien contends that the asymmetrical interactions governing the production and consumption of alcohol created a synapse, or a ‘contact zone’ as Mary-Louise Pratt calls it, between natives and colonisers.

Confirming the deep connection between wine, French national identity and the gastronomic civilising mission, Christophe Lucand’s article, entitled ‘Le commerce des vins de Bourgogne à la conquête des concessions françaises en Chine au début du XXe siècle’, explores how merchants of fine wines from the Burgundy region developed export strategies to conquer French concessions in China, as well as the unreliable but appealing Chinese market, at a time of great political upheavals. Efforts targeted Western expatriates in faraway, captive markets, and ambitiously strove to ‘convert’ new Chinese consumers to their production. Lucand explains how, from the start, Burgundy wine merchants had misgivings about the viability of the enterprise; to them, most Chinese ‘ne connaissent rien au vin’ and French wines were competing against other more established and easily identifiable brands of liquor. Nevertheless, exchanges and correspondence demonstrate ‘un fort prosélytisme mêlant vocabulaire religieux et conversion culturelle’, as well as a cynical disdain for Chinese customers. Chinese markets, Lucand argues, crystallise the complexities of France’s relationship to its colonial empire, the goals being both to extract economic profit from overseas locations and to assimilate faraway populations into the French model. Regarding the latter, Burgundy wine merchants faced an uphill battle. To combat falsification as well as competition, their production had been intimately tied to specific locales and names, such as Pommard and Meursault. These became standards of taste and quality in and of themselves: a system of classification difficult to translate and export. Although at one point Burgundy wine exports to China reached 15 per cent of their total sales, Lucand concludes that merchants never managed to establish a clientele beyond the confines of the concession and a narrow, declining Chinese elite, even when they finally tried to tweak the presentation and the labelling of their products in order to attract a local clientele. By 1930, the last exporter of Burgundy wines had left, symbolising the impasse of the French colonial process in China.

The power (or the failure) to feed others, diners or natives, is at the core of the culinary civilising mission. Based on official reports and journalistic accounts of expositions, Van Troi Tran’s article explores ‘How “Natives” ate at colonial exhibitions in 1889, 1900 and 1931’. Focusing on the provisioning, cooking and health of the natives brought to be on display at the exhibitions for the duration of these large-scale events, he shows how such practical issues embodied the ambitions, tensions and anxieties inherent in the imperial project. Food and bodies, he argued, occupied a liminal position: ‘on one hand, they were resources and exotic products promoted in sensuous advertisements. On the other hand, they were objects prone to pollution and impurity.’ Expositions had an educational agenda: there the civilising mission was to be enacted and performed. Natives were exposed to French food and introduced to modern consumption. Conversely, they shared their foodways and specialties with the public. Additionally, meals at the expositions provided opportunities to foster ‘intercultural commensality’ and ‘a sense of community across colonies’. These included inexpensive meals proposed by les fourneaux économiques, as well as official banquets with champagne, showcasing the new policy of association between colonised elites and French delegates favoured by Marshal Lyautey, the commissioner of the 1931 Exposition. Whereas earlier exhibits presented the natives’ foodways as spectacle, by 1931 culinary exoticism shared the stage with exhibits on colonial commodity crops such as palm oil and rice. The infrastructure put in place to ensure the natives’ well-being, health and hygiene was itself showcased ‘in the promotion of France as a “patrie nourricière”, protector, provider and moderniser of its colonies’. However, despite the official rhetoric of civilisational progress, journalistic accounts of cannibals’ exhibits, as well as related jokes and anecdotes, troubled the sanitised image of the colonial empire sought by Lyautey, who had refused to host ethnographic villages. Critiques of the racist vociferations of the Parisian populace at peripheral exhibits depicted French visitors as cannibals of sorts in a contaminating reversal of roles. As Tran concludes, ‘in the symbolic order of the official French colonialist discourse, the figure of the cannibal was precisely “matter out of place”, polluting and poisoning the Republican public space and the universalist narrative of the civilising mission’. Literal and figurative food, despite official efforts to integrate it into a polished representation of the French colonial empire, remained a durable source of potential disruption.

Lauren Janes further explores the figure of the cannibal in ‘Writing about cannibal diets and consuming black Africans in France during the first half of the twentieth century’. Insisting on the foundational capacity of foodways to define identity and difference, Janes shows how, in the culinary literature of the first half of the twentieth century, and in discussions about African food at the colonial exhibition of 1931, references to African cuisines and foodways almost always ‘included theatrical jokes about black African cannibalism, which signalled that Africans were clearly outside the culinary and racial boundaries of Frenchness’. Using Kyla Tompkins’ notion of ‘eating culture’, that is, ‘the practices and representations of ingestion and edibility’ (2012: 2), Janes shows that references to African cannibalism policed racial and cultural boundaries between coloniser and colonised, but also reversed the gaze and pointed to the ‘incorporative nature of French imperialism’. Because eating is ‘a deeply intimate embodied act’, discussions of exotic eating were especially perilous and often presented opportunities to reassert clear boundaries through the disgust, or laughter, generated by the trope of cannibalism. Analysing recipes and journalistic culinary accounts, she shows that the presentation of cannibalism as regular food provisioning or in purely gustatory terms, i.e. ‘the trope of cannibalism as gourmet culinary practice’ or that of the cannibalistic chef, were meant to either heighten disgust or discount the very possibility of an African cuisine through the use of the colonial culinary carnivalesque. Other accounts reversed this representation to picture the consumption of Africa as spiritual renewal for the colonisers, as in the case of Paul Morand. Alternatively, references to African cannibalism also provided grounds to critique the metaphoric assimilation and the imperial appetite for African bodies, ridiculing exhibit goers’ naïve search for culinary thrills and extreme eating, and critiquing the consumption of black others as spectacle. Janes ends with the 1898 creation of the French chocolate dessert, ‘tête de nègre’, as the foremost example of the dehumanising effects of such rhetoric. When eating ‘tête de nègre’, families were ‘ritually re-eneacting the French consumption of the Kingdom of Dahomey by magically ingesting the candied “head” of Dahomey’s last independent king’ overthrown by the French in 1894. The recipe and its original name still circulate today on cooking sites, alongside alternative designations, as echoes of past culinary celebrations of the French empire.

The metaphoric devouring of Africa analysed by Janes finds a literal translation in the intensive logging of Gabonese timberlands examined by Rufin Didzambou in ‘Le ravitaillement en vivres importés et ses incidences dans les chantiers forestiers du Gabon pendant la période coloniale (1920–1960)’. In the 1920s, labour-intensive logging became colonial Gabon’s main economic activity. Forestry workers from the hinterland and neighbouring West African countries had to be accommodated on site, in dense forests. Attracting and controlling the workforce through food provisioning played a central role in the control exercised by the colonial power on the country’s natural resources. Didzambou shows that the food supply became a constant preoccupation for the logging industry and the colonial authority who made it compulsory to provide workers with a daily food ration, the content of which it clearly detailed. However, their incessant complaints about rations indicate that the law was not always applied. The diet of West African workers and their families was fundamentally transformed by the import of rice, canned foods consisting mostly of sardines, and alcohol, as detailed by Didzambou. On top of the food allowance provided by contract by employers, logging companies opened stores to supplement the ration. In the absence of a regular supply of indigenous foods such as manioc roots, banana and fresh fish, and given the remoteness of the worksites, workers relied on the ration and spent most of their meagre salaries at the company stores, where they ran up a tab. Canned food could be accommodated with local herbs, eaten hot or cold, directly out of the can; rice was appreciated for the ease of its preparation and long shelf life; metal cans were recycled as containers and utensils. Imported food became a prized commodity and a status symbol among workers and their families back home. Rations were a major argument used to attract workers and their families and to stabilise the workforce. However, this poor-quality imported diet had severe health consequences for the workers who suffered from beriberi, dysentery and alcoholism; it resulted in elevated rates of mortality for forestry workers and an overall shortened lifespan. Although logging, eventually replaced by the oil industry, is no longer the main employer in contemporary, independent Gabon, rice imports remain a concern for state authorities and imported foods still make up 85 per cent of the national intake. Induced food dependency, Didzambou concludes, has shaped the tastes of the Gabonese for the long term.

Canned sardines followed a different path in Morocco. The country became a leading producer of canned fish under the French Protectorate (1912–56), yet Moroccans never took to them. In ‘L’impact du protectorat français sur l’industrialisation du poisson au Maroc’, Marie Caquel shows how colonial authorities, assisted by a cohort of officers, scientists, geographers and anthropologists, identified fisheries as an untapped resource. Although fish was abundant, consumption was mostly restricted to the coasts of Morocco. A small-scale artisan production of smoked and dried fish was shipped to markets inside the country. Using theses and memoranda published in the scientific journals supported by the protectorate, Caquel traces the development of the fish industry in colonial Morocco and shows how it generated profit for French entrepreneurs and transformed social structures. Colonial scientists and officials advocated the development of fisheries to benefit both Morocco’s own population and the French metropole, and to develop international commerce before the involvement of other foreign investors. For the French and for other Europeans, as Caquel emphasises, fishing is associated with civilisation, in addition to its Christian connotations. For them, the perceived neglect of such a resource by the Moroccans was considered detrimental to their health and progress: ‘derrière tous les arguments hygiénistes et de santé publique’, Caquel writes, ‘la France veut imposer aussi son modèle économique et sociétal qu’elle considère comme le plus efficace’. Reports critical of the natives’ foodways suggested that fish would advantageously replace tea and sugar consumption, as well as lavish expenditure on ritual festivities, as a nutritious addition. Furthermore, canned fish, available all the year round, would prevent child mortality, food shortage and hunger. Feeding the natives and providing jobs to ensure social peace, as well as educating the natives’ tastes, were presented as important concerns by French colonial authorities. Starting in the 1930s and prompted by investments from the Breton sardine industry, a flourishing private fishing and canning industry developed and modernised this lucrative production to compete successfully against the Spanish and the Portuguese, as well as supply the French market. However, the local population remained excluded from the commercialisation and export of this Moroccan resource. Fish canneries provided jobs for a mostly uneducated and docile feminine workforce, which to this day cleans, cooks and packs fish for international markets, thus contributing to the proletarianisation of the Moroccan population. Caquel concludes that, though Morocco remains the largest producer and exporter of canned sardines to this day, colonial authorities never put in place the policies that could have enticed Moroccans to develop a taste for this commodity or to overcome their culinary resistance.

Cuisine as a site of postcolonial resistance and national reconstruction is explored by Tess Do in ‘Le Palais du mandarin (2009) de Thanh-Van Tran-Nhut: espace culinaire vietnamien et récupération postcoloniale’. In her recent collection of short stories, French-Vietnamese writer Tran-Nhut departs from her well-known series of historical detective novels featuring a gourmet Mandarin detective in seventeenth-century Vietnam, to explore food, her childhood and contemporary Vietnam at the invitation of the series ‘Exquis d’écrivains’. Do argues that although her texts fit the bill of the series, that is ‘écrire “des textes … résolument appétissants et agréables à lire”’, the author uses this new genre to make food into a central character, which, not unlike the Mandarin detective of her previous novels (inspired by her father and great-grandfather), helps re-establish social order after the trauma of the anti-colonial (1945–54) and civil (1954–75) wars in Vietnam. Do relies on Patricia Pelley’s notion (2002) of ‘postcolonial recovery’, meaning both healing the aftermath of war and also regaining one’s national identity, to show that in the collection’s five autobiographical short stories, Vietnamese cuisine and culinary traditions participate in a national recuperative process. She connects Jean-Pierre Poulain’s notion of ‘espace social alimentaire’ (1997) – that is, ‘un espace multidimensionnel à la fois physique et imaginaire dont l’organisation révèle les croyances et les rapports fondamentaux de l’homme à l’univers’ – with the Vietnamese guiding principle of a necessary balance between yin and yang. In so doing, she demonstrates how culinary compositions correspond to the cosmic equilibrium of the universe and have the potential to right the imbalance and disruptions brought about by wars. In ‘Dessert’, eating is an act of defence and resistance for the young Tran-Nhut. Savouring chè ba màu, a traditional sweet soup prepared by female street vendors, in front of the French schoolteacher who taped her mouth to prevent her from speaking Vietnamese in class, amounts to a quiet and restorative culinary rebellion. The tongue of the child is the literal and figurative battlefield for the revitalisation of a balanced Vietnam. In ‘Soupes’ and ‘Secrets’, expert female cooks reconcile a fractured Vietnam by combining and reuniting the tastes of elaborate and seemingly timeless dishes from Vietnam’s three main regions in a peaceful culinary contest. In Tran-Nhut’s fictions, eating and cooking Vietnamese foods act as defence and restore national unity. But mostly, as Do shows, writing about Vietnamese dishes allows Tran-Nhut to create a literary balance and continuity between herself and the turbulent history of her native country through taste.

The mouth is where domination can be exerted or resisted: voices can be silenced, languages suppressed, tastes controlled and food withheld, rejected or force-fed. In ‘Gagging on égalité: French culinary imperialism on the island of Réunion in Axel Gauvin’s Faims d’enfance’, Robyn Cope shows how Gauvin, a champion of Creoleness and the Creole language on Reunion, ‘turns towards another expression of self found on the tongue: food’. Reunionese foodways provide a new ground for the defence of ‘cultural and political self-determination’, opposing neo-colonialism in Reunion. Using the work of Laurence Tibère, Cope shows that French culinary imperialism stands in opposition to what Tibère defines as ‘manger creole’. Creole specificity lies not in specific foods or cooking, but in the way people choose to assemble various prepared ingredients on their plates: rice, which is the common base, legumes, a stew or curry with meat, and condiments. The structure of the plate, not the meal (as in the case of a proper UNESCO-approved ‘repas gastronomique des Français’), is what distinguishes creole eating, since it allows for culinary differentiations and commensality in Reunion’s multi-ethnic society. Set in the destitute highlands against the backdrop of a dying colonial sugar cane industry, Gauvin’s novel denounces the continued political and cultural dependency of Reunion, which became a French département in 1958, on France by focusing on the key role of the school cafeteria. A main source of meals for the children, the cafeteria procures satiation, promotes assimilation and, ultimately, provokes revulsion. Soubaya, the young protagonist of Indian (Malbar) descent declines to eat the beef served once a week by Yvonne, the school cook. Invoking the strict application of the principle of ‘égalité’, Yvonne refuses to set aside a plate of rice and beans to accommodate the boy’s religious observance, and instead pushes his head into the beef stew. When a new school headmistress, a ‘petite blanche’ from Reunion but educated in France, wants to ‘civilise’ the school children by replacing rice with ‘pain doré’, the children pass large jars of Creole pepper paste around to make the bland French food palatable and reassert the common core of ‘manger creole’. In the end, the incumbent mayor, who is Yvonne’s lover, and the new headmistress try to lure the schoolchildren with cafeteria food in order to influence the votes of their parents and turn them away from the autonomist Communist Party. The plan backfires when some of the schoolchildren refuse to eat the food and ‘Yvonne takes revenge by mixing broken needles into the children’s meals, gravely injuring Soubaya’s friend’s throat’. Cope contends that for Gauvin Creole cooking is a weapon in the struggle for self-determination, as are ‘common food aversions and resistance by refusing to swallow what looks like sustenance but is, in fact, poison’. As she concludes, ‘in Faims d’enfance, you are, quite simply, what you won’t eat’.

Culinary creolisation also occurs in the former French metropole where colonial exchanges introduced specialities later indigenised into local and national grammars of food. In ‘“Merguez Capitale”: the merguez sausage as a discursive construction of cosmopolitan branding, colonial memory and local flavour in Marseille’, Angela Giovanangeli proposes to use the merguez ‘as a marker to evoke both the cosmopolitan and the local specificities of the city of Marseille, once celebrated as the gateway to France’s empire’. Giovanangeli focuses on the 2013 initiative to refurbish the image of the economically ailing city as a Euro-Mediterranean capital. Official celebrations and events throughout the year, the high point of which was the inauguration of the national Musée des Cultures de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (MUCEM), emphasised the city’s cosmopolitan dimensions and painted a ‘romanticised portrayal of the Mediterranean’, appealing to tourists. ‘Cosmopolitan branding’, Giovanangeli argues, showcases a city’s immigrant history to depict it as open and multicultural layered spaces. These official efforts prompted alternative cultural actors and activists to launch the Off de Marseille, a playful and festive social critique of authorised discourses addressing local issues such as urban change, social inequalities and the multi-ethnic identities of the city. ‘Merguez Capitale – Marseille est cosmopolite, Marseille est un village’, was a tongue-in-cheek, one-day event taking place, humorously, on the national day of gastronomy; it was open to all who wanted to celebrate and grill the sausage that symbolically embodies Marseille’s ‘local cosmopolitanism’. Following that link (literally and figuratively) Giovanangeli traces the colonial history of this popular street food inscribed in the ‘local experience of decolonisation and Pied-Noir memory’. In addition to its connections to Algerian memories, she shows how the spicy sausage has become a mainstay at large collective gatherings, family barbecues and inexpensive street food outlets in Marseille and across the nation. In contrast to other iconic foods from Marseille such as bouillabaisse or sardines, Giovanangeli underlines the convivial, ethnically inclusive and blue-collar qualities of the merguez, which fit the slow transformation – as well as the contradictions – of the city’s public image post-decolonisation as racist yet tolerant. Giovanangeli proposes a thorough analysis of the title, location and discourses of this one-day event; she explores the community-building properties of barbecuing and extends her analysis to cinematic representations of the merguez in Robert Guédiguian’s marseillais cinema. She concludes that the merguez ‘generates a cosmopolitan discourse that draws on narratives highlighting the parochial aspect of the city’.

These contributions by scholars in literary and cultural studies, history and anthropology, provide a critical exploration of the centrality of food production and consumption in the establishment, maintenance and resistance to empire. They invite us to consider the persistent relevance of the globalised system of provisioning and transformation put in place by imperial domination to understand the elongated routes and opaque structures of our current food systems, and they indeed encourage us to follow Thomas Sankara’s exhortations to take a closer look at our plates, for eating is where alimentary and political regimes meet.