Food Encounters in the Tropics and the Andes: Isaac Holton’s Sensorial Construction of Disgust with Colombian Food in the Nineteenth Century

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ABSTRACT This article examines the circulation of travel writing in the formation of white tastes created rhetorically and materially in opposition to the tastes of locals, focusing on food encounters between U.S. writers and Latin Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. It examines the representation of Colombian foodways in the travel accounts of North American botanist Isaac Holton published in 1857. Holton’s rejection of certain foods, especially those that Colombians seemed to enjoy most, is presented as evidence of his sense of moral superiority. Scholarship on American travel and empire shows how discourses in colonial food encounters and narratives about morality and good taste created stereotypes that persisted over time. Food mediated the daily relationship between travelers and locals in contexts of contested social and political power. To address the coloniality of food encounters, this essay focuses on the textual circulation of representations of African-descended and racially mixed Colombians as lazy and dirty. Their food and foodways served as political, racialized, and gendered metaphors that represented subaltern Colombians in a growing global community of readers. Narratives of disgust about people of the tropics and the Andes help readers to understand how early American travelers to Colombia drew on their sensory experiences to construct narratives that interpreted cultural differences as national and moral. This analysis exposes the link between emotions and senses in forming narratives of “otherness” in the Americas.