On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (KJCC) at New York University, the Center was interested in organizing a series of programs and events to reflect on food as a nexus for discussions about philanthropy, social justice, and cultural exchange across the global Hispanophone. We at the KJCC were especially interested in thinking about how food (discourse and matter) could be an occasion to study, challenge, and rethink the linguistic, geographic, and material boundaries that traditionally define fields like Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Peninsular studies. In its transfer across different times and spaces, while also carrying, conserving, and sustaining ideas and traditions from points of origin and exchange, we felt that through this interdisciplinary discussion of food, the KJCC could serve as a platform for bringing together scholars from food studies who might otherwise not sit across the same (virtual) table from each other. Organized in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the online roundtable, which took place on February 24, 2022, stretched across five time zones and three continents and brought together scholars whose work has made important interventions in the field of food studies as well as their adjacent fields of study, which include (but are not limited to) early modern and colonial studies, transatlantic studies, Latin American and Caribbean studies, Catalan studies, and Iberian studies. The guests in the panel were Rebecca Earle (Warwick University, UK), Melissa Fuster (Tulane University, US), Lara Anderson (The University of Melbourne, AU), and the panel’s moderator was H. Rosi Song (Durham University, UK). The event was organized by Jordana Mendelson, Director of the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at New York University, with the support of KJCC Associate Director Laura Turégano and the creative team of Laia Cabrera and Isabelle Duverger, who produced the original online roundtable, which can be viewed here: www.kjcc.org/event/roundtable-food-and-the-hispanic-world-across-time-space.Having come together to plan the panel and to engage in a lively exchange of ideas during the session, the panelists, with the support of the moderator and the organizer, brought forward the desire to share this discussion in print. The conversation that follows is a slightly revised version of the online conversation that includes a list of works mentioned during the event. We share this print version with the same intention as the panel had in its origin: to study, share, debate, and generate conversations about food in the Hispanic world that foreground points of convergence and departure, so that we may keep this conversation about food moving, since movement was one of the recurrent themes of the roundtable discussion.We could examine, for instance, how food-related products or practices traveled with people. And how these practices sustained them until they reached their destination. Once people and their food arrived in new geographies, how have these products become part of their new environment? Was this process a natural one or a forced one? Of course, we should not forget the journey back, how new products and knowledge traveled to the point of origin transforming landscapes and food practices that are now deeply ingrained in national food imaginaries. What does it mean to recognize that staple ingredients in traditional dishes in Europe come from foreign land? What matters? The ingredients or the preparation of them?We have gathered this roundtable to consider these questions as a starting point to think through together how these movements happened at individual levels but, unsurprisingly, also as the result of systemic power changes, political interests, and the need for survival. Perhaps we could ask Rebecca a question to begin our discussion. As a historian, can you get us started by talking about food and movement? What would you say is the impact of movement (exploration, travel, migration, diaspora) in food practices? In what ways do you think food changes or, in a way, stays the same?During the Spanish conquest of the Americas, two scenes typify the encounters between Europeans and Amerindians: a battle, and a shared meal. When Indigenous peoples and Iberians did not try to kill each other, they often exchanged foodstuffs. Hungry Spaniards were often desperate for food, and Amerindians were curious about the peculiar things consumed by the exotic bearded strangers. Spanish chronicles are full of descriptions of such communal meals. In December 1492, Columbus recorded in his journal that after landing on one Caribbean Island he offered a local ruler “Castilian food” (92). Columbus did not describe the king’s reaction, beyond noting that he ate only a mouthful, giving the rest to his entourage. Other accounts offer more detail. A sixteenth-century Italian traveler wrote that on being given a Spanish meal, one group of Amerindians in Venezuela, “laughing at such food,” threw it to their dogs (Lovera 1997).Unequivocal hostility, however, does not typify all aspects of what historians call “the Columbian exchange”—the global dissemination of foods that followed in the wake of the European invasion of the Americas. Over the next centuries, foods from the Americas spread all over the world. By the early seventeenth century, pineapples reached India, peanuts and maize were being grown in China in the same years, and madrileños were using chile peppers to spice up their foods. Writing in Spain in 1590, the Jesuit priest José de Acosta felt no need to describe the chile in his account of new-world plants because “by now this is a well-known thing, and hence not much need be said about it” (Acosta 2002). At the same time, native peoples in the Americas were adding new foods to their own diets—from lettuces to pigs.Over time, out of these complex blendings of new- and old-world ingredients and culinary systems emerged the distinctive set of cuisines that form the basis of what today are called “Mexican” or “Colombian” or “Argentine” food, whose characteristic dishes are extolled by nationalists, savored by young and old, and desired by emigrants far from their homelands. After all, for many people, food holds a particular power to instill a visceral sense of national identity. Speaking of the iconic Mexican dish mole poblano, one Mexican writer insisted that to reject it “could practically be considered an act of treason” (Reyes).* Virtually all of the Latin American dishes today considered as “national” reflect the blending of ingredients from different parts of the world that resulted from the Columbian exchange. Argentine bife de chorizo with a malbec and chips, or an enchilada suiza, or Brazilian moqueca (whose very name comes from the Kimbundu language of Angola)—all these dishes are the result of the hybridization of eating practices that followed in the wake of European colonialism, which brought grape vines, cattle, dairy products, and West African palm oil to the Americas.American foods moved all over the world because people were moving all over the world. It was almost certainly Portuguese sailors who carried pineapples and peanuts to India and China. And it was enslaved West Africans who brought palm oil and rice—and the expertise to grow them—to the Americas. European conquistadors carried with them not only weapons but also seeds for radishes and wheat, breeding pairs of pigs and sheep, and many other staples of the Iberian diet. And they were the ones who took the chile pepper back to Spain, where women started adding it to sausages to create the chorizo we know today. Foods traveled around the world because from the fifteenth century people were traveling around the world in ever greater numbers. The movements of these foods trace out the movements of people.Sometimes it’s the movement of plants that prompts movement of people, rather than the reverse. We may be used to thinking that people were the only ones with agency—that we moved foods around, but that foods didn’t move us around. Yet sometimes the plants do move us. About 2.5 million years ago in Africa, savannah land—grasslands—began to increase, and as a result early hominins began to move out of forests into these new open grasslands, where they learned to eat a different diet. In other words, plants from the savannah colonized new environments, and people followed in their wake—the movement of plants caused a movement of people, and new diets.There are of course more recent and more historically devastating examples. Let’s return to the Hispanic world. The introduction of sugarcane into the Caribbean by Columbus in the 1490s led directly to the forced movement of millions of people from the west coast of Africa to the Americas. The great majority of the people taken as captives from West Africa to labor in the Americas were sent to the new-world sugar plantations that devoured the lives of millions of men and women. Sugar, as they said, was made with blood. A key part of colonialism involved the deliberate introduction of new plants into Europe’s colonies in order to grow them as commercial commodities. Sugar, coffee, tea, bananas, cacao—all these different food plants were deliberately moved from their places of origin into European colonies, with a view toward cultivating them for profit. Bananas are not originally from Central America and the Caribbean; cacao is not native to West Africa—their presence in these regions is part of deliberate effort to use European colonies to grow commercial crops for export. You can see that this is a really global process. In all cases, the idea was to grow these crops using unfree labor, whether indentured workers or enslaved people or convict labor. Europeans introduced commercial crops grown with unfree labor into every zone they colonized. So the movement of these foods around the world resulted in a vast movement of peoples around the world.Finally, I want to say a little about how the movement of ideas has also shaped how we eat. Let’s think about our concepts of health and nutrition. From the late nineteenth century, new scientific ideas began to emerge that sought to explain how food nourishes the body by using ideas derived from chemistry—ideas like the calorie, vitamins, proteins. This was a new way of looking at food, and it quickly spread all over the world. Scientists in India grappled with how to interpret ancient ayurvedic dietary guidance in light of these new ideas. Politicians in Colombia and Mexico designed new programs that aimed to reshape popular eating habits in line with these new understandings of what was and was not good to eat. The global circulation of new understandings of nutrition had a direct impact on public health policies and on everyday eating habits in many parts of the world.It’s worth recalling, too, that “ideas” don’t include only the concepts devised by scientists or trained scholars. The practical know-how involved in preparing a meal also constitutes a form of knowledge. The spread of culinary and agricultural expertise is another important part of this history. After all, seeds, plants, and animals do not transform themselves into food automatically—people do this, so the expertise and knowledge of farmers and cooks is also crucial to the formation of new eating habits. It was from Indigenous Meso-American women that Europeans learned how to enjoy chocolate, or tortillas, for instance. On other occasions foods spread but without the important agricultural and culinary knowledge that surrounded them in their areas of origin. When maize reached Italy in the sixteenth century it arrived without the complex process of “nixtamalization”—the soaking of dried maize kernels in lye, which unlocks their vitamin content. As a result, heavy consumption of maize often caused pellagra, an ailment largely unknown in Meso-America itself.So the way we eat is profoundly shaped by the movements of peoples, who brought new foods with them as they traveled the world. The introduction of new plants itself often provoked further movements of people, and the movement of ideas, as the world became ever more interconnected, also shapes our eating habits, for instance as we embrace new ideas about what is healthy, or fashionable.Coming back to the Hispanic world, the thing I would like to stress is the intimate link between today’s eating habits and the legacy of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Together, these moved peoples and foods all over the Hispanic world, profoundly altering diets. The British-Sri Lankan novelist Ambalavaner Sivanandan expressed really clearly how the movement of peoples around the world today reflects the history of colonialism. “We’re here because you were there,” he said. Movements of people in the past create new connections that continue to manifest themselves today. The same is true of food. The foods we eat are often here because we were there, and because everyone traveled. Thomas Sankara, the former President of Burkina Faso, also put it really clearly: “So, do you not know where imperialism is to be found?…just look at your plate!” (Cusack 2000).There’s so much more to be said about all of this, but perhaps I should stop here, at least for now.Back to our discussion today, the political aspects of food discourses are closely tied to the ideas of food and movement discussed by Rebecca, where the forces behind such movements were also inherently political. My book, Caribeños at the Table: How Migration, Health, and Race Intersect in New York City, examined the global, political forces as drivers for migration, the creation of foodways—in the diaspora and in the Caribbean, and the resulting health outcomes in US-based communities, as a way to best understand the persisting diet-related inequities affecting these communities, particularly my Puerto Rican community. The political aspect of foods comes out in different ways. An example is in how Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans spoke about their cuisines. Many of the foods that we consider traditional are linked to our colonization and slavery histories. As beautifully outlined in Ortíz-Cuadra’s book Eating Puerto Rico, we got the bacalao (codfish), pork, to name a few, from the Spanish conquistadors, while plantains were brought to the Caribbean as part of foodways developed as part of slavery. These foods were incorporated to the native, Taino (Arawak) diets, including local animal proteins and root crops, like the yucca.Fast-forward to today, the Spanish influence has been replaced by the United States as the political and economic force in the region, influencing the foodways of these island contexts in different ways. In Puerto Rico, we see the open influx of foods and brands from transnational corporations and the decimation of agriculture, brought from our ongoing colonial relationship with the United States. But then, to address the important, second part of your question, we are also seeing the resurgence of an interest in agriculture, being a political statement, pushing back against the colonial status quo. Food interventions have been key in grassroots movements, as the case of comedores sociales—community kitchens or tables—that are present at local protests and in response to disasters, as in the case of the 2017 devastating Hurricane María.As I have discussed in relation to the Primo de Rivera and Franco dictatorships, we can view food discourse as a potent biopolitical tool (see Anderson 2020). During the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, individual eating choices were controlled to uphold the regime’s modernizing agenda while, as part of the Franco biopolitics, individuals were managed and submitted to strict discipline and appropriate behavior as the state promoted a stoic, patriotic, ultra-nationalist gendered and healthy body. Official discourse and food media converged to control the citizenry’s behavior and thinking about Spanish food culture and identity.As Tiago Saraiva explains, “every fascist regime of the interwar period became obsessed for making the national soil feed the national body” (9). Saraiva gives examples from different regimes, writing in the case of Mussolini that the Italian dictator was obsessed with freeing Italy from the slave of the foreign grain, while the Nazis insisted food independence as a “necessary condition for both the biological survival of the race and its political independence” (2016: 71). The Francoist officials had Mussolini’s program of reform in mind, as can be evinced from the many references to Italy’s stoic embrace of reform. More importantly, and through a biopolitical lens, it is possible to view texts about and images of oranges as playing a critical role in upholding Francoist governance. A range of experts, including government authorities, speak authoritatively about oranges, thereby putting into circulation a truth discourse about this Spanish-grown fruit. Together, these different government agencies and the food media promote a discourse about food consumption that targets individual behavior as the solution to Spain’s food problems. According to this all-encompassing discourse about food, if Spaniards put patriotism before their own individual preferences, the country will be able to remain economically and culturally “free” from outside forces.Of interest is the official newspaper Alimentación nacional’s report on a short film titled La naranja (The Orange), which ran at the Avenida José Antonio theatre. The cartoon-style film tells “the history of the orange up to its appearance in Spain.”* Relevant to the view inherent to Francoist autarky that Spain should be both economically and culturally shut off from the rest of the world is the way in which the article deals with the film’s narration of the orange’s introduction to Spain at the time of Arab rule. According to the article, once in Spain the orange abandons “its exoticism and, thanks to our soil and our sun, which give it new life” is quickly embraced as a national treasure (4). As a fruit that grows prolifically in Spain, the orange symbolizes Spain’s capacity to feed her own people. However, in order to maintain the notion—inherent also to autarky—of Spain as culturally shut off from the corrupting forces of foreign influence, the article must first free the orange of its exotic and foreign origins.Spain’s oranges are also rendered 100 percent Spanish through references to their ubiquity in Spanish art and literature. Alimentación nacional reminds readers of the important place of oranges in the literature of Azorín, which sought, as critics have shown, to define an eternal notion of Spanishness. Also mentioned are Joaquín Sorolla’s depiction of orange gardens in his typically Spanish landscapes, such as Entre naranjos (Amongst the Orange Trees), which he painted in 1903 for the well-known Argentine medical doctor José R. Semprún. Sorolla’s painting—described as “a cheerful picture of a Valencian theme”—is important not only for what it says about the bonds of Hispanidad but also for its idyllic depiction of the culture or lifestyle associated with Spanish oranges (Alimentación nacional: 4). With Azorín and Sorolla occupying a place as canonically Spanish in the style and content of their work, Alimentación nacional casts oranges as iconic for their place in the cultural production of two such Spanish greats.Indeed, when in late nineteenth century Spain, Spanish intellectuals began to think about the contours of a Spanish national cuisine in the context of nation building as well as insisting on the importance of freeing their cuisine from the hegemony of neighboring France’s cuisine, they highlighted the importance of discourse to any culinary nationalist projects.At the same time as making suggestions about food as material object in making the unorthodox suggestion that the then King serve olla podrida at his birthday banquet, Dr. Thebussem and the King’s chef (1888) concluded that for Spain to have a recognizable national cuisine, a book would need to be written containing recipes from the diverse regions. This would solidify the idea of a regionally diverse national food culture, while helping Spain’s citizenry to know more about foodstuffs and recipes from across the country. Dr. Thebussem reiterated the importance of culinary multiplicity to Spanish culinary nationalization.Writing his guide at the request of a centralizing government, Dionisio Pérez’s choice of pen name (Post Thebussem) and dedication to Dr. Thebussem make clear the genealogy of his thinking on Spanish Cuisine. Guía del buen comer español (1929) has remained influential amongst Spanish food writers and cookery book authors, particularly for its showcasing of regional cuisines in the context of nation building and the importance of discourse to culinary nationalism.It is interesting to note that the concept of food as discourse has been at the heart of Spanish gastronomy since its origins in the late nineteenth century Spain. In the absence of a Spanish national cuisine at the time of a lackluster nation building, Spain’s pioneering gastronomes insisted on the textual codification of Spanish culinary traditions. This discourse has been gendered, as I have shown elsewhere, with mainly men taking up positions of authority in setting the boundaries of Spanish gastronomy, which has been closely linked to national culture. It’s interesting to note that in the late nineteenth century, Emilia Pardo Bazán (2007), the canonical author who distanced herself from her sex in the realist novels and essays she published, wrote a cookery book and not a gastronomic text like her male counterparts.This perhaps points, again, to the interconnections between the histories of food and the histories of people. People—sailors, merchants, soldiers, peasants, missionaries—were responsible for moving American foods around the world. Their movements, in turn, were prompted by the larger historical processes underway during their own lifetimes. Out of these movements of peoples and foods came new ways of eating. It’s important to understand the historical processes that took the potato to, say, China, where it is now widely eaten—China is now the world’s leading producer and consumer of potatoes—but it’s also important to recognize the ways in which, as it moved around the world, the potato itself changed. Peasants in early modern Europe and scientists in twentieth century India both played a role in developing new varieties of potato that thrived in their new environments, and cooks all over the world discovered new ways to prepare this protean tuber. When things travel, they undergo sea changes, and can emerge transformed.As already referred to, the role played by oranges under the Franco regime, during the Primo de Rivera regime, oranges were also linked both symbolically and literally to the regime’s politics. If, in the early 1930s, orange consumption was used to create citizens with a belief in regeneration and modernization, just some ten years later, oranges would be drawn on to produce autarkic subjectivities. The Franco regime cast the orange as the ideal produce of autarky in its attempts to create an increased appetite amongst Spaniards for this locally grown fruit. The shift in the symbolism of oranges is an important example of the ways in which officials appropriated Spanish food culture for broader political and cultural purposes. In both regimes, an oversupply of oranges was a driver of the “eat more oranges” campaigns, yet the meaning attached to orange consumption varied considerably.The members of the panel discussion thank the KJCC for organizing and hosting this online roundtable event. Asterisks in the transcript indicate the speaker’s own translation.