1. Situates the often-ignored concept of edibility as culturally constructed into broader histories of food, animals, and colonization, merging together multiple interdisciplinary subfields and contributes to the study of colonialism by using the human-animal relationship. 2. Argues for the need to bridge the gap between food studies and animal studies, noting that both are incomplete without the other. 3. Introduces the theory of the “animal typology” as crucial to understanding both historical and contemporary concepts of edibility, in which humans order animals in a personal and cultural hierarchy of least to most edible, informed by a variety of crucial factors, emotions, and relationships. This expands on previous theories that ordered animals as simple edible or inedible, and posits that there is, instead, a hierarchy of edibility. This book examines how the perceived edibility of animals evolved during the colonization of the Americas. Early European colonizers ate a variety of animals in the Americas, motivated by factors like curiosity, starvation, and diplomacy. As settlements increased and became more sustainable, constructs of edibility shifted and the colonial food system evolved accordingly. By exploring the changes in animal edibility identifiable in early modern Spanish, French, and English sources in the regions of Mesoamerica, Greater Amazonia, and the east coast of North America, this book shows that animals, foodways, and settler colonialism are inextricably linked and that the colonization of the Americas was not only the beginning of new empires, but also of a long-lasting colonial food culture that drives both food systems and human-animal relationships to the present day.
Lisainfo e-raamatute kohta