“I Never Met with a Worse Article in My life”: Disgusting Food and Repellent Food Habits in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean Colonies

According to their accounts, British and American travelers in the nineteenth-century Caribbean encountered a wide range of disgusting elements connected with food. Not only did they face unknown and strange foodstuffs, but they also dealt with other repugnant habits such as the filthiness of the people and the places where they ate – or would have eaten had they managed to overcome their revulsion – and the lack of manners of the people with whom they had to share some of their meals. For some visitors, disgust was connected with the realization that the locals ate unusual food, while others were offended by the huge number of dishes eaten by Creoles or by their bad manners and the dirt. In just one case, the sources show a strategy of learning to cope with the emotion of disgust. This essay will discuss how disgust arose from the encounter of different food habits in the colonial spaces of Jamaica, Cuba, and Antigua in order to shed new light on the processes of inclusion and exclusion.