Food, Contamination, and Race-Thinking: Culinary Encounters in Late Medieval Missionary Accounts of Asia

This essay traces the persisting legacy of stigmatized Asian foodways—unclean, unsafe, barbaric, and inherently inferior—back to a particular mode of race-thinking that has deep roots in medieval Latin Christian discourses on food and still pervades popular Western imaginations. Through a case study of two thirteenth-century Franciscan friars, John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck, who traveled to Central Asia, it examines how a particularly Orientalist mode of race-thinking helped negotiate a pressing concern over food for medieval European Christians who are invited, or compelled out of necessity, to eat Mongolian foods. Culinary encounters in the East for European Christians often called for an Orientalizing racialization of Eastern foodways to make it safe and even enjoyable to take a bite of exotic foods, which can be best demonstrated in the case of William of Rubruck, who became fond of comos (Mongolian fermented mare's milk), a drink considered illicit for Eastern Christians. For William, culinary Orientalism served as a key racializing strategy to articulate fundamental differences between European Christians and Eastern people, especially non-Latin Christians, whose theological understandings of food differed from Latin Christians. I argue that William's repudiation of the Eastern Christians' reluctance to drink comos not only made it possible for him to drink it freely and publicly through an aggressive decontextualization of Eastern foodways, but also generated for him a similar kind of pleasure to what bell hooks conceptualizes as the pleasure of "eating the Other."