“The Idolaters Never Eat Anything Cut by Us”: An Ethnography of Food in Gemelli Careri’s Giro del Mondo

This article investigates the varying strategies of early modern “food ethnography” - writings on food consumption, habits, and rules – that can be observed within the late-seventeenth-century Giro del Mondo (Travel Around the World), a travel account by Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, a lay traveler who circumnavigated the globe in the final decade of the eighteenth century. He exhibits an honest curiosity for the peoples and places he encounters and describes them in great detail – with great attention laid on the food being eaten and the habits accompanying it. Two volumes of the Giro del Mondo serve as case studies, one on the Ottoman Empire and the other on India. Using a comparative framework, this article explores the role of food(ways) in descriptions of non-Europeans, the entanglement of food with preexisting tropes and assumptions in early modern ethnography, and whether a unified discourse on food culture can be identified in the Giro del mondo. By comparing the author’s narrative strategies with the larger context and traditions of European ethnology, it will show how Gemelli Careri implicitly and explicitly employed different tropes regarding foodways, and why and how his portrayal of various ethnic and religious groups was deeply connected to the representation and his first-hand experience of food and foodways, which are crucial for his conceptualization of cultural difference.