Creolising Caribbean Foodways: Breadfruit from the mid-nineteenth century to the present

In the late eighteenth century, the infrastructure of enslavement was consolidated. This transformed agriculture and the environment of the Caribbean. Within this paradigm emerged a provision-ground culture.

At the same time, Black enslaved women across the Caribbean - but especially in Jamaica - were forging their sense of self through development of provisions, creating diets rooted in foodways inherited through enslavement. At the heart of these developments was the cultivation of the Breadfruit tree (Artocarpus altilis), part of the mulberry family (Moraceae) (Zerega, 2004).

This farinaceous fruit served Pacific Islanders in lieu of the wheaten loaf of the western hemisphere, and furnished the daily food of Oceanica (Baum, 1903).

The project will ask: how and through what means did breadfruit trees spread across the Caribbean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in what way were Black women involved? What discourses about breadfruit circulated, and with what consequences? Why did breadfruit become of interest, at different times, to colonial authorities, scientists, post-colonial governments, international bodies, and nationalists?

How did Black women inherit and navigate foodways during this period? What does the 'design' of diets reveal about social circumstances, such as enslavement, for Black women? What was the relationship between the foodways created by Black women and the development of provision grounds and wider infrastructure for trade? How did breadfruit fit into these constraints? How were these varied experiences tran