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Danielle Alesi, "Eating Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Consuming Empire, 1492-1700" (Taylor & Francis, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the new New Books Network.
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B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking to Dr. Danielle Elisi about her book titled Eating Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic Consuming Empire, 1492-1700, published by Amsterdam University Press in 2025. Now, obviously, as the subtitle of the book suggests, we are going to be covering quite a time period here, as well as a lot really interesting ideas that all kind of boil down to these questions around who eats what and why, which sounds like kind of just a question about food. But as I think our discussion is going to show, as the book definitely shows, it is a question about food. It's also a question about a whole bunch of other things, about curiosity, about diplomacy, about travel, about sort of culture and conceptions of good and bad. I mean, it turns out by looking at what seems like quite a simple question, it. There's actually a whole world we can unpack here. So, Danielle, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your book.
- [02:13]
C
Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:15]
B
Could you start us off by telling us a bit about you and why you decided to write this book?
- [02:20]
C
Sure. So, I'm an assistant professor of history at Nazareth University in Rochester, New York. This book came out of my PhD dissertation, which was on a similar topic. And I think it's something that has also always been really personally interesting to me. I grew up a vegetarian, in a vegetarian family, and so this has kind of always been a question percolating in the back of my mind. I didn't think it was going to be my research area, but it kind of found me again in my. In my graduate work. You know, I was getting ready to start thinking about what I would want to do my dissertation on. And I had always really been interested in how we categorize animals and how that impacts how we treat them. You know, we put animals as humans, in different categories. Our pets, our food, the ones we like to see at the zoo, the ones that we don't want to see, ever. The pests. Right. And then we treat them accordingly. And I've always been interested in those categories. But when I was doing my. My PhD work, I, you know, I had an assignment in my class which was on travel narratives to the Americas. And I showed my class a woodcut I found from the Theodore Debris America collection. And it was of the. These Dutch sailors kind of bludgeoning these penguins to death. And then I talked about how, you know, they were starving, they found all these penguins, they kill them all, and then they have a huge feast. And I'm kind of telling the story to my class. And the class was horrified. Like, the looks of horror on their face was kind of shocking. And I thought about that moment a lot because I was thinking, you know, how many of those students in my class had a chicken sandwich that day, right? Like, but they were horrified at the idea of these penguins dying for the same purpose. And it kind of got me started thinking about how does the colonial period, a period of time where those categories are being negotiated and renegotiated. And I started the project from there and kind of continued on into the book version, which is very much about how we process edibility, this concept of edibility. When we think about plants, there's very clear lines of which ones are edible and which ones are not, which ones are actually poisonous. But it's not so clear with animals. Very few animals are poisonous to eat. Only really a handful, a couple. Most are perfectly fine, safe to eat, but we actually have a very small amount of animals that we consider edible, culturally. And so the book really became about that and how this. This colonial time period was. Was the fashioning of a lot of those categories.
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B
Very interesting indeed to understand kind of the ideas you were bringing together in this project. It's never just right, but it's always very interesting to kind of see the different threads that come together. And there's a whole bunch of things you've already raised there in terms of questions to investigate around kind of who makes the categories and why and what gets put where. Are there any further questions you ended up asking in this book that you want to discuss before we get into what you figured out from them?
- [05:46]
C
Yeah, you know, I think I was really interested in, you know, how edibility shifted over the colonial period, because when I first got into the text, it seemed like all animals were fair game for the European colonizers. And then they. They go away, they disappear. Then it becomes what we're very familiar with, the cows, pigs, chickens, kind of very small amount of animals that they had already domesticated and bring over from Europe. So I really wanted to trace that shift in edibility. But alongside that, I also wanted to think about how the food system is in that the end of the colonial period reflects this kind of change of colonial identity. What does it mean to eat indigenous food versus European food versus American food, and how all those different identities are coalescing. This also includes African foods and African food ways and how this gets added to the American colonial story. So I was really interested in how identity and culture interacted with. With one another alongside this idea of the edible animal and how that was really shifting and changing.
- [07:01]
B
Okay, this is very helpful then, to lay out the foundation for what we're going to be discussing in more detail. If we're going to talk about change, though, obviously there's kind of a before and after that has to be understood. So when we're looking at European travellers going to the Americas at first, first, how did they start off with describing animals that they may not have encountered before in that first instance and kind of what it was like to eat them or why they ate those particular things. Like what was the beginning of that sort of interaction and sort of how they categorized the edibility of these animals.
- [07:38]
C
Yeah, so in the beginning, the Europeans and the European writers are fascinated by all the animals that they see in the Americas. They write about them so much. I mean, it's almost in, you know, every page, there's something that they're. They're going to reference about an animal, even if it's the absence of animals or the size of the animals. They're so fascinated by the animals and that situation in the Americas, and then they're also eating them almost all the time. It's one of the first things they talk about is what they tasted like. So they were so fascinated by animals in the Americas, and they were thinking through the fascination in terms of. Of taste. What do these. Are they good to eat? Was kind of the first question that seems to come up for the colonists. Or they're. They're trying them kind of in. In community with indigenous peoples in this early period as well. Like, they're being offered food and they try it. Honestly, they're having very similar experiences to anybody who has traveled to a very different place. They are experiencing travel through food experiences. They're willing to try things they would never eat at home. Most likely, they don't want to be rude to their hosts. So they're trying things they maybe are a little bit uncomfortable with, but then are pleasantly surprised. It's actually very familiar to people who have traveled and eaten abroad in their. In their life. It's a really similar experience. I think what's so striking, though, about this early period is not just that they are eating the food, but that they love it. Everything they eat, they say, is as good, even better than the food from home. They talk about iguanas being the best type of meat they've ever tasted. Turtles taste like veal. Tapirs taste like beef. Amazonian rodents taste like rabbit. Like, every animal is both familiar or similar to animals they eat in Europe, but also so much better. Bigger, juicier kind of whiter meat, more delicate. Like, these are all the words that they're using all the time. And I think what they're. Part of what they're doing is they are. There's like a jigsaw method of describing the animals, right? How do you describe an American possum to someone who has never seen one before? Well, you have to use things that they do know, right? Has like the tail of a rat, the hands of a monkey, the body of a cat. They have to piece it together. And they do that when they describe the animal physically, but they also do that. That with the taste. How do you explain what something tastes like? Will you use something familiar? It tastes like chicken.
- [10:29]
B
Yeah. I mean, again, that does sound really familiar to, for example, how people post on Instagram today about, you know, I went to this country and I ate this thing, right? And you do have to kind of make sense of the familiar. And obviously, if we continue that comparison to now, one of the sort of impacts or consequences of this is quite often like, ooh, now I want to go on holiday there, right? Or now I want to find A restaurant that serves that kind of food. Was that the same in this period? What were the sorts of impacts and consequences of these descriptions?
- [10:59]
C
Yeah, so, you know, this impact, it's twofold. There's the colonization narratives, the texts that the travelers are writing and publishing back in Europe about the Americas. They're really serving two main functions. The first is exactly as you're saying, to market, to sell the idea of the American colonies. And they're using these texts to drum up interest, maybe even investment, financial investment, cultural investment, kind of emotional investment in the project. And you know, they're telling these stories of these, these strange and fascinating animals that they got to eat to both make the Americas seem exciting, fascinating, exotic, but also a place where the everyday man can eat. They can eat veal easily. A common person who's probably not eating veal all that often in Europe could actually get on a ship and come to America and eat something that pretty much tastes like veal. So they're both making it exciting and fascinating, but not too exotic, that it's not possible that you can't also join in on what we're doing. So they're very much marketing the project. Another thing that the texts are trying to do is also establish a authority, authority over this, you know, new to them place. The early modern period, especially as the travel and colonization is taking place, is very much a time of acknowledge construction and reconstruction. And it's reframing concepts of truth, legitimacy. Eyewitness accounts are starting to mean as much if not more than having noble birth when it comes to reporting on things. For example, so we're seeing in real time with these animal descriptions and these animal food descriptions, the, these writers establishing their authority of, over the information about the Americas because they've been there, because they've seen it, because they've eaten it. Right. It's very much the Instagram post, like Pixar didn't happen. They, they are showing that I've been here by being able to describe these really, really unusual eating experiences. I think, you know, this, the French Calvinist minister, Jean de Laddie, he has this incredible line that I reference in the book, from his book on his travels to Brazil. And I think Larry is perhaps the most obvious about using his firsthand experience, especially his firsthand culinary experience, to establish his authority. He's talking about like some seabirds in the Atlantic that he's describing. But he says, since I have eaten some and therefore seen them both inside and outside, here's the description, right? And so he's basically saying the Best way to know a thing is to eat it. Since I have eaten some, I can tell you about it. I think it's such a great line. You know, he's saying the best way to know a place is to eat there. And so it really emphasizes this connection between authority over all this new information and that firsthand, really, really intimate experience of eating something.
- [14:14]
D
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- [14:42]
A
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- [15:00]
B
That's very helpful to understand because many of those things do in fact seem quite similar, and we wouldn't expect them to necessarily. Right. The time period you cover. 1492-1700 doesn't necessarily sound like Pixar. It didn't happen would be applicable. And yet clearly it is. But there's also some aspects of what they're talking about and why they're talking about food that maybe are weirder or stranger to what we have now. So I wonder if we can switch to talking less about the narratives you came across that were like, yay, this is amazing, and you can have it, too. And instead, we're more like, I'm over here and I'm starving.
- [15:36]
C
Yeah. Yeah. So the starvation accounts are featured prominently throughout all of these, and they're very, very interesting to me. Yeah. And I think, you know, to your point, you would think that, that these would actually play out differently than they do. I think people would think, oh, a starvation account. They're probably about the absence of eating, the experience of hunger. But in fact, the starvation accounts are almost entirely about eating and filled with eating. You know, I, they, they never really say, oh, yeah, we were hungry, we didn't eat anything. That's not really what they are. Instead, these accounts are these, like, long, grueling, sometimes horrifying confessions of what they did eat in what order. And a self defense of those choices. Because the starvation accounts in the colony, that's what's so interesting, I think about them in this moment, right. There's other periods of history where the starvation accounts play out differently. Where it really is. There's no food and people are starving. And it's a very different experience. But these are, they're contained in a world where there is a lot of food, right? Like if you think about the early colonial American environment, we've got millions of deer, where millions, thousands of animals everywhere, like fish in the sea. There's. That was such a huge part of what they're talking about in the narratives of. This is a place filled with resources. So how are they starving? Right? And it's. So, it's such an interesting juxtaposition. But in the accounts, you know, they, they really are spending them talking about how what they run out of is food they're willing to eat, food that they are comfortable eating. And so we start to see them describe the, the choices they have to make as they, as they lose access to their preferred food. And they have to kind of go down what I call an animal typology, a hierarchy of what they are most to least willing to eat. And they're very, very interesting accounts because they tell about what these people were anxious about, how what they viewed as taboo animals, their relationship to animals. You know, the, the closer to human, the less likely people want to eat the animal. So it tells us a lot about categorizations there. So I'm really, I, I really have a lot of fun with the starvation accounts. You know, even though they are gruesome and horrifying in a lot of ways, they can all follow the same pattern. Generally what I found in this context, right, like in the American colonies. So they'll list the animals that, you know, we were starving. We started with this, then when we ran out, we went to this. And they always go from the most culturally edible animals devolving to the least culturally. And I split them into three general phases. So in the first phase, they're eating all the recognizable, appropriate animals until they're all gone. We ate all the cows, all the pigs, all the chickens, the eggs, right? They list those off and they have to kind of say that. They have to say, hey, we did what we were supposed to do. We started with the right animals. But then things got a little bit odd after that. So then they go to the second phase and that's where, you know, they may be starting to eat slightly stranger or less familiar Foodstuff stuff out of their kind of culturally acceptable edible animals. But still edible animals, reptiles, amphibians, rodents, all feature pretty prominently in this phase. And then the third phase, if the account gets that far, things are truly off the rails by this point. This is where they're confessing to eating their pets, objects, really gross stuff, sometimes humans, dead bodies, ill people. Right. Like, we get a lot of really horrifying and upsetting kind of for different reasons stuff in the third phase. And it's always really interesting, I think, when they, when they get there, kind of what they're doing with these accounts, because you have to ask yourself, like, why are they, why are they talking about it? Why are they admitting it? But they are kind of like they're self reporting. They're, they're processing their anxiety, sometimes their grief. A lot of times they're blaming people for what went wrong or they're justifying their behaviors, kind of what they, what they got up to. There's all sorts of reasons why they, they do this, like, narrative typology and. But it tells us a whole lot about how the colonists are thinking about their place in these new settlements and how they, they kind of go over there thinking it's going to be a land aplenty, but they find the reality to be a little bit different than what was marketed to them.
- [20:33]
B
Yeah. I mean, from a historian's point of view, like, this is absolutely fascinating. Right. But I admit I did have some of the same questions you did of, like, why were they writing this down? Right. And you've clearly answered that part. But I guess the corollary is sort of why were people reading it? Because you discuss in the book that these weren't necessarily like, really obscure bits of writing. Like, they were popular amongst European audiences who were not in these places, but we're reading about them, you know, back in Spain, back in England, back wherever. Why was this such a thing that people were interested in?
- [21:05]
C
Yeah, you know, the, the, the American colonial writings, they never become, never overcome the popularity of like, the writings about what's going on in the east or the Reformation. But I would say they're about like, the third most popular writings of the time. You know, I think they're doing again, two different things here. One is, you know, they're really important for building and reinforcing imperial identities as Europeans are kind of understanding their place in the world as Europeans, but also as Spanish or English or French. And so these, this idea of the imperial identity is really informing that. So these texts more generally, I Think do that. But more specifically in these conversations, it's very entertaining, right? Even for people at the time, they're fascinated by these stories. They are consuming the animals in these texts for entertainment. Like humans continue to consume animals for entertainment now. And this is before zoos and the nature documentary, or I think when it comes to starvation accounts, if not the nature documentary, maybe some of those, like rescue documentaries, like things that have gone wrong. The stories of these animals in. And what happens in these early colonial periods, they are repackaged and sold to people who are fascinated by what could be going on over there. Kind of like their armchair consumers. It's another, like, form of consumption, I argue, right? There's the literal consuming of the animal bodies and then there's the consuming of the stories they're sold off as people are fascinated by these adventures abroad. But I think more important than that is that they also serve as guidebooks for future travelers and colonizers. The most. These books are mostly being read by one another, right? Like they are each other's audience first and foremost. You can really tell when you read them that the books are talking to each other and they're. They're informing one another and they're referencing one another. They're building this body of knowledge on how to move through the colonial space, how to effectively colonize it. Some of the texts, like Jose de Acosta, the Jesuit in the Andes, for example, he explicitly states this often that the better they understand the natural environment, the animals, what they can eat, how to move through this world, the better they'll be able to colonize its peoples. Like, they are very clear about those intentions. So I think while they're sold and consumed for entertainment, they're also functional as part of the colonization experience. And especially when we see the starvation narratives. Right? That's a really interesting one because these are often leaders blaming one another for why that or why that colony went south, but ours won't. And they're. They're kind of using that as justifications for. For different choices that they're making or different regions that they're. They're going to. But I think that while very interesting to the common consumer, probably the more important thing to pay attention to for historians is how these books are being used as a process of colonization, not just a product of it.
- [24:37]
B
This is really interesting to understand the ways in which these accounts are being used. Used and this link you're making to the kind of processes of colonization more broadly, because that is something that comes up not just in the accounts of Eating indigenous animals, but also kind of in changing perceptions around like what can and cannot be eaten as time and colonization processes continue. Right. What you were talking about right at the beginning. So now that we have an understanding of how Europeans were encountering animals unfamiliar to them and kind of talking about them, when and why did that change? Because we get to a point where the colonists are now saying, yeah, okay, I used to like eating those things, but now, you know, I wouldn't dare or I'm going to eat, I'm going to bring over some sheep and eat those instead. Like that seems time consuming, expensive. Like why do we see this kind of change and what does this have to do with these processes of colonization?
- [25:31]
C
Yeah, you know, it's so interesting. I think when I went into the project I expected to see maybe clearer lines in this process, but it ended up being a little bit muddier. So there's not really a set year or time frame across the board where, where that's changing. It's more of this like, ongoing process of negotiation. And you know, from the, from the very second voyage, right, Columbus's second voyage, they immediately go back and they, they bring domesticated livestock is one of the first things that happen. So it, the attempt to bring domesticated European livestock to the Americas is immediate. The effectiveness of it, the sustainability of that food source is not as immediate. So it's more about, it's less about the decision to get there and more about the time it takes to be able to do it. So generally we see like in the first decade or so of any given settlement. And that's why the book covers such a large time frame. Because I'm looking at Spain, France, England, looking at a variety of places doing this. And they start at different times, right. So they're all going through the process at different moments, but they're informed by one another, like I said. So the, the English know kind of what the Spanish went through and they make choices based on that, etc. They're also interacting with each other in those spaces and, and that's really interesting part as well. But you know, they, they'll kind of spend about a decade or so trying to get the settlement to be sustainable enough to kind of have the. Not need to import livestock as much have the livestock and is, you know, self replacing through reproduction and agricultural systems. That takes a little while. And that also depends on the natural environment, the predators, the weather, and a variety of things that happen. If there's a starvation incident where they pretty much then wipe out all of their Livestock and start fresh. Right. Like all of these things can come up and can set them back a little bit. But so it's generally a decade or so and then a settlement is a little bit more sustainable. Colonizers start to consider themselves settlers, not travelers. And that's really where we see the shift. And it takes place when the people living there start to see themselves as permanent. And then, and this really, really becomes clear when there's like the second generation, that there's people being born there. That's when we see actually there a focus on maintaining European identity, preferring European food. So they bring the European animals over immediately, but it's takes a little while for them to be able to kind of fully sustain off of those of those animals. Another thing I think is interesting and probably a place worth, with potential for more study I think, than my book necessarily goes into is we, we don't really see a lot of the settlers spending a ton of time talking about requirements for their own diets. Right. So even though they have cows, pigs, chickens, etc. And that's really important for their identity, it's not so much that they have fully stopped eating all indigenous food. In fact, it takes a while. And in some places there are, there are still people, settlers who eat indigenous American foods. I'm thinking of like squirrels, alligators, raccoons, right. These deer turkeys become hugely popular in Europe. It's not a wholesale rejection of Europe of American animals in favor of European ones. Each animal kind of has a negotiation and a renegotiation based on these, these hierarchies, right, that we talked about before. How close are they to indigenous animals, to humans? How close far away are they from European animals? These are all things that they are thinking about almost on a case by case basis. Where we see the change in edibility appear most forcefully is where the colonizers, the settlers are criticizing indigenous people. I think that's what's really interesting. So that's where it comes up the most in the sources. Whether it's Spanish sermons to Nahua people encouraging them to eat Spanish food, especially animals. Right. We actually don't really see all this, this happen all that much with plant food. But they're specifically saying you should eat Spanish animals, you should eat cows, you should eat chickens, you should not eat. They'll call them things like dirty animals. You should not eat the toads, the, the spiders, the locusts. You should not eat your, the, the rodents. Right. Like all the things that they were eating, you know, before. So it's the prescriptions of indigenous people to. To, you know, to assimilate to actually European eating styles. Where we see the shift, most prominently colonial letters that report back in Europe, kind of the goings on in the colonies. You'll see criticisms of indigenous people for continuing to eat American animals despite the availability of cows and pigs. And that's their real concern. Not that they ever ate them, not that they have been eaten in the past by anybody. But why would you still eat them? We have the better food now. You could eat the cows and the pigs now. And that's where the criticism comes out. So, you know, ultimately, I think the change in edibility is reflected in the records the strongest, where it feels like it's. It's resistance to colonialism, specifically indigenous resistance. Colonialism. You know, it's one thing to eat the iguanas and the toads when there was nothing else there, but now there's farms, now there's beef, there's pork, there's enough to go around. So eating the old food, that's a statement. And so I think in the records at least, it's easier to see these things appear when people are anxious about them, when they're upset about them, when they're complaining about them. I think that plenty of settlers probably were still eating American animals either for taste or probably necessity. But that's not going to necessarily be as bothersome as some of these more resisting colonialism examples. So I think those appear in the records far more.
- [32:29]
B
This is really interesting to understand what shows up in the record and why. And I think this goes back to kind of what we were saying right at the beginning, that it might seem like a really simple question of kind of who's eating what when, but actually by looking at what people were eating and what they were. Don't chew on that, Max.
- [32:45]
A
Cooper loves that shoe too.
- [32:47]
B
Oh, now he's into Cooper's food. Wow, he is loving it. What do you feed Cooper?
- [32:53]
A
Blue Buffalo Life protection formula. He never leaves a crumb. I love it because it's made with high quality protein, nutrient rich fruits and veggies and wholesome whole grains.
- [33:02]
B
Looks like we're switching to blue blue Buffalo. Foods are made with the superior ingredients your dog needs to thrive. Can your dog food say that? Visit feedbluefood.com to learn more saying about it. We can get into all of these other ideas. I mean, framing it as anxieties I think is really intriguing too, because it is questions kind of power and who sets the rules, not just sort of what people's preferences are around food. So really interesting to understand those linkages there. And not something I was really kind of expecting going into the book. And it sounds like this is a bit surprising to you too. Were there any other surprises that really jumped out at you in the research or writing process of all of this?
- [33:43]
C
Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, I think one thing that really surprised me was, you know, I was pretty sure going into the project that I was going to find that eating animals is. Is highly emotional. And because I, and that's true to my own experiences, that there's a lot of kind of personal, illogical stuff happening when it comes to eating animals. That was really clear in the starvation accounts, right? You have all these accounts where, you know, you're reading like, okay, then we ate this, then we ate this. And they don't make any sense, right? They're, they're, they're starving, but they're leaving bigger, calorically dense animals way later, right? They're eating like, roots and, and mushrooms and toads before they eat their dog. That is an emotional choice. That is not the. That's not a choice of somebody who's making a purely logical decision there. They don't want to eat their dog because they have a relationship with the animal, but that would feed you far longer than the toads and the roots and the kind of creepy crawlies they were finding. And so I kind of already expected that going in, that the eating animals is very emotional and that it was going to be an emotionally charged thing that I was reading. What I didn't expect, what I was really surprised by in the researching and starting the book was that I didn't think that there was that one of the emotions I was going to find would be rage or vengeance. Like, I didn't expect that one. So I ended up adding a chapter pretty late in the project about what I call revenge eating. Because I kept finding these, like, random instances, little asides, little moments here or there, of colonists kind of maybe getting bitten or attacked by an American animal, whether it's like a jaguar or a stingray, right? Big or small. And instead of just, you know, killing the animal in vengeance, they also eat the animal to really solidify that domination, that victory over the animal. And I was really surprised by that. It was a surprising emotion to bring to eating animals. And then I also thought it was really surprising because generally humans don't eat predators. That's not a common thing across cultures. But what I was finding in the records, in this really, I think, anxious and emotionally fraught time Of. Of settling and creating. Being in a new place as unfamiliar and. And feels dangerous, that if, you know, this animal, this predator hurt the colonists or their family or their settlement or threatened the settlement. There's this really interesting example of a jaguar that was kind of like repeatedly stalking a settlement and, you know, not really hurting any people, but, like, taking their. Their livestock. It's a threat to their food security, the settlement's stability as a whole. So that's when we see this kind of revenge killing. And usually almost every time, it's a pretty brutal retribution. We might call it overkill. Right. And then it ends in a meal. And that was so surprising to me because we don't usually see that in any other context, this kind of revenge eating. I was also really surprised that most of the time in those revenge accounts, the writer would gender the offending animal female. And that's not really common in other accounts. And I thought that was really interesting too, this kind of. This. This further domination or control element in these moments that they would be. They would be gendering animals that I might argue would actually be really hard to tell that the animal was female. For example, there's a. There's an account of John Smith of Jamestown and Pocahontas fame, who. He gets stung by a stingray. And, you know, they. They kill and eat the stingray, they say. But they. They are always referring to the stingray as a she, as her. And I don't know that they could have accurately sexed the stingray at that time. I find that to be surprising. So I found all of those accounts really interesting. And so much so I end adding that that late chapter.
- [38:09]
B
Always interesting when projects kind of take you in directions you weren't expecting, and you're like, oh, wait, now I get to go investigate this. So thank you for taking us behind the scenes in your writing process. Is there anything we haven't discussed that you're hoping readers take away from this book?
- [38:26]
C
You know, so first, I hope that readers will take away this awareness that you. Animal edibility is culturally constructed, which I think if people haven't spent a lot of time thinking about that, they don't realize that the animals that are edible has changed throughout history and can change again and might change again, that animal edibility is socially dictated. Right. There's a kind of like a broader cultural understanding of what's edible, but it's also incredibly personal, and that's going to vary from person to person. I think that interrogating that further, thinking more critically about that, is a Takeaway that I hope people get. I think thinking about how animals are not actually split into categories of edible or inedible, but thinking of it as a hierarchy, this animal typology from most to least edible, to a society or to an individual, I hope people take that away. I also hope people think about how, you know, especially from a. An academic perspective, historians or scholars, that food history and animal history are interconnected. Right. There's a reason why people feel very differently about eating meat than eating plants, why food taboos and restrictions tend to be around meat. And it's because there's something about the animal being this living, the sentient being that we have relationships with that changes the dynamic for a food relationship. So I hope people think more about that, especially people in food or animal history kind of thinking of these categories as intersecting with one another. And then I think more broadly, I hope people take away maybe this larger picture of how in this environmental disaster that we're currently in is inherently colonial. The way we treat the Earth, animals, indigenous nations across the world, these are all connected and it's all rooted in this period of colonization. That the food system we're in is a colonial food system. That the environmental destruction of the planet is a colonial situation. Right. And that we need to think about it in those historical terms and understand the roots of it as we hopefully move towards possibly a positive outcome.
- [40:56]
B
Certainly lots to think about from that. I think a good place to finish our discussion on the book with those thoughts. But is there anything you're currently working on that you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?
- [41:07]
C
Yeah, I mean, I'm working on my next book, which is still going to be thinking about categories of animals and how we treat them in the colonial space. But I'm turning towards all those predators that. And dangerous animals, the animals that bite and eat back essentially in the Americas. What I'm finding is that they. They very quickly, in the colonial context, change their category from monster to pest, to be eradicated, to kind of clear the way for all that livestock that the colonists want to bring in. So this feels very much like the sequel alongside that I'm working on project about crocodiles, because I think they're the most interesting animals of all of them. And they encapsulate and defy every one of the categorizations I've been researching. That kind of crocodile keeps coming up as I go through all these projects in this research of like they are all of it. They're predator, pest, monster, food, commodity, caricature. Every possible character category the crocodile is. And I think they're so interesting that they deserve their own book. So I think I'm, I'm sneaking that one in first, and then I'll, I'll turn to the, to the bigger one after that.
- [42:21]
B
That sounds very intriguing. Thank you for the sneak peek, and I hope all of those projects go well. Of course. In the meantime, listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled Eating Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic Consuming Empire, 1492-1700, published by Amsterdam University Press in 2025. Danielle, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [42:45]
C
Thank you so much for having.