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more information – www.cambridge.org/9781107032828
 GLOBAL APPETITES

Global Appetites explores how industrial agriculture and countercul-

tural food movements shape ideas of U.S. hegemony in the century
since the First World War. Allison Carruth’s study centers on the
“literature of food” – a body of work that comprises literary realism,
late modernism, and magical realism along with culinary writing, food
memoir, and advertising. Through analysis of texts ranging from Willa
Cather’s novel O Pioneers! (1913) to Novella Carpenter’s nonfiction
work Farm City (2009), Carruth argues for the centrality of what
she terms American food power to the history of globalization and
examines its ramifications for regional cultures and ecosystems. Lively
and accessible, this interdisciplinary study will appeal to scholars of
American literature and culture as well as those working in the fields of
food studies, agriculture history, science and technology studies, and
the environmental humanities.

allison carruth is Assistant Professor of English at the University

of California, Los Angeles, where she is affiliated with the Center for
the Study of Women, Institute for Society and Genetics, and Institute
of the Environment and Sustainability. Her research focuses on
contemporary American literature and new media, the environmental
humanities, food studies, and science and technology studies. She
received her PhD from Stanford University.
 GLOBAL APPETITES
American Power and the Literature of Food

ALLISON CARRUTH
University of California, Los Angeles
 cambridge university press
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107032828

© Allison Carruth 2013

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2013

Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Carruth, Allison.
Global appetites : American power and the literature of food / Allison Carruth,
University of California, Los Angeles.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-03282-8
1. Agriculture in literature. 2. Food in literature.
3. American literature – 20th century – History and criticism.
4. American literature – Women authors – History and criticism.
5. Cather, Willa, 1873–1947 – Criticism and interpretation. 6. Morrison, Toni. Tar baby.
7. Ozeki, Ruth L. – Criticism and interpretation. 8. Food writing – United States.
9. Agricultural industries – United States. 10. Globalization. I. Title.
ps228.a52c37 2013
810.90 3564–dc23 2012031891

isbn 978-1-107-03282-8 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to
in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such
Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
 To Barron Bixler
For the words in this book and the many meals that inspired them
 Contents

List of Figures page viii

Acknowledgments xi

1 Introduction: The Power of Food 1

2 Rural Modernity: Willa Cather and the Rise of Agribusiness 19
3 “Luxury Feeding” and War Rations: Food Writing at
Midcentury 49
4 Supermarkets and Exotic Foods: Toni Morrison’s “Chocolate
Eater” 90
5 Postindustrial Pastoral: Ruth Ozeki and the New Muckrakers 117
6 The Locavore Memoir: Food Writing in the Age of
Information 154

Notes 169
Bibliography 213
Index 235

vii
 List of Figures

1 “Still Life #30.” 1963. Museum of Modern Art, Counter Space:

Design and the Modern Kitchen Exhibition. © Estate of Tom
Wesselmann / Licensed by VAGA, New York. Reprinted with
the permission of VAGA and Art Resource. page 3
2 “Electrified Farm.” 1939–1940. New York World’s Fair
Exhibition. Courtesy of the New York Public Library,
Manuscript and Archives Division. 3
3 “Feed Mill, California 2008.” © Barron Bixler. Reprinted with
the permission of the artist. 13
4 “Your Country Calls: Enlist – Plow – Buy Bonds.” Circa 1917–
1918. World War I recruitment poster created by Lloyd Meyers
and published by Hamilton Press. Reprinted with the
permission of the World War Posters Collection (Mss 36),
Literary Manuscripts Collection, University of Minnesota
Libraries, Minneapolis. 36
5 “Save Waste Fats for Explosives.” 1943. World War II food
rationing poster created by Henry Koerner and the Office of
War Information and published by the U.S. Government
Printing Office. Courtesy of the Hennepin County Library,
Kittelson World War II Collection. 57
6 “Rationing Means a Fair Share for All of Us.” 1943. World War
II food rationing poster created by the Office of Price
Administration and published by the U.S. Government
Printing Office. Courtesy of the Hennepin County Library,
Kittelson World War II Collection. 63
7 Photograph of Hershey Ration D Bar and Tropical Chocolate
Bar. Circa 1942–1944. Courtesy of the Hershey Community
Archives, Hershey, PA. 74

viii
 List of Figures ix
8 “Nestlé’s Swiss Milk – Richest in Cream.” Théophile Alexandre
Steinlen, 1894. Reprinted with the permission of the Mary
Evans Picture Library. 110
9 “Battery Cage.” © 1990 Sue Coe. Reprinted with the permission
of Galerie St. Etienne, New York. 125
10 “Milking Parlor, California 2007.” © Barron Bixler. Reprinted
with the permission of the artist. 130
11 “Feed Lot.” © 1991 Sue Coe. Reprinted with the permission of
Galerie St. Etienne, New York. 133
12 “Veal Skinner.” © 1991 Sue Coe. Reprinted with the permission
of Galerie St. Etienne, New York. 134
 Acknowledgments

I cannot imagine Global Appetites without Barron Bixler, who saw a scholar
in me a decade ago and has, ever since, supported my work and enriched my
life. My gratitude to him runs deep. In addition to the time he devoted to
reading drafts and weighing in on ideas, his photographs of the San Joaquin
Valley and Northeast Brazil transformed how I see the massive interven-
tions of industrial agriculture as well as more intimate acts of farming,
fishing, and breaking bread. Those images inspire the pages that follow. To
you, B, I dedicate this book with love.
I have benefited over the years from extraordinary mentors and col-
leagues. I owe my greatest debt to Ramón Saldívar, who, as my dissertation
director, guided the development of this project at every turn. My admira-
tion of him as a scholar, teacher, and leader is difficult to convey. Other
faculty members at Stanford were generous with their time and ideas. I
thank Gavin Jones and Andrea Lunsford for pushing me to conceptualize
the power of food for literary studies, Ursula Heise for blazing a trail in the
environmental humanities, and Sianne Ngai for helping me to think in new
ways about the pastoral. In 2012, I was fortunate to join the faculty at
UCLA, where I brought this project to a close. I am grateful to Ali Behdad,
Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Carrie Hyde, Rachel Lee, Marissa López, Kathleen
McHugh, Michael North, Felicity Nussbaum, Mark Seltzer, and Robert
Watson for their warm welcome and intellectual camaraderie. I thank
the UCLA English Department and Office of Faculty Diversity and
Development for providing generous research funds, and I thank my
research assistant Brendan O’Kelly and indexer Helene Ferranti for their
careful work while the book was in production.
A year in residence at UC Santa Barbara as the Arnhold Postdoctoral
Fellow provided the initial opportunity to develop the book manuscript
while working with a marvelous group of faculty that included David
Cleveland, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Stephanie LeMenager, Alan Liu, Rita
Raley, Russell Samolsky, Daniela Soleri, and William Warner. Colleagues
xi
xii Acknowledgments
and graduate students at the University of Oregon helped me to hone the
book’s argument. Thanks especially to Lara Bovilsky, Alan Dickman,
Margaret Hallock, Kate Mondloch, Paul Peppis, Carol Stabile, Courtney
Thorsson, David Vázquez, Molly Westling, and Harry Wonham. I would
also like to thank Darra Goldstein for her judicious responses to the manu-
script and for her friendship. The opportunity to serve as the Associate
Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford
from 2011–12 was fortuitous. I owe a great deal to Fred Turner and Colleen
McCallion for making the year productive and inspiring.
At Cambridge University Press, I am indebted to Ray Ryan, Louis Gulino,
Marielle Poss, and Cherline Daniel as well as to my anonymous readers, who
all improved the book in incalculable ways. The book further benefited from
feedback at the American Comparative Literature Association, Modernist
Studies Association, Modern Language Association, and Willa Cather
International Seminar as well as from a dissertation fellowship made possible
by the Mellon Foundation. I also acknowledge the University of Oregon for a
Summer Research Award and Junior Professorship Development Grant, the
Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics for a Resident Scholar award, and
the UCLA Friends of English for generous funding to support image per-
missions. Thank you to Martin Schapiro for his work on the cover design,
which originally came from Greenpeace and an anonymous designer. I thank
the following individuals and organizations for permission to reprint images:
Sue Coe and Galerie St. Etienne, the Estate of Tom Wesselmann, Hennepin
County Library, Hershey Community Archives, the Mary Evans Picture
Library, the New York Public Library, University of Minnesota Libraries,
and, once more, Barron Bixler.
The years spent in graduate school and as a new professor were made
more joyful thanks to family and friends. For the countless hours spent
sharing meals while talking about our work, I thank Yanoula Athanassakis,
Denise Boulangé, Benedetta Faedi, Harris Feinsod, Michael Hoyer, Ruth
Kaplan, and Ju Yon Kim. I am profoundly appreciative of Claire Bowen,
Laura Crescimano, Heather Houser, and Amy Tigner for being there
through thick and thin in addition to being cherished collaborators. To
all of the Carruths, Bixlers, Evans, Emrys, Hilkers, and Skeens in my life,
I am grateful to each of you for making my sense of family big-hearted
indeed. To Penney Carruth and Pat and Harold Hilker, I thank you for
loving me as your own and for providing oases in which to write. And to my
granny Polly and, in memoriam, my grandparents, I express my gratitude
for teaching me the art of storytelling. I can only begin to acknowledge all
my mother, Patricia Carruth, and my father, Dennis Carruth, have done
 Acknowledgments xiii
for me. They have buoyed me through times of self-doubt, celebrated every
milestone along the way, and taught me to make work a labor of love. For
this, and so much more, I thank you.
Finally, I offer thanks to the farmers and farmworkers who bring food to
San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Eugene, and Los Angeles as well as to the
many chefs around the world who confer to food both a poetry and a
politics.
 chapter 1

Introduction: The Power of Food

It is to serve the farmers of this great open country that teeming cities
have arisen, great stretches of navigation have been opened, a mighty
network of railways has been constructed, a fast increasing mileage of
highways has been laid out, and modern inventions have stretched their
lines of communication among all the various communities and into
nearly every home. Agriculture holds a position in this country that it
was never before able to secure anywhere else on earth. . . . [I]n America,
the farm has long since ceased to be associated with a mode of life that
could be called rustic. It has become a great industrial enterprise.
Calvin Coolidge, Address to Farm Bureau Federation (1925)1
[T]oday in cosmopolitan Dublin, you can choose to eat an Indian
curry, a Mexican burrito, or an Irish breakfast. With an increasingly
global food trade a single meal can originate from ten locations across
the planet. . . . In eagerness to minimize the distance our food travels,
and connect flavours to places, we may risk over-simplifying the
complex systems that comprise our food systems. But, whether one
grows local or eats global, food will always be inextricably linked to
place; and places are in constant flux.
Center for Genomic Gastronomy,
Edible: The Taste of Things to Come (2012)2

In 1925, Calvin Coolidge looked out on an audience of farmers and policy-

makers and effectively broke with the agrarian rhetoric of his predecessors.
If Thomas Jefferson imagined the United States to be a nation of yeoman
farmers, Coolidge called 150 years later for a rural workforce savvy in “manage-
ment,” “intricate machinery,” and “marketing.”3 Even as the president
announced the arrival of industrial agriculture, his rhetoric anticipated a
postindustrial era in which farming would be just one among many “enter-
prises” constituting the human food chain – what the Harvard Business Review
would call in 1956 “agribusiness.”4 The speech captures a new dimension of the
American national imaginary, I contend, according to which food and agricul-
ture propel, rather than offer a retreat, from modernity. A concept of the food
1
2 Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food
system thus takes hold in American culture, calling into question what is
currently an intellectual separation of agricultural history from food studies.5
At World’s Fairs that took place from the 1930s through the 1960s, the
systemic connections between the nation’s farms and kitchens were evident
in exhibits about the future of food, which were also very much about the U.S.
appetite for international power. These futuristic displays presented a cornu-
copian nation whose agricultural surpluses and scientific innovations com-
bined to generate a global utopia of edible goods. The Fairs gave symbolic
expression to a material reality: the nation’s agricultural economy, in Warren
Belasco’s words, “had reached its geographical limits,” and the power Coolidge
correlated in 1925 to food production would now require not (or at least not
only) territorial expansion but new technologies and new markets.6
At the same time, a neo-Malthusian streak haunted the American vision
of a global food frontier. Plans for futuristic farms and kitchens foresaw a
world in which the reduction of farmland and the growth of the human
population would make technological fixes vital to manufacturing experi-
ences of culinary abundance out of a handful of staple crops. In the 1960s,
the decade in which the Fairs came to an end, American Pop Art painter
Tom Wesselmann exposed the rhetoric of American abundance as a fallacy
in his “Still Life #30,” a garish painting of a kitchen teeming with food
(Figure 1). The apparent cornucopia in the still life is, in fact, a monoculture
of consumer brands, while the repetition of packaged meat, bland starches,
and canned goods undercuts the colorful kitchen scene and the verdant
townscape beyond its open window. Notwithstanding a smattering of
vegetables and a bright red apple (whose singularity suggests the post-
Edenic character of the Cold War food supply), “Still Life #30” offers a
mosaic of culinary monotony. The “Electrified Farm,” which appeared at
the 1939 New York World’s Fair, suggests that the conceptual origins of
Wesselmann’s homogenous yet overflowing kitchen lie in earlier designs
for standardized and productive farms (Figure 2).7 Today, we may not find
the push-button farms that engineers forecasted in the thirties, but we can
find farmers who spend their time, as novelist Ruth Ozeki pictures a
character in All Over Creation (2003), “at a computer, sweating at it, trying
to input data and generate readouts and maps.”8 So, too, can we witness a
global market for biofuels that require more energy to produce and distrib-
ute than the energy they provide.9 In line with Coolidge’s claim that the
“network” of railroads, highways, and communication lines served above all
to support the industrialization of food production, future-oriented designs
like the “Electrified Farm” predicted a time when power would be all too
literal as an organizing concept for the modern food system.
 Introduction: The Power of Food 3

1 “Still Life #30.” 1963. Museum of Modern Art, Counter Space: Design and the Modern
Kitchen Exhibition. © Estate of Tom Wesselmann / Licensed by VAGA, New York.
Reprinted with the permission of VAGA and Art Resource.

2 “Electrified Farm.” 1939–1940. New York World’s Fair Exhibition. Courtesy of the
New York Public Library, Manuscript and Archives Division.
4 Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food
Since the moment when Coolidge addressed the Farm Bureau, the political
and economic power that has accrued to those who control the world food
supply has turned out to be an indicator of global power writ large, and the
hegemony of the United States has had a great deal to do with food ever since.
Today, what I term U.S. food power is both global in scope and subject
to manifold forms of opposition: it drives the international adoption of
genetically modified seeds (GMOs), but fuels anti-GMO movements and
seed-saver organizations; it inspires the post-9/11 revival of “victory gardens” as
instruments of national food security, but spurs community supported agri-
culture (CSA) as a means to make food systems ecologically and socially
sustainable; and it enables the global reach of American food brands, but
energizes alternative dietary practices. The United States is, moreover, not the
world’s sole food power. Nearly a century since Coolidge delivered his speech,
the “great industrial enterprise” has taken root in China, Brazil, Mexico,
Australia, India, France, and elsewhere, while transnational social movements
have mobilized to contest that enterprise. Put simply, food has become a
political mobilizer and cultural buzzword. In the United States, the number
of protests, activist groups, conferences, books, films, art installations, and
websites devoted to food and food politics grows by the year. This popular
discourse attests that food both participates in “complex systems,” from regional
watersheds to international markets, and circulates in multivalent cultural
forms, from traditional genres like almanacs and cookbooks to new media
like blogs and bioart experiments. To invoke Roland Barthes, the “polysemia”
of food in contemporary society – as in the multiple social and, I would hasten
to add, ecological structures it shapes – is a constitutive feature of modernity.10
The reasons for the proliferation of food movements and food media
during the last decade are numerous. Perhaps most importantly, environ-
mental groups have publicized scientific findings that industrial agriculture
is a major contributor to climate change at the same time that volatility in
rice, wheat, and corn prices have highlighted a troubling paradox of the
modern food system: despite tremendous gains in the productivity of
agriculture, nearly one billion people are hungry.11 The 2012 exhibition
Edible: A Taste of Things to Come illustrates another paradox of the modern
food system, one that inspires this book: the richness of cultural responses to
the system’s perceived failings. Organized by the playful art collective
known as the Center for Genomic Gastronomy, the exhibition assembled
artists, activists, cooks, scientists, and hobbyists to imagine possible futures
of food. With installations like “Disaster Pharming” and “Vegan Ortolan,”
the exhibition showcased the outer reaches of molecular gastronomy and
agricultural genetics alongside more familiar “countercuisines”12 such as
 Introduction: The Power of Food 5
vegetarianism and raw food. In positing these futures, the exhibition was
highly critical of the status quo. The Edible catalog concludes with two
infographics: one showing disinvestments in small farmers and increases in
obesity rates and another charting the decline of agricultural diversity under
the industrialized food regime (in which wheat, rice, milk, potatoes, sugar,
and corn have displaced the thousands of edible plants long cultivated
around the world).13 Paired with this lament about the present, however,
is a celebration of the culinary cosmopolitanism that the present affords.
De-centering the United States, and indeed the nation state, as the locus of
food power, the Edible curators suggest that the global circulation of food-
stuffs and food cultures allows the individual eater to act as a world citizen.
Although Global Appetites makes the case for the cultural significance of
the modern food system and the power of a nation like the United States
within it, U.S. food power in the period since the First World War certainly
has historical precedents. Coolidge acknowledged in 1925 that the farm had
“long . . . ceased to be associated with a mode of life that could be called
rustic.” Broadening his point, we can identify in European empires and in
the colonial United States the twin impulses to expand the geographic scale
of food distribution and transform the technological apparatus of agriculture.
We also can trace back to the ancient world the very forms of cosmopolitan
consumption that the Edible exhibition identifies as uniquely modern and
urban. Food historian Massimo Montanari observes that the “social expan-
sion of globalization” should not lead us to “forget its ancient origins as a
cultural model.”14 At the same time, Montanari contrasts the “infinite local
variations” that once defined international cuisines with the current
“tendency toward uniformity of consumer goods” that multinational corpo-
rations have effectively promoted.15 It is my contention that literature
provides a powerful medium through which to chart both the historical
continuities and cultural ruptures that inform late modern appetites for
world cuisines and national aspirations for global food power.
Moving from the First World War to the post-9/11 era, Global Appetites
argues for the centrality of food to accounts of globalization and U.S.
hegemony that pervade the literature of this period. Across genres, literature
is a vehicle attuned to the modern food system due to the capacity of
imaginative texts to shuttle between social and interpersonal registers and
between symbolic and embodied expressions of power. Just as importantly,
literature has a facility with shifting from macroscopic to intimate scales of
representation that can provide an incisive lens on the interactions between
local places and global markets that are so central to how communities and
corporations produce, exchange, and make use of food in the modern
6 Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food
period. While wide-ranging in its primary materials, the book zeroes in on
one question: What forms does the writing of food take in the age of
American agribusiness? This question proves pertinent to a wide array of
texts, from cookbooks that challenge the products and ideologies of fast
food to novels that depict the modernity of rural communities. The
literature of food that this book maps includes not just culinary writing
and agrarian narrative, but also experimental poetry, postmodern fiction,
government propaganda, advertising, memoirs, and manifestos. This body
of literature takes shape after the First World War, when industrial agri-
culture really took off in the United States, and gains momentum during
the Cold War, a period in which U.S. corporations began to market food
brands and packaged foods internationally. Engaging with these historical
shifts, writers elucidate and at times challenge what Henry Luce called in
1941 “The American Century.”16 For Luce, the exceptional history of the
United States underwrites a national imperative to lead the world in the
twentieth century toward the arguably competing goals of “free enterprise”
and political “freedom and justice.”17 From Willa Cather to Toni Morrison,
the writers whom I discuss in the pages that follow articulate this sense of
American exceptionalism, yet often through a negative form that defines
the United States as the main origin of imperialist and unjust practices
attending the globalization of food.
One could argue that the literary history this book traces reaches back at
least to the turn of the century, when writers such as Upton Sinclair and
Frank Norris begin to investigate the rise of industrial agriculture and the
corporate ownership of food infrastructure. Hsuan Hsu reminds American
Studies scholars that 1898 is a particularly pivotal year for the history of U.S.
power as a moment when the Spanish-American War crystallized the
nation’s imperial aspirations and actions.18 Although writers like Sinclair
make cameo appearances in Global Appetites and although I concur with
Hsu’s historical argument, I show that it is not until the First World War
that a discourse of food power pervades both politics and literature, just as
it is then that the methods of industrial agriculture and the products of
U.S. food companies pervade the world system.19 Investigating a set
of writers who tackle these historical developments, the book contributes
to cultural theories of globalization. Since the 1980s, globalization has
come to describe a set of institutions, ideologies, and practices that advance
modes of border-crossing connectivity – what sociologist Anthony Giddens
terms the “disembedding” of communities from local contexts.20 While the
term globalization offers a kind of clarity in connoting free trade, mass
media, and consumer culture, scholars have employed it in often sharply
 Introduction: The Power of Food 7
divergent analyses. As Ursula K. Heise observes in Sense of Place, Sense
of Planet, some theorists “see globalization principally as an economic
process and as the most recent form of capitalist expansion, whereas others
emphasize its political and cultural dimensions, or characterize it as a
heterogeneous and uneven process whose various components . . . do not
unfold according to the same logic and at the same pace,” an insightful gloss
of a field that includes the work of Arjun Appadurai, Ulrich Beck, Daniel
Bell, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Saskia Sassen, and others.21 The now
omnipresent concept of globalization in the social sciences and humanities
serves, furthermore, to encapsulate a host of social conditions associated
with the contemporary period as well as to synthesize the overlapping
historical designations of late modernity (Beck), late capitalism (Harvey),
postmodernism (Jameson), postindustrialism (Bell), and postcolonialism
(Appadurai and Sassen).
Shifting the lens of globalization inquiry to food, I have come to question
a central premise within this body of theory: the idea that globalization
separates spaces of production and consumption, intensifying the process
Karl Marx termed “commodity fetishism” and giving rise to decolonial
modes of resistance to late capitalism (or what Harvey labels the “new
imperialism”).22 Global Appetites addresses decolonial movements that resist
economic globalization, such as those calling for food justice and seed
sovereignty. So too does the book credit those late capitalist ideologies –
from free trade to global branding – that depend on the geographic and
psychic distance between people and that profit from our enchantment with
things. Indeed, we see commodity fetishism at work nowhere more clearly
than with food. Outside a small if growing subculture, most consumers in
the contemporary United States shop weekly at supermarkets, where the
labor conditions and environmental consequences of the produce are as
hidden as those of the brand-name packages overflowing from the center
aisles. If global commodities like a can of Coke and the Big Mac exemplify
Marx’s theory, one’s indulgence in a fair-trade-certified bar of chocolate is
surely no less an instance of commodity fetishism than the hurried purchase
of a fast food meal. However, despite how robustly the modern food system
reinforces the idea that globalization is the apotheosis of capitalism, there is
a countervailing pattern to apprehend. Globalization, as this book con-
cludes, also provides the imaginative frameworks and material structures for
the contemporary movement to re-localize food and reconnect producers
and consumers. This contention speaks not only to globalization studies but
also to environmental criticism, and especially to recent work that has
questioned the centrality of place-based politics and localism in North
8 Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food
American environmentalism.23 From Cather’s novel O Pioneers! (1913) to
Novella Carpenter’s memoir Farm City (2009), the primary materials
I examine span a century to provide a new account of globalization that
emerges out of an environmental sensibility at once local and global in its
coordinates. Imaginatively reconnecting farmers and eaters ‒ cities and
countrysides – the literature of food shows us that the endgame of global-
ization may not be the free market that the United States has underwritten
for decades and backed with its military. Rather, it opens up the possibility
that the outcome of globalization may be a postcapitalist system defined by
interchanges between regional communities and the global networks that
not only fulfill appetites for exotic foods but also circulate the knowledge
and resources that advance alternative food movements, from organic
agriculture to urban farming.

This thesis informs my analytical methodology, which expands the

parameters of food writing beyond taste, the table, and cuisine. I depart
from what has been a tendency in the humanities to treat as separate
objects of analysis, on the one hand, culinary practices and gastronomical
rhetoric and, on the other, agricultural production and agrarian discourse.
This intervention informs the predominance of women writers in the
book, which emerges out of my finding that the distinction observed
between writing about eating and writing about farming is gendered as
much as it is formal. Scholars of the American pastoral and agrarian
traditions have emphasized male writers, from Frank Norris to Wendell
Berry, particularly when their interest is in how rural literature treats the
sweeping forces of industrialization and U.S. expansionism. Although
Cather is among the exceptions to this pattern, in focusing on her
importance to American regionalism, critics tend to diminish her atten-
tion to matters national and global in scope. With respect to culinary
literature, critics have defined that rhetorical mode primarily around the
spaces of the kitchen and the table, thus bracketing it from the wider food
system. Rethinking the divide between agriculture and cuisine in literary
and cultural studies, I examine a group of women writers whose texts mix
formal modes to depict the entanglements of growing, procuring, and
consuming food and the interdependencies of food culture and agriculture
under globalization.
Food studies scholars such as Warren Belasco, Amy Bentley, Denise
Gigante, Harvey Levenstein, and Doris Witt have shown just how significant
dietary habits and culinary regimes are to cultural histories of race, class, and
gender.24 This scholarship revitalizes structuralist theories of cuisine that
 Introduction: The Power of Food 9
Barthes, Mary Douglas, and Claude Lévi-Strauss formulated in the sixties,
while also asserting the value of historicist approaches to the study of food.25
That early cohort of structuralist thinkers argued for the social significance of
eating by defining food as a system of communication with the capacity to
create meaning beyond its “material reality.”26 In turn, their semiotic analyses
provided the intellectual foundation for foodways27 to become a subject first
in anthropology and cultural geography and, more recently, in the human-
ities. As Jennifer Fleissner notes, the turn to food in the humanities has
focused since the late nineties on reexamining an established philosophical
distinction between “aesthetic and gustatory taste,” a distinction Barthes
called into question in his seminal comparison of French and American
cuisines.28 At the same time, the work of Terry Gifford, Leo Marx,
Raymond Williams, and others has made rural culture and agricultural
industry important subjects for literary history.29 These scholars demonstrate
how multivalent the pastoral tradition is by comparing ideas of rural land-
scapes that draw on idyllic poetry to realist narratives of farm life that activate
the georgic and almanac traditions. The arc and argument of this book are
indebted to both of these trajectories within literary and cultural studies.
Global Appetites departs from prior scholarship, however, in showing that the
history of modernity centers in no small measure on the interactions between
places of food production and experiences of food consumption. The book
thus recontextualizes Berry’s assertion in “The Pleasures of Eating” that
“eating is an agricultural act” by intervening in the localism that his assertion
has inspired in sustainable agriculture and related environmental move-
ments.30 In the period that Global Appetites covers, the term food signifies a
chain of activities that travels all the way from planting a seed to relishing a
square of chocolate and from farms near and far to one’s evening meal.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the literature of food breaks
from two genres that map onto the scholarly gap I am identifying between
studies of the culinary and studies of the agricultural: namely, gastronomical
primers focusing on taste and fine dining and pastoral narratives about the
relative simplicity of rural life. Although both genres remain active, as we
will see, new cultural templates emerge alongside them to articulate how
the social structures and experiential realities of food most change with the
rise of factory farms and branded foods. My aim is to define these templates
and situate them within the social, technological, and environmental his-
tories of food in the context of agribusiness and in the related context of
globalization. Chapter 2 elaborates on this keyword of agribusiness through
a reconsideration of Cather’s Nebraska novels O Pioneers!, My Ántonia
(1918), and One of Ours (1922). Central to these novels is a story of rural
10 Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food
modernity: a sense of agrarian communities as new sites for industrial
infrastructure and consumer culture that Coolidge lauded in 1925.
Although her fiction conveys ambivalence about the modernity of rural
life, Cather disturbs the myth of the United States as a nation of small-
holding pioneers by chronicling the importance of modern farms and
farmhouses to the nation’s expansionism in the first decades of the twen-
tieth century. The “great industrial enterprise” of food became even more
interwoven with U.S. global power during the Second World War, as
evident in propaganda that made the productivity of farms and efficiency
of kitchens vital to the Allied war effort and to U.S. economic growth. By
1945, the United States had become the world’s largest food exporter.31
Challenging the imperialist character of wartime and postwar food rhetoric,
writers on both sides of the Atlantic lay bare what they saw as a growing
rather than diminishing stratification of the world’s edible resources. These
mid-century writers politicize modernism by juxtaposing rhetorical asser-
tions of American abundance to lived experiences of hunger within and
outside the United States. Chapter 3 develops this argument through
discussions of the experimental lyrics of Lorine Niedecker, the unconven-
tional culinary writings of M. F. K. Fisher and Elizabeth David, and the
absurdist theater of Samuel Beckett (an arguable outlier in this group of
writers, but one who makes poignantly visible not only mid-century fam-
ine, through the existential sparseness of his stage and the meager rations of
his tramps Vladimir and Estragon, but also the power of those – like Pozzo
and Godot – who control agricultural land).
The second half of the book turns to contemporary novelists and journal-
ists whose accounts of globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries revolve around agricultural corporations and cosmopolitan con-
sumers as well as countercultural food practices that aspire to disrupt
American agribusiness. Chapter 4 focuses on Morrison’s 1981 novel Tar
Baby, which is set on a fictionalized Caribbean island that Philadelphia
candy executive Valerian Street develops into an enclave of vacation estates.
A novel that speaks to the environmental justice movement, Tar Baby links
bodily desires for exotic foods – chocolate and other delicacies – to the
historical forces that give rise to the supermarket and its promise of plenty.
Extending the mid-century dialectic of “luxury feeding”32 and physical
hunger, the novel offers a searing critique of free trade that moves from the
hemispheric impact of U.S. food companies on the agriculture of island states
to everyday acts of food indulgence and food resistance. The chapter has a
distinct position in the arc of Global Appetites, as it breaks from the focus on
the interconnections of world war and American agribusiness that centrally
 Introduction: The Power of Food 11
informs the first half of the book and that returns in Chapter 5. The role of
Tar Baby in the book is to move us geographically beyond the United States
to refract through a hemispheric lens the image of the world food system as
a new frontier for U.S. farmers, corporations, and consumers. In this sense,
the chapter builds out my transnational framework for U.S. food power while
deepening the book’s historical arc. Published during the period when neo-
liberal ideologies of free trade were coming to the foreground of U.S. foreign
policy, Morrison’s novel de-centers the United States not just by homing in
on the Caribbean but also by showing that the spectral origins of U.S. food
power lie in colonial histories of empire, botanical prospecting, and slavery.
Turning from chocolate to meat and from the Caribbean to the Pacific
Rim, Chapter 5 puts Ozeki’s satirical novels My Year of Meats (1998) and
All Over Creation in the context of recent muckraking exposés of the American
factory farm. Although the meat industry garnered scant attention in the
decades after Upton Sinclair published The Jungle (1906), this inattention
turned to alarm at century’s end as environmental groups publicized the brutal
working conditions and animal abuses of confined feedlots along with their
ecological impacts as a major contributor (via methane pollution) to climate
change. The chapter concentrates on My Year of Meats, which critics have read
as a feminist narrative in which cosmopolitan bonds among women provide
an antidote to late capitalism. While critics have focused on parsing Ozeki’s
political allegiances to third-wave feminism and to slow food, I reframe the
analysis of her novels around their formal strategies of pastiche and satire.
Through these formal methods, Ozeki illuminates contemporary conflicts
between postindustrial agriculture and localist food movements. Similar to
Tar Baby, My Year of Meats extends the geography of the industrialized food
system and its postindustrial developments beyond the transatlantic horizons
of Chapters 2 and 3. Her narrative of the U.S.-Japan meat trade, in particular,
is a story that takes the reader back to the postwar occupation of Japan to
satirize the rhetoric of an American meat-and-grain diet, which presented that
diet as an engine of both bodily and national power during the Cold War.
As for the book’s principles of selection, two additional points merit
explanation. First, I exclude two writers whom readers may expect to
encounter: John Steinbeck and Jane Smiley. Although these quintessential
novelists of American farm work and rural culture address the industrializa-
tion of agriculture, neither Steinbeck in the first half of the twentieth
century nor Smiley in the contemporary period takes up the dialectic of
farming and eating or the global horizons of the U.S. food system – the twin
concerns that animate Global Appetites. Even though I have chosen not to
give these writers prominence, the book does offer a launching point for a
12 Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food
reexamination of American regionalism. Second, while my focus is on U.S.
literature, each chapter develops a transnational context for the topic at
hand. This approach follows from my claim that the literature of food
coheres in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries around conflicts as well
as synergies among the local, the national, and the global. Chapter 4 thus
situates an analysis of the cosmopolitan food tastes and neocolonial food
politics that inflect Tar Baby in relationship to Columbus’s Voyages, on the
one hand, and Édouard Glissant’s postcolonial writings, on the other. That
said, Chapter 3 is the only place where I treat at length writers from outside
the United States; there, discussions of Beckett and David show how a
creeping U.S. hegemony structures mid-century representations of food
power on either side of the Atlantic.33

The idea for this book originated with my observation that pastoral tropes
have come to structure much of the contemporary discourse surrounding
American agribusiness. The persistence of pastoral sensibilities in the infor-
mation age extends out from the marketing campaigns of companies such as
Foster Farms, Chipotle, and Horizon organic milk to, on the one hand,
apologies for GMOs and, on the other, polemics for farmers’ markets and
whole foods. This pastoral turn has a specific flavor, however. Although in
some instances contemporary food rhetoric features idyllic images of shep-
herds and meadows, more often it reaches back to a classical georgic tradition
that sees food as melding the natural, the cultural, and the technological.
This georgic streak today pops up in cultural forms as divergent as molecular
gastronomy cuisine, avant-garde bioart, and the agribusiness exposés of
writers such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Eric Schlosser.34
In contrast to this recent renaissance of georgic notions of food, the first
half of “The American Century” tended to the modernist veneration of
industrialized agriculture that we see in Coolidge’s 1925 speech. This vision
of an engineered food system severed, thru technical fixes, from the unpre-
dictability of natural ecosystems and the diversity of culinary traditions
redoubled during the Cold War. In 1968, USAID Administrator William
Gaud coined the now notorious moniker of the Green Revolution, a term
that categorized the multiple industries constituting agribusiness – from seed
companies and pesticide manufacturers to food science labs and packaged
food makers – as participants in a humanitarian project to solve world
famine. In line with the Nobel Prize winning scientist Norman Borlaug,
Gaud suggested that the same compounds that had gone into chemical
weapons (DDT most infamously) were migrating from combat zones to
fields of grain, where they would serve the common good. The Green
 Introduction: The Power of Food 13
Revolution failed to realize this political promise for its critics, who instead
saw its end result as a global trade in pesticides, fertilizers, and seeds that
produced skyrocketing farmer debt and eroded regional food traditions.35
The amalgamation of weapons production and agribusiness began during the
First World War, when chemical gas and barbed wire simultaneously struc-
tured the trenches of Europe and the industrializing farms of the American
Midwest. The tacit alliance between war and food accelerated in the fifties
and sixties, when corporations began marketing chemical inputs to farmers as
part of the Green Revolution while supplying the Department of Defense
with weapons such as Agent Orange. In our own historical moment, we can
witness this militarization of the food system in the physical infrastructure
that has developed to support American agribusiness for nearly a century. A
2008 photograph of a California feed mill showing an intricate series of pipes
and silos, brings powerfully to mind – in the mill’s scale and complexity –
what Dwight D. Eisenhower termed in 1961 the “military-industrial com-
plex” (Figure 3).36 To quote food journalist Michael Pollan, agribusiness has
aimed throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first to put the
national “war machine to peacetime purposes.”37
The multinational corporation Monsanto provides a window onto the
important cultural shift that occurred between the Cold War and the early
twenty-first century – the transition from the modernist exaltation to the

3 “Feed Mill, California 2008.” © Barron Bixler. Reprinted with the permission of the artist.
Another random document with
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 “This is the spirit, the spirit is present,
The spirit of this tapu!
The boy will be angry,
The boy will flame,
The boy will be brave,
The boy will possess thought.
Name this boy
That he may be angry, that he may flame,
To make the hail fall:
Dedicate him to fight for Tu;
Ward off the blow that he may fight for Tu.
The man of war jumps and wards off the blows.”

Here the ceremony terminated, and the assembly, as if inspired,

jumped up, and rushed to the fight, while the priest repeated the
following karakia, standing on some elevated spot, from which he
could command a view of the battle:

“The god of strength, let him be present;

Let not your breath fail you.”

After the battle was over the priest called those who survived, and
enquired of each if he had killed anyone, or taken any prisoners. All
who had been in battle before delivered up their weapons to him,
who deposited them in the house where they were kept. Those who
had fought for the first time were called and asked if they had killed
anyone. If the person addressed replied in the affirmative, the priest
demanded his mere—stone battle-axe—and broke it into pieces.
This was the invariable custom with young warriors when they had
imbued their hands in the blood of their enemies. The priest having
afterwards assembled them together, used the following words,
which were called the Haha:
 “This is the wind, the wind is feeding;
The wind descends,
The wind is prosperous,
The many sacred things of Tu.
The wind descends,
The wind is prosperous,
The living wind of Tu.”

The natives regard the wind as an indication of the presence of

their god, if not the god himself. After this ceremony the youths were
considered as men, though they were narrowly watched for some
time by the priest, and they were liable to be put to death if they
broke any of the sacred rules of the tapu. They could not carry a
load, cut their own hair, or plait a woman’s. If one of them was
discovered by the priest doing any of these things, he assumed his
authority, and pronounced the sentence of death by saying “Go
away, go away.” This so affected the person to whom it was
addressed, that it was quite sufficient to kill him.
There was another ceremony performed after fighting, which was
supposed to confer a benefit on all who had been engaged in the
battle, and were successful in killing or making slaves. It was called
he pureinga, which means a taking off of that sacredness which had
been put upon them before the fight, or, in other words, the taking off
the tapu:

“There is the wind;

The wind rests;
The wind is feeding;
The wind which gathers—
O wind subside!
O living wind!
O sacred wind of Tu!
Loose the tapu,
The god of strength;
Let the ancient gods dismiss the tapu,
O ... o ... o ... the tapu is taken away!”
 When they went to war, they were separated from their wives, and
did not again approach them until peace was proclaimed. Hence,
during a period of long-continued warfare, they remarked that their
wives were widows.
When a party attacking a pa had forced an entrance, they
generally killed all within it. At the time of the slaughter the victors
pulled off a lock of hair from each victim, and also from those they
saved as slaves, which they stuck in their girdles. When the carnage
was over, they assembled in ranks, generally three deep, each party
being headed by its own tohunga, to thank their gods, and also to
propitiate their favour for the future. When all the necessary
arrangements were made, they each gave the tohunga a portion of
the hair they had collected, which he bound on two small twigs;
these he raised above his head, one in each hand, the people doing
the same, except that they used twigs without any hair. They
remained in this posture whilst the priest offered a prayer for the
future welfare of the tribe. He then cast the twigs with the hair bound
to them from him, as did the warriors with theirs, and all joined in a
puha or war song. Then, standing quite naked, they clapped their
hands together and struck them upon their thighs in order to take off
the tapu from their hands which had been imbued in human blood.
When they arrived within their own pa, they marched slowly, and in
order, towards the house of the principal tohunga, who stood in his
waho tapu or sacred grove ready to receive them. As soon as they
were about one hundred yards from him, he called out, “Whence
comes the war party of Tu?” Whereupon he was answered by the
tohunga of the party. “The war party of Tu comes from the search.”
“From whence comes the war-party of Tu?” “The war party of Tu
comes from the stinking place.” “From whence comes the war party
of Tu?” “It comes from the south; it comes from the north; it comes
from the thicket where birds congregate; it comes from the
fortifications: it made speeches there; it heard news there.”
 New Zealand Arms.
When they got near the principal tohunga, the warriors gave the
remaining locks of hair to their own priests, who went forward and
presented them to the chief one: he offered them to the god of war,
with many prayers. They then performed the tupeke, or war dance,
and clapped their hands a second time. The slave of the tohunga
belonging to the war party then made three ovens, in which he
cooked a portion of the hearts of the principal warriors of the
conquered party. “When they were done, the chief tohunga took a
portion, over which he uttered a harakia, and then threw it towards
his god as an offering. Having eaten all the food of the three ovens,
he took the tapu off the warriors, and they were permitted to “tangi,”
or cry with their relations. The women came out armed, and if any of
the attacking party had been lost in the assault, they fell upon the
slaves and killed as many as they could. Among the Taupo tribes it
was not lawful for women and girls to eat human flesh, though this
restriction does not appear to have extended to other parts of the
island.
 Australian Weapons.
As we are now as close to Australia as we are likely for some time
to be, we may as well take a voyage over and see what sort of man
of war our dirty little friend the Bushman is. He is not at a loss for
weapons, nor for skill to use them. They may be enumerated as
follows:—The spear, nine or ten feet long, rather thicker than one’s
finger, tapered to a point, hardened in the fire and sometimes
jagged. The wammera or throwing stick, shows considerable
ingenuity of invention; about two and a half feet long, it has a hook at
one end which fits a notch on the heel of the spear, in whose
projection it acts, much like a third joint of the arm, adding very
greatly to the force. A lance is thrown with ease and accuracy sixty,
eighty, and a hundred yards. The waddy is a heavy knobbed club
about two feet long, and is used for active service, foreign or
domestic. It brains the enemy in the battle, or strikes senseless the
poor gin in cases of disobedience or neglect. In the latter instance a
broken arm is considered a mild martial reproof.

Throwing the Boomerang.

The stone tomahawk is employed in cutting opossums out of their
holes in trees, as well as to make notches in the bark, by inserting a
toe into which, the black can ascend the highest and largest gums in
the bush. One can hardly travel a mile in New South Wales without
seeing these marks, old or new. The quick eye of the native is
guided to the retreat of the opossum by the slight scratches of its
claws on the stem of the tree. The boomerang, the most curious and
original of Australian war implements, is, or was, familiar in England
as a toy. It is a paradox in missile power. There are two kinds of
boomerang, that which is thrown to a distance straight ahead, and
that which returns on its own axis to the thrower. “I saw,” says Mr.
Mundy, “a native of slight frame throw one of the former two hundred
and ten yards and much further when a ricochet was permitted. With
the latter he made several casts truly surprising to witness. The
weapon after skimming breast high, nearly out of sight, suddenly
rose high into the air, and returning with amazing velocity towards its
owner, buried itself six inches deep in the turf, within a few yards of
his feet. It is a dangerous game for an inattentive spectator. An
enemy or a quarry ensconced behind a tree or bank safe from spear
or even bullet, may be taken in the rear and severely hurt or killed by
the recoil of the boomerang. The emu and kangaroo are stunned
and disabled, not knowing how to avoid its eccentric gyrations.
Amongst a flight of wild ducks just rising from the water, or a flock of
pigeons on the ground, this weapon commits great havoc. At close
quarters in fight the boomerang, being made of very hard wood with
a sharp edge, becomes no bad substitute for a cutlass.
The hieleman or shield, is a piece of wood about two and a half
feet long, tapering to the ends with a bevelled face not more than
four inches wide at the broadest part, behind which the left hand
passes through a hole perfectly guarded. With this narrow buckler
the native will parry any missile less swift than the bullet.
In throwing the spear after affixing the wammera, the owner
poises it, and gently shakes the weapon so as to give it a quivering
motion which it retains during its flight. Within fifty or sixty paces the
kangaroo must, I should conceive, have a poor chance of his life.
 Hurling the Spear.

The spear is immeasurably the most dangerous weapon of the

Australian savage. Many a white man has owed his death to the
spear; many thousands of sheep, cattle, and horses have fallen by it.
Several distinguished Englishmen have been severely wounded by
spear casts; among whom I may name Captain Bligh, the first
governor of New South Wales, Sir George Grey, and Captain
Fitzgerald, the present governors of New Zealand and Western
Australia, and Captain Stokes, R.N., long employed on the survey of
the Australian coasts. The attack by the blacks upon the Lieut.-
Governor of Swan River, occurred so lately as December 1848. In
self-defence he was compelled to shoot his ferocious assailants just
too late to save himself, being seriously hurt by a spear passing
through his thigh.
Our artist, Mr. Harden S. Melville, while attached to the Australian
exploring expedition, in H.M.S. “Fly,” had a narrow escape from
making a disagreeably close acquaintance with one of these
formidable barbed war tools. The ship’s boat had put ashore at a
spot where there was a congregation of native huts, though not a
solitary human inhabitant could be distinguished. With a spirit,
however, which evinced more devotion to the cause of science than
to the usages of polite society, our friend must needs penetrate to
the interior of one of the kennel-like abodes, though to effect this
purpose he had to crawl on all fours. Whether he found anything to
repay him for his pains I don’t recollect; I only know that he had
barely scrambled to the perpendicular, with his back to the bush,
when the seaman who was with him, with laudable promptitude,
called his attention to an interesting object in the distance. It was a
native—the owner of the house Mr. Melville had so unceremoniously
ransacked, no doubt—and there he stood with his spear nicely
adjusted to the wammera and all a-tremble for a cast. The instant,
however, that our artist (who I may tell the reader is a perfect giant)
turned his face instead of his back to the native, the spear was
lowered and the danger at an end.
 Australian Duel.
Lax as is the native Australian’s morality still he has his code of
honour and should one of its articles be infringed he will not be
content to lay wait for the aggressor and drive a spear through his
back, or strike him dead with his boomerang while he is safe
concealed and secure from observation; no, he must have “the
satisfaction of a gentleman,” he must call his man “out,” and compel
him to be murdered or commit a murder. So in this respect the
bushman, “the meanest specimen of humanity,” is as respectable an
individual as many a noble born and highly educated Englishman,
who lived in the reign and basked in the friendship of the “first
gentleman in Europe.” He shows himself even more respectable; for
whereas gentlemen of a past generation would meet and fire bullets
or dash and stab at each other with naked swords about ever so
trifling a matter, as a dispute about the cut of a coat or the character
of a sweetheart, the bushman never appeals to the honourable
institution of duelling, except an enemy be guilty of the heinous
offence of denying that he has a thick head. “He no good, his scull
no thicker than an emu’s egg-shell.” If a bushman brook such an
insult as this he is for ever the scoff and jest of all who know him; but
the chances are that he will not brook the insult; he will send a friend
to the slanderer to bid him bring his stoutest “waddy,” that it may be
shivered on the thick head of the warrior he had traduced.
The combatants meet and a select party of friends are invited to
see fair. The weapons are the familiar “waddys,” and the men stand
opposite each other with their heads bare. There is no tossing for
position or any other advantage; indeed there is no advantage to be
gained excepting who shall have first “whack,” and that is always
allowed to the challenger. The man who is to receive first whack, if
he is a person of experience, knows the hard and soft parts of his
cranium and takes care so to manœuvre that the former shall be
presented to the up-raised club. Down comes the weapon with a
thud that makes the recipient’s teeth chatter, but beyond that he has
sustained no inconvenience, and now he straightens his back and
grins, for it is his turn. His opponent lowers his head as he had done
and a loud hollow noise follows, which the man’s friends hail with
delight, as it indicates that though his skull may be dented it is not
yet cracked. And so the duel proceeds, whack for whack, until one
mightier than before, or on a “sore place,” stretches one of them on
the grass.
 CHAPTER XXIV.

Caffre warfare—Great cry and little carnage—A Caffre war chant—

War song of the renowned Cucutle—A Griqua Pitsho—An African
council of war—The chiefs speech—The chief accused of apathy
—A reproof to the kidney-eaters—Death before dishonour—
Archery in Eastern Africa—Fan bowmen—War weapons of
cannibal Fans—War knives and brain hatchets—The women
warriors of Dahomey—The king’s fingers—King Gezo likened to a
hen—Amazon parables—Pretty picture of an Abyssinian warrior
—Omen birds—A non-believer in English gunnery—The sceptic
convinced—A potent candle end—Savage metallurgy—The king
and the blacksmith—Le Vaillant turns bellows mender.
urning to Southern Africa, we find that among the Caffres
the trade of war is conducted with a method and
precision seldom found among savages. The most
common causes of warfare are, what is proper tribute to
the chief, grazing privileges, and territorial boundaries;
no body of men, however, ever fall upon another body of their
inimical countrymen without certain formalities are observed, with a
view to warn the enemy what he may shortly expect, and to prepare
himself accordingly. Bearing in their hands the tail either of a lion or a
panther, ambassadors are sent to enquire whether the other side still
persist in their obstinacy; if so, the tails are flourished threateningly,
which is equivalent to a declaration of war.
The declaration made, all the vassal chiefs with their dependants
are summoned to assemble. Everyone must implicitly obey this
mandate, and follow his leader; whoever does not, is in danger of
having his whole property confiscated. As soon as the army is
collected at the habitation of the king, a number of deer are killed,
that the warriors may be strengthened for the fight by eating
abundantly of their flesh; at the same time they dance, and deliver
themselves up entirely to rejoicing. The king presents the most
distinguished and the most valiant among the Caffres with plumes of
feathers from the wings of a sort of crane, and these they wear upon
their heads as marks of honour. These plumes are regarded as
official badges, and those wearing them are looked on as officers;
and it is expected that every man so distinguished will not only
manœuvre his company, but, spear or club in hand, head it and do
battle with the leading warrior on the opposing side. If a leader shirks
his duty, he is condemned by the Caffre law to an ignominious death.
Among the followers, too, whoever forsakes his leader is slain as
soon as captured.
When the army moves, it takes with it as many deer as are
deemed necessary for its support; and when the stronghold is
approached, the “tail-bearers” are once more sent forward to give a
last notice of the intended attack, repeating the motives which have
given occasion to the war. If the enemy declares that at present he is
not quite prepared,—that he has not yet collected his fighting men;
or that it would be much more convenient if the other party would
wait till the blacksmiths had made a few more assagies and
sharpened the old ones,—the attacking party is content to squat
down and kill and eat their bullocks and smoke their pipes till the
enemy notifies his readiness to begin. A wide open place, without
bushes and without rocks, is chosen as the field of battle, to avoid all
possibility of an ambush, which is considered as wholly degrading.
The two armies, raising a loud war cry, approach in two lines till
they are within seventy or eighty paces of each other. They now
begin throwing their assagies, at the same time endeavouring to turn
aside those of the enemy. The king or commander-in-chief, whoever
he may be, remains always in the centre of the line, and takes an
active part in the fight. Some of the inferior commanders remain near
him, the rest remaining at the heads of their divisions. By degrees
the two bands approach nearer and nearer to each other, till at
length they come hand to hand, when the spears are thrown aside,
reliance being placed on the clubs to decide the fortunes of the day.
Should night surprise the combatants, hostilities are suspended,
the chiefs of either party meeting and endeavouring to bring about a
treaty of peace; but should this be found impracticable, the fight
commences again in the morning. If one of the armies takes to flight,
the commander alone is blamed: everything depends on his
personal bravery; and his falling back is the signal for the whole body
to do the same. A flying enemy is immediately pursued; and above
all things the conquerors seek to possess themselves of their women
and children and cattle. If the vanquished party agrees to submit, his
submission is immediately accepted, on condition that he
acknowledges his conqueror from that time forward as his sovereign,
and solemnly promises obedience to him. When this is done, the
captured women and children are sent back, as well as part of the
cattle taken, it being a household maxim among these people that
“we must not let even our enemies die with hunger.”
In these Caffre fights, however, the loss of life is never very
considerable; the assagie is the principal weapon, and with it the
Caffre is a not very certain marksman. To see the dancing and
yelling, and the air thick with spears, one would suspect the
bloodiest carnage; but it will often happen that after a few hours’
battle, in which say two thousand are engaged, it is a great chance if
more than about twenty on each side are slain and about double that
number wounded.
Caffre warfare, too, is merciful, as well from deliberation as from
ignorance; and one falling unarmed into the hands of the enemy is
seldom or never put to death; the women and children equally have
nothing to fear for their lives. For this reason, women are sometimes
employed as ambassadors, when there is danger that matters have
been pushed too far, and that a male negotiator may be put to death
before he has time to explain his errand.
“The Basutos and the Caffres,” says Mr. Cassalis, “are
passionately fond of a kind of war-dance, at which the women are
only present to aid by their songs and cries. A circle is formed by
some hundreds of robust men, having the head adorned with tufts
and plumes, and a panther’s skin thrown over the left shoulder. The
signal is given, the war-song commences, and the mass moves
simultaneously as if it were but one man. Every arm is in motion;
every head turns at once; the feet of all strike the ground in time with
such force that the vibration is felt for more than two hundred yards.
Every muscle is in movement; every feature distorted; the most
gentle countenance assumes a ferocious and savage expression.
The more violent the contortions, the more beautiful the dance is
considered. This lasts for hours; the song continues as loud and the
frantic gestures lose none of their vigour. A strange sound is heard
during the short intervals when the voices are silent in accordance
with the measure; it is the panting of the dancers, their breath
escaping with violence, and sounding afar off like an unearthly death
rattle. This obstinate prolongation of so fatiguing an exercise arises
from the challenges made to each other by the young men, which
are even sent from one village to another. The question is, Who can
keep up the longest? The gain of an ox depends upon a few more
leaps. Dancers have been seen to fall down dead upon the spot;
others receive injuries which are difficult to cure. There is another
war-dance which is less fatiguing. In this they form themselves in a
straight line, and then run forward singing as if they were about to
attack an enemy. When they have reached a certain distance, they
halt, some men leave the ranks, fence from right to left, and then
return to their comrades, who receive them with great acclamations.
As soon as the line is again unbroken they return in the same
manner to their starting point.
Besides war dances the savages of this region have war songs, of
which the two following will serve as samples:—

“Goloane is going to fight;

He departs with Letsie.
He runs to the enemy,
Him against whom they murmur,
Him whom they will never obey.
They insult his little red shield;
And yet it is the old shield
Of the ox of Tane.
What has not Mosheth just said?
Cease to defy Goloane the veteran.
However this may be, there are horses coming;
Goloane brings back from the battle
A grey horse and a red one;
These will return no more to their masters.
The ox without horns will not be restored.
To-day war has broken out
More fiercely than ever;
It is the war of Butsani and the Masetelis.
A servant of Mohato,
Goloane has hurled a piece of rock;
 Goloane has hurled a piece of rock;
He has hit the warrior with the tawny shield.
Do you see the cowardly companions of this overthrown warrior
Standing motionless near the rock?
Why can their brother not go and take away
The plumes with which they have adorned their heads?
Goloane, thy praises are like the thick haze
Which precedes the rain:
Thy songs of triumph are heard in the mountains;
They go down to the valleys
Where the enemy knelt before
The cowardly warriors!... They pray!...
They beg that food may be given to them—
They will see who will give them any.
Give to our allies,
To the warriors of Makaba;
To those whom we never see come to attack us.
Goloane returns lame from the strife;
He returns, and his leg is streaming;
A torrent of dark blood
Escapes from the leg of the hero.
The companion of Rantsoafi
Seizes an heifer by the shoulder;
It is Goloane, the son of Makao,
Descendant of Molise.
Let no one utter any more insolence!
Ramakamane complains—
He groans—he says that his heifer
Has broken his white shoulder.
The companion of the brave
Goloane has contended with Empapang and Kabane.
The javelin is flung!
Goloane avoids it skilfully,
And the dart of Rabane
Is buried in the earth!”

Here is another in which a warrior having fought his country’s

battles thinks it not unbecoming to be his own trumpeter:

“I am Cucutle!
The warriors have passed singing,
The hymn of the battle has passed by me;
It has passed, despising my childhood,
 p , p g y ,
And has stopped before the door of Bonkauku.
I am the black warrior.
My mother is Boseleso!
I will rush as a lion,
Like him that devours the virgins
Near the forests of Fubasekoa.
Mapatsa is with me—
Mapatsa, the son of Tele—
We set off singing the song of the Trot.
Ramakoala, my uncle, exclaims:
Cucutle, where shall we fight?
We will fight before the fires of Makoso.
We arrive....
The warriors of the enemy, ranged in a line,
Fling their javelins together;
They fatigue themselves in vain:
The father of Moatla rushes into their midst,
He wounds a man in the arm
Before the eyes of his mother,
Who sees him fall,
Ah! Where is the head of the son of Sebegoane?
It has rolled to the middle of his native town.
I entered victorious into his dwelling,
And purified myself in the midst of his sheepfold:
My eye is still surrounded with the clay of the victory.
The shield of Cucutle has been pierced;
Those of his enemies are intact,
For they are the shields of cowards.
I am the white thunder
Which growls after the rain!
Ready to return to my children,
I roar: I must have prey!
I see the flocks and herds escaping
Across the tufted grass of the plain;
I take them from the shepherd with the white and yellow shield.
Go up on the high rocks of Macate;
See the white cow run into the midst of the herd.
A Makose will no longer despise my club;
The grass grows in his deserted pens,
The wind sweeps the thatch
From his ruined huts;
The humming of the goats is the only noise that is heard
In his town, once so gay.
 Tired, and dying with thirst, I went to the dwelling of Entele;
His wife was churning delicious milk,
The foam of which was white and frothy
Like the saliva of a little child.
I picked up a piece of a broken pot
To drink out of the vessel,
Which I soon left empty.
The white cow that I conquered
Has a black head;
Her breast is high and open—
It was the nurse of the son of Matayane—
I will go and offer it to my prince.
The name of my chief is Makao,
And Makao is Makoo:
I swear it by the striped ox
Of Mamasike!”

During Mr. Moffat’s missionary sojourn among the natives of

Southern Africa it frequently fell to his lot to become pleader and
arbitrator in most important public matters. Once, when among the
Griquas, the neighbouring tribe of Mantatees threatened war; and
the fiery Griquas were eager to accept the challenge. The English
missionary, however, was against the whole business, and did not
hesitate so to express himself at the war council.
Orders were sent off to the different towns and villages that a
pitsho, or parliament, be convened on the following day. As subjects
of great national interest were to be discussed, all were in motion
early. About 10 a.m. the whole body of armed men, amounting to
about one thousand, came to the outskirts of the town, and returned
again to the public fold, or place of assembly, some singing war-
songs, others engaged in mock fights, with all the fantastic gestures
which their wild imaginations could invent. The whole body took their
seats lining the fold, leaving an arena in the centre for the speakers.
 African Arms.
A few short extracts from some of the speeches will serve to show
the manner in which these meetings are conducted. Although the
whole exhibits a very grotesque scene, business is carried on with
the most perfect order. There is but little cheering, and still less
hissing, while every speaker fearlessly states his own sentiments.
The audience is seated on the ground, each man having before him
his shield, to which is attached a number of spears; a quiver
containing poisoned arrows is hung from the shoulder; and a battle-