Foodways and Emotional Communities in Early Colonial Virginia

Abstract

This article argues that in colonial Virginia a variety of emotional communities were knitted together by processes of food provisioning, which were themselves inseparable from environmental influences. As a fundamental necessity, a central component of early modern conceptions of community and friendship and crucially as something that was scarce in a colonial context, food had the power to engender a range of emotional relationships, both positive and negative. In the Virginia of the 1620s, environment and emotion became ever more tightly entwined, creating new relationships, antagonisms and connections to the land, developments that would have a lasting impact on the emotional landscape of Anglo-America. At the centre of this entanglement was food.