Beginning with a fish dinner aboard a ship in Henry VIII’s navy and ending with Bridget Jones’ dinner at Una Alconbury’s house, Lizzie Collingham’s The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World offers a new lens through which to view the Empire: food.
“The British Empire was born on Newfoundland’s stony beaches,” writes Collingham in the first chapter. Forget the spice trade, she says, instead look at the cod fisheries off the Canadian coast that shows how the issue of fishing rights in Europe led English fishermen across the Atlantic.
Her description of the processing of the cod reminds me of Rudyard Kipling’s Captain Courageous , even though that book came only a couple of centuries later. Obviously a good process did not need to be messed around with.
Each of the 20 chapters revolves around one food item and Collingham takes off on a dizzying ride across the globe — Ireland, Barbados, India, Guyana, Kenya, South Africa, the U.S., Canada, New Zealand — and introduces the reader to a variety of dishes like Johnny cake, Jollof rice, Okra soup, Bengali currant chutney and more. But there was a darker side to these culinary experiments.
The sugar plantations of Barbados was built on the slave system; in West Africa, maize replaced the traditional millets but, without the knowledge of how to process it, the Africans fell prey to kwashiorkor, a disease brought on by severe protein malnutrition; in Newfoundland, the indigenous Beothuk people were driven to extinction by the settlers.
Collingham also looks at how agricultural improvements in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries drove people to emigrate to Canada, New Zealand and Australia, a process that continued through the World Wars; how the food processing industry helped create an atmosphere of ‘home’ and how Britain began to import food to feed its citizens in the wake of World War II.
While she does accept that in the process of establishing this intricate network, “the British eradicated entire native populations, changed landscapes and agricultural systems, often destabilising other people’s access to food...,” Collingham’s tone of admiration and wonder at the achievements of the empire tends to grate. Also her references to the slave trade ignore the violence and misery it spread in its wake. Despite these quibbles, the book remains eminently readable showing as it does how global fusion food is not a 21st century affectation.
The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World ; Lizzie Collingham, Bodley Head/Penguin, ₹699.
