New Worlds of Food (April 1 - May 31, 2009)

The Latin American Library is pleased to present this exhibit, New Worlds of Food, to coincide with the Society of Ethnobiology 32nd annual meeting, hosted by Tulane University. In tandem with the conference topic, Food: Crops and Non-Crops, the exhibit focuses on written and visual accounts documenting cultural aspects as well as scientific observations of food in Latin America, in a historical perspective. Ranging from original Mesoamerican Indian painted manuscripts depicting native foods and plant classifications, through sixteenth and seventeenth-century European accounts of the natural world and the food of the Indies, to travelogues of nineteenth-century scientific explorers such as Alfred Wallace and Alexander von Humboldt, the exhibit highlights the ways in which human societies and cultures have interacted with and conceived of food and the natural world in the region.

Case one focuses on food as perceived through indigenous accounts in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Mexico. Although very few pre-contact painted manuscripts or codices survive, traditional uses and conceptualizations of edible plants and animals were recorded in post-contact settings, often commissioned by Spanish authorities.

Case two highlights passages from a wide range of histories and chronicles illustrating the conceptual, linguistic and purely physical challenges of early European historians confronted with new worlds of American plants, agriculture, food and eating habits.

Case three shows examples of classification systems, both native Mexican and European, used to organize the plants of the New World. Case four highlights post-Enlightenment approaches to the Latin American physical world as seen through the texts of European scientific travelers.

This exhibit was made possible through an endowment from the Zemurray Foundation to the Latin American Library in memory of Doris Zemurray Stone.