Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans

Historian McCulla debuts with a fascinating dissection of the tangled links between consumption, food, and race in a city long known for its excesses. She contends that “plenitude grew out of the labors of people in bondage” in 19th-century New Orleans, both in the form of food harvested by enslaved people, and “slave auctions” held in coffeehouses, taverns, and hotels, where the combined “entertainment” of food, drink, and enslaved bodies were served to locals and tourists. With the rise of photography in the 20th century, images of Black Louisianans on sugarcane plantations fueled “nostalgia for the antebellum past” while promoting tourism to white visitors. McCulla also highlights how some 19th-century Black Louisianans—both free and enslaved—worked as street vendors or market sellers, though the work was not without its moral challenges, as it often depended indirectly on slave labor. McCulla’s excellent archival research dredges up vivid personal histories that energize her fine-grained analysis. For example, she recounts how Marie Francoise Borga was enslaved to a New Orleans grocer, freed in 1817, and later became a street seller of calas, a fried food she’d learned to cook in Congo, where she was born. The result is a top-notch scholarly study of the complex relationships between entertainment, consumption, and Black life in the American South. (May)