ABSTRACT
The author wants to consider here the distinctive role played by food, in contradistinction to all other commodities, in American everyday life. His favourite is Audrey Richards's Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia. Richards uses Bemba agricultural and nutritive patterns as a way of showing us how the people produce, distribute, and consume their daily food, and how it colors all of their relationships. Richards did describe at length and with clarity the effects of Western colonialism, especially politically and economically, on the Bemba. But for the most part their food continued to be truly Bemba food, and only grudgingly did the Bemba give way to the relentless pressure of external forces upon diet and food habits. Treatments such as Mary Weismantel's Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes do much to help us understand how new foods and new schedules, enhanced and enforced by migration and the splitting of the family labor unit, remake local life.
