Effects of Food in Colonial Latin America

Effects of Food in Colonial Latin America

Intro to Colonial Latin America 5/24/08 There are three main types of foodstuff that was imported and greatly used in Colonial Latin America: salt, sugar, and tobacco. Sugar and tobacco are closely intertwined, if something happens to one the other is affected. As you can see the use of tobacco was great before the Spanish arrived. The use of tobacco greatly affected the society that came into contact with it. Without tobacco Indigenous physicians would not have had as many “cures” for their patients. Tobacco helped the Indigenous society function then as medicines and pain killers help us function in today’s world. Salt was also greatly used by indigenous people, but it was mostly used by the Mayans for they lived by the ocean. Salt was essential to Mayan life, for salt is vital to some ones nutrition and well being (Andrews 9). The salt consumption by the Mayan society was extremely high, by the year 800 A.D. the Mayan lowland had a population of around five million or more. With the average consumption of salt by the Mayans at around 8 grams a day per person; the amount of salted needed by the Mayan lowland society would have been 40 tons a day, or 14,600 tons a year (Andrews 10); this is a large amount of salt that was being used by the Mayans. Now the thing to realize is that this is just the bare minimum consumption of salt and it does not take in the other uses of salt by the Mayans. The Mayans had many other uses for salt. Salt was used as a preservative, it was used in rituals and as medicine, an exchange item, and the Mayans even incorporated the salt into the clothes they wore in battle (Andrews 14). Bishop Landa observed that Maya warriors had quilted shields and jackets “made strong with salt and cotton” (Andrews 14). The Mayan use of salt as a preservative greatly helped the travel of certain foods in Latin America. For example: salt was used to preserve fish, which sometimes would be brought inland as far as 70km, which is farther than if it...

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