“Edifying Punch and Brandy”

This chapter examines the performative role of food in shaping racial and national identity in the early English settlement of Virginia. Focusing on the sensory and embodied dimensions of sustenance, it shows how colonial food practices mediated the paradox of settlers seeking to distinguish themselves as “civilized” from indigenous “savages” through dietary rejection, even as material need compelled their dependence on indigenous foodways. Examining records of the colonists’ initial resistance to native food, survival cannibalism during the Starving Time, and the rise of distinctively Virginian cuisine and dietary practices, this chapter analyzes how visceral performances with and through food—informed by early modern humoral theory—functioned as a medium of communication and identity formation. Drawing on theories of entanglement and scriptive things, the study foregrounds how acts of gathering, cooking, and consuming food scripted colonial performances of civility, difference, and dominance, constructing racialized boundaries between Self and Other. Through an analysis of Aphra Behn’s play The Widow Ranter , it also traces the emergence of a proto-American identity, where novelty in food and drink—such as the adoption of punch over wine—symbolized the transformation of English settlers into a distinct Virginian breed. Highlighting the embodied and performative nature of food, this work illuminates how edible practices inscribed race and nation into colonial and colonized bodies.