Rhetorical Analysis Of Slave Diets

On the 8th of this month, I attended a lecture in the UA Poetry Center presented by Dr. Jerome Dotson (an instructor in Africana Studies). The speaker, who obtained a MA in African American Studies and a PhD in History, presented information for this particular lecture on the diets of slaves, and specifically within that, the connotation of pork in their meals. Dr. Dotson began the talk with a brief discussion of ‘roots’ and played a video of Kunta Kinte’s visual explanation of the meaning of food in a slave’s life. The video highlighted what slaves ate, which consisted mostly of grits, roughly ground corn, and pork. Kinte’s video also presented yet another tragedy behind slavery—the nature of chronic underfeeding and hunger. The slaves were

Their pork intake was often higher, since they lacked resources to other healthier types of meat or nutrition, but the cuts had significantly more bone and fat content than other social classes. Looking at the health of the slaves provided proof of this; they had diseases of the lungs caused by malnutrition, such as “Negro Consumption”, and their lifestyle forced rationing. At this point, Dr. Jerome gave the audience a visual of an interview with Campbell Armstrong—it was said that slaves’ food was weighed out for the week. They had to eat the food, because they couldn’t go back for seconds or more; that was not

Generally, it was discussed that eating specific foods added other meaning for those foods as well as the slaves. Some slaves that worked in the Master’s house ate the same food at the same time as the Master and family, creating an automatic higher rank in the social hierarchy because of what they consumed. Slaves were trained, partially through their dietary restrictions, to see themselves as different groups of people. The regulation of pork consumption allowed owners to have control, which acted as a marker of race and power. Overall, the lecture from Dr. Dotson worked as an informative, captivating relay of the historical connotations of pork in the world of slaves. In means of presentation, he created simple slides and made use of interesting videos that kept the audience’s attention for the entire hour. Even in light of some technological errors, the speaker kept conversation flowing and immediately fixed the issue. He went over his allotted time, and was often hard to understand due to a thick Southern accent, but still maintained the ability to keep people interested in the symbolism of pork