Cassava/Yuca/Manioc

Abstract

Cassava/Yuca/Manioc: This staple of Indigenous Caribbean diets has gone from being decried for its danger and denigrated for its supposed inferiority to wheat by the early colonists, to being among the few foods that nourished slaves, to creolizing into postcolonial national dishes, and to being touted as a wonder food resistant to the climate disaster and dietary breakdowns that manifest the slow violence of the colonial project. Is the uplifting of cassava the rise of the Caribbean plot, the next step in neocolonial globalist expropriation of things Caribbean, or something of both? This paper traces discourses of cassava from the writings of early colonialists like Pere Labat through Caribbean cookbooks of the independence era where it was creolized with African, European, and Asian techniques and traditions and into postcolonial diasporic food writing and commercial projects from Carmeta’s Bajan food independence through contemporary global agriculture projects promoting cassava. Cassava/Yuca/Manioc, this paper argues, continues to be deterritorialized on a global scale at the same time as, in the Caribbean, it continues to nourish locally grounded persistence, adaptation, resistance, and thriving.

1. Introduction

Colonialism worked in a curious way in the Caribbean: before extracting the value they “discovered” in the Caribbean, colonial powers decimated and sidelined large portions of the people and plants they “discovered” and then “imported” both the raw materials and the labor they needed to generate profit. This legacy obviates Fanonian decolonization, which operates by getting rid of the colonizers and returning to “native” rule, even as it lays the ground for a Glissantian postcolonial Caribbean governed by the creolized populations that grew under colonial rule and threw it off.

Offering a culinary parallel to the human paths of resistance that Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, and others theorize, cassava manifests a radical past, present, future Caribbean creole. Rather than pre-colonial recreations (à la Fanon), cassava recipes offer a Caribbean creolization (à la Glissant and Wynter) that neither relies on nor excludes the European in the mix of materials, techniques, and tastes that nourish Caribbean postcolonial and decolonial praxis.

The story of cassava this article tells reveals a Caribbean decolonial praxis that has persisted by dodging, taking, leaving, and collecting traces, working around, under, though, and with what Europeans have brought and taken. Denigrated and exploited by colonial forces, relegated to the plots and provision grounds in the least hospitable soils, cassava survived to feed the survival and resistance of slaves and to support the enterprises of small farmers and market women, maroons, and cooks. This story also shows that colonialism remains a driving mechanism in the Caribbean and that its end has yet to be fully realized. Finally, cassava’s story manifests the ongoing tension between the persistent extension of colonial control and of Caribbean resistance.

In Caribbean literature, cassava links Indigenous histories with creolized futures. For Jamaican poet Olive Senior, “Cassava/Yuca” embodies the cycle of divine/human/plant life as mothers sow cassava sticks, tend the mounds in which “Radiate roots penetrate Mother Earth,/douse for water. Children of Yuca/shoot up high, fertilized by Sun Father” until the “newly risen one cries out “Cut me down. For you, I die each season. This is my body./Come, dig me, peel me, grate me, squeeze me, dry me, sift/me, spread me, heat me./Give me life again. Eat me” (Senior 2022, p. 26). In Dioses de la yuca, Dominican poet Marianela Medrano writes back to Columbus by poetically unearthing the Taíno divinity and reminding that “En las raíces de la yuca/la diosas y los dioses continúan haciendo milagros“ (In the roots of the cassava/the goddesses and the gods continue making miracles” (Medrano 2011, p. 8).1 To bridge Caribbean pasts and futures, Medrano weaves together “fibras orgánicas estas que nos hacen humanas/respirando en el maní/en la mambá/en la caña/o en el amarillo tímido del cazabe” (organic fibers that make us human/breathing in the peanuts/in the peanut butter/in the cane/or in the timid yellow of cassava cakes), linking all of the people and plants that come together to make the postcolonial Caribbean, with cassava as the representative of the Indigenous strand and its integration with the African, the Asian, and the European (Medrano 2011, p. 83). Trinidadian writer (Akhim Alexis 2022) imagines in “I, Cassava” that the Earth People—a twentieth-century Trinidadian religious and cultural group that rejected all dualisms and practiced food independence by growing local crops—is left to the young man who chose for himself the name Cassava, suggesting like Medrano that Caribbean creolizing, syncretic, and self-sustaining futures are rooted in cassava. Scholars such as Michael Niblett and Erika Waters and Carol Flemming examine the ways both sacred and mundane that cassava is grown, prepared, and eaten across Caribbean literature (Niblett 2013; Waters and Flemming 1994).2 Edward Baugh in his study of George Lamming’s literary representation of another Caribbean food, Barbadian cuckoo, notes that “analysis of the way in which he recounts the process [of making cuckoo] also reveals other social and moral significances which [Lamming] uses the process to symbolize” (Baugh 1977, p. 29). Accounts of how to make foods in cookbooks offer similar analytic opportunities, while consideration of their linguistic and organizational choices, authorship, and attribution of recipes offer opportunities to consider both creative choices and the contextual constraints of their writing.

Cookbooks, as I argue in Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence (Valens 2024), are themselves bridges between the literary, the commercial, and the mundane; the imaginative and the practical; the public and the private. As articles of material history, as collections of “receipts”, they are part of domestic historical records; as works of invention, substitution, and recombination, as texts that convey messages through words, they are part of an expanded definition of literature. I take cookbooks and food writing, including agricultural tracts, as works of Caribbean history and literature; I read recipes and descriptions of foods closely, gleaning for counter-stories and contextualizing for significance; I read tables of contents, ingredient lists, and agricultural trade documents distantly, counting and calculating what changes and what remains.

Cassava takes the place of what Glissant calls “the trace” in Caribbean cookbooks. In the trace, cassava survives the massive upheavals of colonialism, becoming part of the creolization that “is not a fusion, it requires each component to persist, even while it is already changing” (Glissant 2020, p. 130). Caçabi, the “bread” of Carib and Arawakan peoples of the Caribbean made from bitter cassava, persists and changes into bammies and cassava cakes; “yuca” persists in sancocho, stewed with meats brought to the Caribbean by Europeans; and cassava flour persists in gluten-free carrot cake. All are part of non-telic Glissantian creolization; each offers a window into particular moments, particular places, in the changing and in the inclination to change and to persist.3

The linked and divided terms of my title, cassava/yuca/manioc, are, on the face of it, the simple artifact of the several colonial languages that often remain the national languages in a Caribbean divided along linguistic lines. The common referent is a food plant called cassava in English, yuca in Spanish, manioc in French, cassave in Dutch, manyòk in Kreyòl, yuka in Papiamento, and euphoriboriaceae manihot esculenta in Linnaean taxonomy. These linguistic differences do, however, matter. Domesticated cassava, “maniot” or “mandioca” in the Tupí-Guaraní languages of South America, and “yuca” in Kalina or Carib languages, comes from a wild plant originally from the Amazon basin (Karasch 2000, p. 181). It was cultivated in the Amazonian lowlands by 7900BP, widely cultivated throughout Mesoamerica and Central and South America by 6500BP, and was being used for food in the Caribbean by 3000BP (Olsen 2015, p. 299). The flours and foods made with it are called “katibía” and “kasabi” and the cooked liquid extracted from it “kashiripo” in Arawakan languages (which include Taíno); the starch and products made from it are “tapioca” in Tupí. The proximity and exchange among speakers of Tupí, Carib, and Arawakan languages in South America and the Caribbean lead to a related but not wholly shared language for what I—writing in English—refer to as cassava. Prior to colonization, cassava was among if not the most important foods of Caribbean populations across the islands where Europeans first “discovered” it (Ortiz Cuadra 2013, p. 125). Colonists, who variously misconstrued and borrowed Indigenous languages and foods, are responsible for the terms we now use: cassava/yuca/manioc.4 Spanish and French retained different words for cassava root, cassava flour, and cassava cakes, while English and Dutch did not. English and French brought in African-derived terms-such as bammy and gari in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

2. From Danger and Claiming to Plot and Plantation

In the early colonial period, Europeans counted the absence of wheat bread and the presence of poison in the cassava from which Caribbean people made “their bread”, as a sign of their lack of culture and savage proximity to danger. Going on about the dangers of cassava, colonists both maintained the inferiority of Indigenous cultures and the menace of Indigenous peoples at the same time as they relied on cassava (and Indigenous knowledge and skill in processing it) for sustenance. During this same period, the Columbian Exchange brought cassava, along with so many other plants, around the world, and while cassava did not grow and spread in Europe like tomatoes and potatoes, it did thrive in West Africa and Southeast Asia, so much that it became a staple food in many parts of the tropics.5

One of the first colonial chroniclers, González Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, includes in his 1555 Historia general y natural de las Indias a chapter “of the Indian’s bread called caçabi, which is the second type of bread in this Spanish Island and elsewhere the Indians make, as do the Christians, and some even use it more than maize, and say it is better and eat it more, which is made from a plant they call yuca”6 (Fernandez de Oviedo [1555] 1851, vol. VII, ch. 2). After describing the plant and its growth and farming, Oviedo warns that “any man or animal … who eats these roots, with the juice, fresh, as they are before the juice is extracted (in particular presses), dies without recourse (Fernandez de Oviedo [1555] 1851, vol. VII, ch. 2). Oviedo goes on to describe in detail how caçabi is made, but he concludes by discussing the cost of the breads on the market. This is not cooking instruction but information about a commodity; the danger and the labor of making cassava bread allows it to remain an Indigenous production.

By the early seventeenth century, as colonialism settled in along with the creolizing processes that brought Indigenous, European, and African (food) cultures together, cassava entered the ranks of colonially regulated foods (Puertorriqueña 1967, p. 22). When R.P. Du Tertre strove to help French colonists establish settlements in the Caribbean in the mid-seventeenth century; he instructed that the first actions of any colonists must include planting potatoes and “manyoc” and procuring “cassave” from the Arawaks (Du Tertre 1667, p. 87). Du Tertre’s descriptions of making cassava flour and bread detail the transformation of cassava into a plantation staple and the integration of enslaved Africans into its processing and cooking (Du Tertre 1667, pp. 115, 456, 520). By the end of the eighteenth century when Jean-Baptiste Labat describes the growing and processing of “manioc”, he notes that “cassava and manioc flour serve as bread for most of the white, black and red inhabitants of the Islands, in other words, for Europeans, Negroes, and Savages” (Labat 1742, p. 394), and his descriptions and illustrations detail both “savages” and “negresses and negroes” completing the labor to make them (Labat 1742, pp. 396, 408–9). As British naturalists like Peter Marsden, Hans Sloane, and Charles Leslie took up the colonial pen in the eighteenth century, they chronicled the continued place of “cassada bread” in diets across the English colonies (Higman [2008] 2022, pp. 55–56). During this time, Spaniards brought sweet varieties, more common in the lands they conquered and controlled on the mainland, to their island colonies, such that cassava in its unprocessed root form also took, and still has, a prominent place in stews and boiled and mashed sides and sweets (Cabanillas 1973, pp. 56, 64).

As the colonial period advanced, more basic foods—such as wheat flour—were imported from Europe and the United States to be served at the tables of the plantation great houses and colonial administrators. These were prepared by and passed along, as a matter of course, to their slaves and workers. Conversely, even as all diets in the Caribbean changed, cassava remained among the basic foods grown on the islands in provision grounds and peasant plots alongside yams, pumpkins, and plantains. There, cassava not only persisted, but it became part of the food group called “ground provisions” in English, “viandas” or víveres” in Spanish, and “viandes” in French, a creolized collection that brings together the traces of the colonial import of raw materials and people for extractive profit but also a foodstuff that circulated widely in internal markets and fed many without entering any market (Ortiz Cuadra 2013, p. 123). Clinton Beckford and Donovan Campbell detail the two-pronged agricultural system that developed in the Caribbean: on the one hand, large-scale export agriculture, and alongside it, on the other hand, “a small-scale farming sector focusing on domestic food crops that are staples in local diets and local cuisines” (Beckford and Campbell 2013, p. 3). This system lives on, ever the site of both extractive exploitation and local survival and resistance.

Wynter explains, “if the history of Caribbean society is that of a dual relation between plantation and plot, the two poles which originate in a single historical process, the ambivalence between the two has been, and is, the distinguishing characteristic of the Caribbean response” (Wynter 2022, p. 295). As an agricultural site, the plot belongs to “the indigenous, authochtonous system … where a product is made in response to a human need” (Wynter 2022, p. 292). From the beginning of the plantation system, enslaved people and free peasants created or were allotted small plots in corners or plantation and larger plots, often called provision grounds, on the outskirts or off the plantations where they grew subsistence crops. Cassava, along with plantains, pumpkins, breadfruit, yams, and other root vegetables, made up the bulk of ground provisions both because of their high nutritional value—full of complex carbohydrates, minerals, and vitamins—and because they could survive with only the occasional tending permitted by their distance from the plantation and the limited “free time” granted enslaved people to go to them. Although plantation owners often used plots (including provision grounds) as excuses to provide less food to the enslaved, peasants and enslaved workers nonetheless used the plots to manage their direct sustenance and to establish trade in both food and knowledge in avoidance of and resistance to the plantation system. The plot, thus, is both a creation of the plantation system and “the focus of resistance to the market system and market values” (Wynter 2022, p. 295). The plot is not of precolonial origin; it is where we can dig into the traces of cassava to follow the Afroindigneous paths of creole cuisines created by and resistant to colonial domination.

3. Creole Cuisine in Colonial Cookbooks7

The earliest colonial Caribbean cookbooks, in the second half of the nineteenth century, documented the importance of cassava as a food of the “the natives” and inscribed its place in the creole dishes that also covered the tables of plantation owners and colonial officers. The distinctions among the places of cassava in different islands, along with its common presence and combination with African-, European-, and Asian-originated elements, demonstrate how, during the colonial era, distinct and related national cultures developed across the Caribbean, maintaining the food interdependence and island-distinctions that had long marked Caribbean foodways.

Cassava appears in its many forms—bitter and sweet, raw root, processed flours, and prepared cakes—throughout Eugenio Coloma y Garcés’s (1856) Manual del cocinero Cubano and 1859 El cocinero puertorriqueño.8 It features in recipes with titles such as Sopa acelerada habanera9 and Olla cubana10 that tie the combination of Indigenous, African, and European ingredients and techniques that they contain to the places under colonial control and inscribe the creole character of island cuisine as a colonial creation. Dishes with cassava and so many other Indigenous and African-derived elements often have names like Olla del campesino11 or comments, like that in the recipe for Sopa de casabe12 that cassava “is a kind of root very popular among poor and among the rich” (Coloma y Garcés [1859] 2004, p. 165).13 By naming the mixing as one of classes rather than races, Coloma y Garcés covers the traces of Afroindigenous contributions to creole foods and sets the table for a people who can claim cultural, and eventually political, identity linked to the mixing that they also erase. Coloma y Garcés’s recipe for Matahambre—a dessert made with cassava flour [cativía]; European-originated wine, anis, butter, and lard; and the plantation product par excellence: sugar—exemplifies his erasive inclusion. Following the instructions for making matahambre, Coloma y Garcés notes that “the cassava flour [cativía] is extracted by grating the cassava [yuca] and expressing it in a cloth. The remainder is put in the sun, and is what is called cassava flour [cativía]”. While inscribing Indigenous terms and techniques, the passive construction eliminates the contaminating presence of actual Afroindigenous people who would be the subjects performing the extracting and drying. Subsequent Spanish colonial Caribbean cookbooks continue to extend cassava—in all its forms, in all kinds of dishes—and to evacuate it of association with Indigeneity or Blackness via its incorporation into a whitewashed creole cuisine.

Caroline Sullivan’s (1893) The Jamaica Cookery Book, like most subsequent West Indian colonial cookbooks, includes cassava only in its processed forms. Nonetheless, like their Spanish counterparts, West Indian colonial cookbooks establish the symbolic place of cassava as central to a colonially controlled creoleness. Sullivan includes several recipes that call for bammys [sic], one recipe for Cassava Flour (Quaco), and two recipes for Tapioca. Like Coloma y Garcés, Sullivan erasively includes Indigenous foodways but she also blends them with African ones through her inscription of the terms Quaco and bammies. The parenthetical “(Quaco)” in her title for the cassava flour recipe stands out. I can find no etymological connections between any words for cassava flour and “Quaco”, nor can I find any other uses of “Quaco” to designate cassava flour. “Quaco” is a West African first name that was present in Jamaica by the nineteenth century, but Sullivan attributes just two of her recipes, both to other publications, so it is unlikely that her “Quaco” is meant as an attribution to a cook. Sullivan’s unusual use of “Quaco” does link, however, to what has become a common term for cassava bread in Jamaica, “Bammy”. B.W. Higman traces the first appearance of “bammy” in print to an 1886 Jamaica Gleaner reference to a Mrs. Amelia Josephs winning a prize for her “cassava in bammy or thin cakes” (Higman [2008] 2022, p. 65). Higman endorses Richard Allsop’s suggestion that the term “bammy” comes from a West African source, arriving with enslaved Africans in the early nineteenth century for whom cassava, though originally brought to West Africa from the Caribbean, had been a staple food for over a century.

Like Coloma y Garcés’s notes about how to make cativía, Sullivan’s cassava recipes serve more to demonstrate the author’s knowledge than to guide readers through actually making cassava flours or breads. Sullivan’s recipe for Bammys No. 1 notes that “Bammys are sold ready for cooking and are a sort of muffin”, while the one for Baked Cassava and Bammy Cakes explains that “the cakes are much liked, but it is easier to buy them readymade, and they are very inexpensive. A packet of cassavas at threepence, and a penny-half-penny worth of bammys are enough for breakfast unless the party is a large one” (Sullivan 1897, p. 95). These recipes also exemplify how bammys and cassava cakes are, in British colonial cookbooks, like other Indigenous and native foods, presented as base materials that can be elevated with “refined” European presentation and adornment. At the same time, the instructions to purchase rather than make bammys nod, however obliquely, to the skill and work of market women from whom they are presumably purchased.

Cassava rarely appears in early twentieth century British West Indian cookbooks.14 At issue, it seems, is neither the disappearance of cassava flours, bammys, and cassava cakes nor the absence of sweet cassava among the provisions but rather cassava’s association with Black foodways. Martha Warren Beckwith, in her 1929 Black Roadways: a study of Jamaican folk life, details that “the Negroes are extravagantly fond of this delicacy [bammies]. No choicer offering can be made to an exile to the wet north side of the island, where cassava is not grown, than a package of homemade ‘bammie’ from the drier south” (Beckwith [1929] 1969, p. 22). Black Jamaicans embody the Jamaican “folk”, and the bammy represents their favorite food; cassava and its products represent the native Caribbean even as the characteristics of the people in that group change. Cassava’s already limited place in the first British colonial cookbooks recedes over the first half of the twentieth century. The exception that proves the rule is the one cookbook of British Guiana, the only British Caribbean colony located on the South American mainland and the one with the smallest Black population. Maria Psaila’s (1912) The Housekeeper’s Guide to British Guiana calls for cassava flours, cassareep, and fresh (sweet) cassava in a good number of recipes primarily associated with Indigenous and White Creole cuisine.

Hidden in plain sight in Spanish colonial cookbooks, relegated to dark corners in British ones,15 cassava marks a distinctly local, “plot”, food whose identity as native and creole solidify, even as the meanings and values of those terms shifts.

4. Independence Era and the Places of Cassava in National Culinary Cultures16

Fanon recognized that political separation from Europe, fundamental to achieving independence from colonial rule, relies on and demands national culture (Fanon 2004, pp. 97–180). In the Caribbean, that national culture is creole. Caribbean national culinary cultures assert the native and national status of creole foods developed over the colonial period, claiming as Cuban or Bajan or Haitian dishes deliciously inherited and transformed from European as well as Indigenous, African, and Asian traditions. Rather than reinvigorating cultures that had been, as Fanon finds in colonized Africa, “frozen in time”, Caribbean independence boosts native national cultures created and sustained on plots under and through four hundred years of settler colonialism, slavery, and plantation economies. That there is very little shift in the basic distribution and treatment of cassava from the colonial era cookbooks results partly from the ways that independence-era cookbook writers are often, like Fanon’s “colonized intellectuals”, raised and trained inside the ruling culture and its values, elite women who in Wynter’s terms belong more to the city, extension of the plantation, than to the plot. The continuity in the places of cassava from colonial- to independence-era cookbooks, also, however, inscribes as national culinary culture the elite and peasant Caribbean foods that emerged from, through, and as creolization.

The work of (cookbook) authors of Caribbean independence who pick up the culinary creolization that occurred over the course of the colonial era and turn it into national cuisines is far less that of recovering or reinventing foods or dishes than that of domesticating them. What is “from here” is what has met up here: cassava is not exotic, Guinea Peas are not African, and Europe is not the “home source” of anything. What distinguishes the treatment of cassava in the recipe for Matahambre in the first cookbook of independent Cuba, José E. Triay’s (1903) Nuevo manual del cocinero criollo, is, for example, that rather than being added to eggs, sugar, wine, anis, butter, and lard in a separate sentence, “next”, it comes in the first sentence, “mixing everything well and incorporating into it cassava flour [catibía]”, and that it is no longer singled out from the other ingredients with information about how it is made (Triay 1903, p. 295). Cassava blends in, not a special ingredient, not an ingredient in special foods. In the cookbooks of Independence-era Barbados, cassava is unmarked by the associations with Blackness that it had in the colonial era: the Barbados Child Care Committee’s (1964) Bajan Cookbook has two recipes that call for cassava—Boiled Cassava Pudding and Cassava Biscuits—both of which blend into the “Hot Puddings” and “Biscuits” sections in which they are, respectively, included (Barbados Child Care Committee 1964). Integrated into the domestic core of new national cuisines, cassava “goes into the land, which will never again become a territory” and sustains the slow build toward postcolonial independence cookbooks that can plot new forms of resistance to the Eurocentric veneer that elite independence-era cookbook writers endorsed with titles like “Pudding” and “Biscuit” (Glissant 2020, p. 10).

Food independence, either symbolic, such that the value of creole cuisine has no comparison outside the Caribbean, or material, such that Caribbean nations feed themselves solely with what they grow and make, may never be possible or even desirable. As I argue in Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence, Caribbean national cuisines continue to develop away from Europhilia and open more to their own plots, articulating symbolic hierarchies of taste and quality that are not ordered by European culinary values but are still in conversation with them (Valens 2024). On the material front, even the independence era, “development of a local domestic agriculture through the local peasantry did not change the economic structure of the Caribbean from exporters of raw materials and primary products and importers of food”, and in spite of various post-colonial plans to augment domestic food production for domestic consumption, that has not changed; indeed, the Caribbean has seen “a growing dependence on imported food” (Beckford and Campbell 2013, pp. 17, 18). But we might measure the success of food independence movements launched during the independence era, like Carmeta Fraser’s “eat what we grow, grow what we eat” not by whether nations like Barbados stop importing food but rather by whether local farmers continue to find local markets for their products and new cookbooks offer elite and middle-class women recipes that value those products in old and new ways.

5. Postcolonial Food Sovereignty: Eat Local

Food Sovereignty, defined in the (Declaration of Nyéléni 2007) as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agricultural systems”, has become, in the twenty-first century, the primary geopolitical framing of food independence and local food movements.

Postcolonial agricultural and trade policies have, since at least the mid-twentieth century, aimed to increase production and availability of local foods, but in order for local food movements to succeed, there must also be a demand for those products to be cooked and enjoyed. Fraser’s (1976) National Recipe Directory recognizes that “a National Will to consume locally produced goods” can only come from there being “impressive reasons … not necessarily from the national viewpoint, but more particularly from the angle of the housewife” to do so (Fraser 1976) Cookbooks, explicitly and implicitly, make the case to “housewives” for cooking and eating local foods. A peek into the places of cassava in postcolonial cookbooks shows how they do so, revealing also the changing understandings of domestic interests and of the women who continue to do most of the home cooking. Cassava undergoes a slow transformation in Caribbean local food movements. Over the past fifty years, Caribbean cookbooks reframe it as a source of pleasure in eating local, as a vehicle for innovation and the pursuit of the new, as an ace for the domestic budget, as a health food, and as a path for retracing Afroindigenous histories and identities. From these angles, they show how individual health sustains national health and how domestic pleasure feeds national well-being, plotting paths of resistance to the relics and extensions of colonial control.

Fraser, as a senator and leader in the Barbados Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation (BADMC), was much involved in writing recipes and publishing cookbooks that “encourage you to serve up your old Barbadian delights and have fun in your kitchens as you experiment with new and exciting dishes using up your local foods” (Fraser 1981, p. 2). In her cookbooks, and throughout local food movements, Cassava underwent a slow transformation. In the National Recipe Directory, like in Bajan Recipes, it appears only in Cassava Bakes and Cassava Pone. But as Fraser’s (1981) Come Cook with us the Bajan Way includes these two, and Pepperpot made with casareep appears among the “Old Bajan Favourites” and also includes recipes for Cassava Fruit Cake, Cassava Banana Loaf, and Cassava Dumplings, cassava takes its place among both the old delights and the new experiments through which Fraser brings postcolonial Barbadian housewives into the movement for what we now call food sovereignty.

Pleasure is also central to the Carnegie School of Home Economics’ 1973 What’s Cooking in Guyana? that collected “recipes which have been chosen for maximum enjoyment … to stimulate interest in and use of local foods and culinary products” (Carnegie School of Home Economics 2004, p. xi). The 2004 edition of What’s Cooking in Guyana? includes major additions that extend the pleasure principle while also incorporating “Indigenous Amerindian dishes” in ways that are fast and easy to make (Carnegie School of Home Economics 2004, p. vii). These are concentrated in a new section, “Farine dishes”, that starts with a paragraph on “How farine is made” from bitter cassava roots. The information that “a farine pan is greased with beef fat” locates the making of farine in 2004 when both farine pans and beef fat are widely available; when the recipe for Farine Chester calls to “Grate coconut. Add to soaked farine” with a note to, “as a variation use thin farine flour pastry to either line the pan, or to line and top the pan”, it becomes clear that readers are expected to use farine flour ready-made from the market (Carnegie School of Home Economics 2004, pp. 36–37). Twenty-first century Guyanese cooks can find joy and interest in local Amerindian products that are easy to purchase and to use in recipes that participate in the ongoing processes of creolization that, in Guyana, includes Indian- and Chinese- as well as Amerindian-, European-, and African-derived ingredients to render treats like Farine Fried Jumble made with farine, meat, “Chinese sauce or cassareep”, cabbage, bora (Indian long beans), pumpkin, peppers, Chinese spice, vetsin, and more (Carnegie School of Home Economics 2004, p. 50).

The connection between an appeal to home cooks’ interest in health and the practice of eating local marks the subtitle of the first cookbook to focus on ground provisions, the Guyanese Sabrina S. Panday’s (2016) Provisions: Cooking Healthy with Nature’s Bounty. Panday’s introductory premise that “ground provisions sustain us in many ways through the nutrients we receive in our bodies to our connection with mother earth” makes clear that she understands “the health benefits and nutritional value obtained from eating ground provisions” to be intimately linked to their status as local food, “grown beneath the earth” that she stood upon “growing up in Guyana” (Panday 2016, p. 8). Her list of ground provisions and balance of recipes position cassava as an equal player along with eddoes, plantains, sweet potatoes, yams, and breadfruit. The headnote for each dish details nutritional and health benefits, with cassava variously noted for the fact that it “has more protein than that of other tropical food sources like yam, potato, plantain etc”, contains many vitamins and minerals, especially magnesium and copper so that it “promotes life-long health lowering your blood pressure and reducing your risk of osteoporosis [and] helps support healthy nerve function”, and “yucca root, when taken orally, can help treat the symptoms associated with arthritis, bursitis and gout” (Panday 2016, pp. 14, 18, 36, 51). These are “impressive reasons” to eat cassava, especially when such health benefits are embedded in recipes for dishes like Cassava Biscuits, Wonderful Farine, and Cassava Flan that evoke “fond memories” and, as Panday says in an interview with Guyanese Girls Rock, offer “a twist on what can be done with ground provisions other than the traditional recipes we know” (Deosoran-Low A Chee 2016).

In Cuba, Vilda Figueroa and José Lama share the pleasure of good taste, the indigeneity of cassava, and its place in a much-needed increase in sustainable food practices that include supporting small, local farmers (Figueroa and Lama 2010, pp. 13–17) in their “vocation to serve the Cuban people”. While their previous cookbooks, such as the 2002 Las plantas de nuestro huerto, focused on “integrating the content with agriculture, health, or environment”, their 2010 effort is a love-child of community building that combines their own creations with a selection of recipes “sent from across the country to the authors [that] constitute testimonies of regional culinary traditions, a form of contribution from the Cuban population eager to share their knowledge and creative initiative” (Figueroa and Lama 2010, p. 11). Fitting with the Cuban ideal of a classless and equitable society, they write less for housewives than for “the Cuban people” even though the people whose recipes they include are overwhelmingly women. They foreground communal pleasure and bounty, and, unlike in their previous cookbooks, cassava features prominently—in over two dozen of Figueroa and Lama’s recipes and eleven in the selection from the community. Like independence-era Cuban cookbook writers, Figueroa and Lama casually mention both bitter and sweet cassava, indicating that their readers know the difference and how to handle each; the significant local knowledge about cassava is part of its communal appeal. Their recipe for Harina de yuca (Cassava flour) adds a note: “cassava flour has many uses as a substitute for wheat flour: to thicken stews, soups, marmalades and fruits, sauces, purées, and more. To give consistency in the making of croquettes, fries, and hamburgers. To bread without egg. To extend egg tortillas. To prepare arepas and natillas. To prepare churros and palitroques. To make sweets based in wheat flour like panatelas and others” (Figueroa and Lama 2010, p. 205). This variety of uses, without regard for differences in kinds of cassava flour, starch, or tapioca that would be best for each, takes for granted that the cooks being addressed are already familiar with them all. Substitutes for wheat flour may still evoke for Cuban readers the Special Period when the fall of the Soviet Union made most imported foods inaccessible and led to significant hunger, but when Figueroa and Lama suggest cassava flour as a local substitute and filler, they present it as an enhancement: cassava is the new way to feed the community.

Dominican celebrity chef Leandro Díaz’s (2014) Cocinando sin ITBIS17 promotes local foods from local markets by overtly appealing to the financial benefit of avoiding taxes on imported foods. Díaz’s primary purpose is to serve domestic budgets and palates; that “all of these products are produced in our nation, that is to say, with this we are supporting our own”, is an added benefit (Díaz 2014, p. 12). His many recipes with cassava—like Guisado de pollo con pimiento de morrón y yuca tierna18 and Ropa vieja con arepitas de yuca19—offer celebrity-chef-style innovations and classics with a twist. Cooking local with cassava, he shows, allows Dominican home cooks to afford new Dominican haute home cuisine.

Rosa María Gómez’s (2014) La Nueva Cocina Dominicana de La Chefa beckons Dominican cooks not only toward using local foods but also toward embracing the Afroindigneous as part of Dominican creoleness—something that had been explicitly denied by Trujillo, implicitly mixed into the Dominican cookbooks that predominated under his long rule, and extended by those that followed it into the early twenty-first century. The image of Gómez’s brown skin and natural hair, that looks out at the reader from the center of the front cover recurs in the insignia of La Chefa embroidered on the breast of the chef’s jacket that she wears. Dominican cooks, the cover asserts, are not just white-presenting housewives—like those featured on the front covers of Silvia H. De Pou’s popular Mujer 2000 series—and male celebrities but also Afrodominican women who cook professionally and at home (De Pou 2015). The inside front jacket copy of La Nueva Cocina Dominicana de La Chefa proclaims Gómez a “pioneer in a new way of understanding cuisine in the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean region”, while a prolog by Mario Núñez Muñoz specifies the novelty of her work as a valuation of “the mixture of races, product of the Conquest and subsequent Colonization, as of the imperialist invasions by Spain, France, and the United States of North American, make of this land a cultural universe where culinary fusions nurtured extraordinary tastes and aromas … To know it is one thing, to value it is another and to share it is a new task” (Gómez 2014, p. 10). Gómez pioneers an angle in which the Afroindigeneity of Dominican cuisine is both its history and its future, and cassava represents the advanced agricultural and culinary landscape that the Europeans encountered when they arrived in the Caribbean. Cassava is the “American root that at the arrival of the Europeans was already cultivated across the Caribbean. … It is a very versatile product that can be used in sweet and savory preparations” (Gómez 2014, p. 23). Cassava epitomizes Caribbean non-reliance on the European as the source of not only its food materials but also its techniques and tastes. In keeping with her observation that “La Nueva Cocina Dominicana has expanded the range of use of this product [cassava]” (Gómez 2014, p. 23), Gómez’s recipes feature cassava as an ingredient in notably contemporary dishes from Sopa de gallina con dedos de yuca rellenos de queso de hoja y emulsión de cilantro20 to Bastones de yuca empanizada con ají dulce molido y harina de alemendra criolla,21 and of course cassava appears in her updated Sancocho celestial de cinco carnes (Celestial five meats sancocho). Although her recipes use only unprocessed cassava, she notes the presence of cassava flours and cakes on the Dominican market and links them to Indigenous history: “the Indigenous produced casabe, a kind of rough and somewhat hard bread or tortilla that today is industrialized” (Gómez 2014, p. 23). Gómez’s recipes for new uses of fresh cassava offer her readers a Dominican new rooted in its Indigenous history and modernized through its mixing with the local techniques, labor, and imagination of Afrodominicans like her.

Michelle and Suzanne Rousseau’s 2018 Provisions has an even greater focus on recovering the traces of Afroindigenous foodways for new sovereign formulations and figurations of Caribbean cuisine. The Jamaican Rousseau sisters dedicate Provisions to “the women of our past whose stories have disappeared from the family tree because they were deemed unimportant, irrelevant, or unnecessary, and to the women of our future who will carry on this beautiful lineage and create new stories and recipes to share with their daughters” (Rousseau and Rousseau 2018). Their focus on women indicates the “the angle of the housewife”, but their preference for terms like “womenfolk”, their documentation of market women and small women-run food businesses, and their identification on the back covers as “sisters, chefs, and entrepreneurs” include women with range of professions, and their historical framing aligns the angle of women cooks with a viewpoint trained through national history. Provisions’ opening highlights the mutually sustaining culinary information shared among indigenous and enslaved people in the Caribbean. Cassava, they write, “was indigenous to the islands, and methods for its processing and consumption were taught to early slaves by the native Indian communities of the Caribbean islands” (Rousseau and Rousseau 2018, p. 3). The Rousseaus’ focus on provision grounds as the space where Caribbean food was developed trains attention to the plot as the trace and source of both peasant survival and resistance and also of all that is “still voraciously consumed with great pleasures today by islanders from all walks of life” (Rousseau and Rousseau 2018, p. 13). While their “contemporary approach” to Caribbean cuisine offers “a new presentation of our food that is both accessible to all and relevant to modern life”, they do so “in the spirit of our ancestors’ adaptations and ingenuity in the kitchen” (Rousseau and Rousseau 2018, p. 9). They present cassava not only as an old thing that can be renewed but also as what can renew an old dish like mashed potatoes (Rousseau and Rousseau 2018, p. 18). Theirs stands out among cookbooks of the former British West Indies for the frequency of dishes made with unprocessed cassava. That they call for sweet cassava with no mention of a distinction among the varieties makes clear that it is widely available in Jamaica. The paucity of recipes for unprocessed cassava in most Jamaican cookbooks (even through the early twenty-first century) stems not from an absence of the ingredient in Jamaican cooking. Rather, cassava persisted in peasant plots and pots even when it did not gain admission into the elite and even middle-class print culture of cookbooks. As they turn to the plot as the source of pleasure for “islanders from all walks of life”, the Rousseau sisters demonstrate how much resistance it still has to offer. This becomes ironically clear in their remarks, directly following their explanation for how bammys are made, that “fortunately, you don’t have to make your own to enjoy this dish. Premade bammy is sold online and in Caribbean markets”, which authorize the (re)direction of cooks and readers to local markets for both raw materials and processed goods (Rousseau and Rousseau 2018, p. 23). Fortunate readers of Provisions also receive instructions on how to use those bammy cakes in the Rousseau sisters’ invention: steamed bammy with coconut, pumpkin, ginger, and tomato that, in addition to being “easy and quick to prepare, makes a tasty gluten-free dish that is super filling, full of fiber, and really good for you” (Rousseau and Rousseau 2018, p. 23), hitting, in other words, nearly every contemporary food trend. To eat local, to enjoy “healthy and culturally appropriate food”, is, they show, to be deliciously connected to the traces and plots of the past and the future.

6. Market Development, Internal and External

By the early 1990s, cassava was “cultivated throughout the world tropics, and […] consumed as a staple by 300–500 million humans on a daily basis” (Jackson 1993, p. 323). As of 2024, the top producer of cassava worldwide is Nigeria, and Thailand is the largest supplier, responsible for about seventy percent of worldwide exports of cassava (World Population Review 2024). The Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARICOM)22 and other regional and international organizations focusing on “development” in the Caribbean are alternately eager and concerned about the untapped potential of the Caribbean to enter global cassava economies. The Caribbean rarely features in global conversations about cassava, its status as the place where Europeans first documented its processing and widespread consumption largely ignored. It may be that cassava’s elision is a symptom of the “standardized dilution” that Glissant warned “globalization, seen as non-place, would indeed result in” (Glissant 2020, p. 118). It extends colonial practices of material and symbolic expropriation. Yet, Caribbean cassava plotting remains, giving truth to Glissant’s observation that globalization may extend the work of colonialism, “but for each of us, the path that leads from our place to the world and back again, again and again, indicates the only permanence” (Glissant 2020, p. 118). As this essay shows, post-colonial Caribbean cookbooks are retracing the paths of cassava as a delicious, healthy, local source for food sovereignty. If CARICOM’s hopes are realized, will that also mean that, like so much else, cassava is finally moved off the plots and into the factories? Or will that show how postcolonial returns and retracings can plot new forms “of resistance to the market system and market values” (Wynter 2022, p. 295)?

A 2021 Casava Fact Sheet picks up F. Ford’s 2015 estimate that “cassava could reduce the [Caribbean] region’s food import bill by ten percent” and could substitute Caribbean Community (CARICOM) food imports in corn, wheat, and malt to propose that “the development of the cassava industry can assist the region in meeting its food security and nutrition targets” (“Cassava” 2021). In Barbados, cassava is made into meat alternatives, and BADMC, still using the Carmeta’s brand name, has retail success with products like bread, cake, and porridge mixes; ‘cassava colada’ sorbet; and cassava flour that it markets as “made exclusively with home-grown crops” and “hand-peeled” (“Cassava Flour” 2024). Daphne Ewing-Chow reports that, in Jamaica, cassava is used by Red Stripe as a replacement for imported high-fructose corn syrup, “local agro producers manufacture cassava products such as bammy, pancake mix, cassava chips and bammy Sticks. Supermarkets in Barbados, Grenada and Trinidad and Tobago sell locally-made sliced bread made from 40% cassava” (Ewing-Chow 2019). However, the Cassava Fact Sheet’s focus on “industry” indicates how “local” development can as much support the city extension of the plantation that Wynter wrote about as the small-scale farmers that the food sovereignty is committed to. The question of who and what counts as local, and how that matters, that so occupied colonial-era cookbooks, re-emerges.

The United Nation’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) supported projects in Guyana to “boost local production and strengthen food security, rather than depending on imported industrialized products”. (Staboreck News 2023). In 2017, the Guyana Marketing Corporation, picking up the work of What’s Cooking in Guyana?, hosted a Farine Fiesta designed in part to promote the use of farine in coastal Guyana, where it is less used. Nonetheless, while What’s Cooking in Guyana? presented farine as made by hand in small batches (Carnegie School of Home Economics 2004, p. 36), the IFAD-funded projects involve moving farine production from manual harvesting, cleaning, and processing performed by Amerindian Guyanese women to what Agricultural Minister Leslie Ramsammy calls “an actual industry” with a “full-phased factory” (Caribbean Journal Staff 2013). The question of who this development serves looms large, as, in 2024, Guyanese cassava production rose “in line with its developmental trajectory to increase food productivity”, and President Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali has announced, “And now, we have the opportunity of taking Farine into the Brazilian market. It is no longer about producing food. It is how we now translate production into storage, add transportation, create higher value, and access more markets” (Guyana Standard 2024). Is this the dawn of Caribbean production and profit from cassava on the international markets, or is it a(nother) moment when national “interests” take up the colonial mantle of expropriating Indigenous knowledge and work?

Calling cassava “the Caribbean’s diamond in the rough”, Ewing-Chow suggests that, rather than focusing on cassava exports, Caribbean nations should focus on its potential for the food and agro-tourism industry. The 2021 “Cassava” Fact Sheet also suggests that “with the rise in gastronomy tourism, and more tourists seeking out immersive experiences, the development of ‘farm to fork’ enterprise is a worthwhile venture” (“Cassava” 2021). The question remains: would this new agro-tourism simply offer a new way to extend the internationally-backed economic model that supports international hotel chains far more than local business owners, let alone peasants? Or would the next generation of tourist-serving restaurants, tours, and festivals actually feature and support local businesses making and serving local foods grown on local farms? Would those businesses and farms remain sustainable and in the hands of peasants, the working-class, and local small-scale entrepreneurs?

Glissant, arguing that globalization is not going away, exhorts “whole-world” consciousness that expands creolization’s imaginative, unpredictable nourishment of the local–relational in and around globalization:

Let’s begin to clean up our surroundings, so that Martinique, for example proclaims and maintains itself, integrally, a land of organic products and clarity. Let’s stop believing in the production of unsaleable, badly protected commodities, whose fate depends on policies that are always changing and decided elsewhere. … In the world there is a place (buyers, people who know what they like are excited by the exchange) for everything that would come out of space of light, for everything that would proceed from the determination to clean up the seas and the clouds, the Gardens and Sands. … We believe in the future of small countries, when they form an archipelago like this.

(Glissant 2020, p. 141)

This is the hope that those who “grow what we eat, eat what we grow” attain food sovereignty, that the lack of food independence is not a sign of failure but an acknowledgement that the Caribbean has always been the site of crossing foodways and markets—those that brought cassava to its shores in the first place and that implanted all of the things that make up its creole foods today. It is the hope of imaginative cooks and entrepreneurs who, tracing their lineage and their recipes to the higglers and market women who have been selling cassava bread at Caribbean crossroads for hundreds of years, continue plotting resistance.