Black American women have long sustained a complex relationship to food—its production, consumption, and distribution within families, communities, and the nation. Black women, often represented in American culture as “natural” good cooks on the one hand and beset by obesity on the other, straddle an uncomfortable divide that is at the heart of contemporary debate about the nature of our food system. Yet, Black women as authorities in the kitchen and elsewhere in matters of food—culturally, politically, and socially—are largely absent, made invisible by the continued salience of intersecting vectors of disempowerment: race/gender/class/sexuality. In this dialogue, we bring together a variety of agents, approaches, explorations, and examples of the spaces where Black American women have asserted their “food voices” in ways that challenge fundamentally the status quo (both progressive and conservative) and utilize the dominant discourses to create spaces of dissent and strategic acquiescence to the logics of capital ever-present in our food systems.

This paper discusses the preliminary results of analysis of faunal material from eight sites of Romano-Libyan and Islamic date. The sites are located in the pre-desert of Tripolitania. The samples were in general small and the bones were not well preserved, the degree of fragmentation being high. Although a range of species is represented, the economic strategy depended upon the exploitation of sheep and goats. In the southern part of the study area gazelles were also of importance. Sheep and goats were raised primarily as meat animals, being killed principally during their second year of life. The basic economic system seems to have persisted for a long time, although slight differences can be detected between sites of Romano-Libyan date and of Islamic date.

RIFIUTI ALIMENTARI DI UNA RICCA FAMIGLIA CITTADINA NEL TARDO SECOLO QUATTORDICESIMO: RESTI FAUNISTICI E BOTANICI DAL PALAZZO VITELLESCHI, TARQUINIA (VITERBO)Gli scavi condotti dalla British School at Rome nel Palazzo Vitelleschi in Tarquinia hanno fornito una quantità considerevole di dati faunistici e botanici, molti dei quali relativi al “proto-palazzo” del tardo sec. XIV. Le analisi del materiale qui presentate permettono di ricostruire in maniera abbastanza dettagliata il regime alimentare di una ricca e privilegiata famiglia urbana: tale esempio non può dunque essere assunto come rappresentativo in generale del tenore di vita diffuso nell'Italia centrale in età medievale. Alcuni elementi testimoniano come gli abitanti del proto-palazzo siano stati colpiti da una malattia, forse peste. E' stato possibile estendere il quadro ottenuto da questo particolare contesto e mettere in relazione l'economia di questa famiglia con l'organizzazione della produzione agricola nella compagna circostante. Le conoscenze offerte dai dati faunistici e botanici sul tipo di vita condotta nel medioevo sono paragonati e messi a confronto con le testimonianze documentarie relative alia dieta ed alla agricoltura medievale in Italia, anch'esse relative in gran parte alle classi più alte della società.

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Times have changed for Roman women. To an undergraduate – even a woman undergraduate – reading Greats some fifteen years ago, they were obviously a fringe topic, worth at most a question on the General Paper. There were pictures of dresses and hairstyles, in most of which it looked impossible to move. There were snippets of anthropology from Plutarch, as that a bride had her hair parted with a spear (Moralia 285b): entertaining, but about as relevant to the views of a bride in the late Republic as are wearing a veil (to symbolize being under authority) and being pelted with confetti (in hopes of many children) to a bride in the 1980s. There was an account of forms of marriage, with, usually, a panegyric of a Roman matron and a denunciation of the laxity of the late Republic and immorality of the early Empire; and a handful of brief biographies: Cornelia, Sempronia, Arria. This information would be found somewhere around chapter 15 of a general handbook, once the author had dealt with the serious business of life, like the constitution and the courts and education and the army and the provinces. J. P. V. D. Balsdon's book made a difference, since he never forgot that he was writing about human beings, who worried about their children and ran their households and had long days to fill. But the real change came in the 70s, as the Women's Movement – a decade late – got through to the classics. First there was the new perspective offered by general feminist histories, though their scholarship was second-hand and often wild; then articles and books, though still only a few, trying to answer the sort of questions it now seems so odd we did not ask. What did Roman women do all day, besides getting dressed? How did they feel about it? What else could they have done? Were they oppressed, and did they notice? Why do we know so little about half the human race?