Haitians, Pets on the Menu, and John Muir
Food shaming targets unwanted people as less than human.
Donald Trump and J. D. Vance have been all too happy to boost the lie that Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, are snaring dogs and cats for the stew pot. It hardly matters to them that Springfield city and police officials say the claim lacks credible evidence. Trump bellowed the falsehood anyway during his debate with Kamala Harris last week, citing as his source “the people on television saying my dog was taken and used for food,” while Vance won’t stop repeating the lie. The story is just too good for plucking the deeply racist and xenophobic fears that drive MAGA’s dark heart.
Meanwhile, far-right provocateur Laura Loomer, who has been accompanying Trump on the campaign trail, dumped on Kamala Harris’s South Asian heritage via food. She tweeted that if Harris wins the presidency, the White House “will smell like curry” — as if that’s a bad thing.
Tagging a feared, despised, or unwanted group with allegedly disgusting dietary habits wasn’t invented by Trump, Vance, or Loomer. It’s a commonplace othering tactic, and it’s been around for a while. Take John Muir as an example.
During his first long canoe trip through Alaska’s Inside Passage with Presbyterian missionary S. Hall Young, the white men made it clear to the Tlingit crew that they had no interest in eating local food. To’watte, the captain, accommodated the squeamish pair by segregating their rations from the Tlingits’. But when they reached the village of Yandeist’akyé and were invited to a feast to celebrate their arrival, To’watte said that if the white men refused the festive meal, Tlingit manners would be offended. Muir and Young gallantly chewed and swallowed their way through courses of potatoes, salmon, and candlefish oil followed by rosehips and berries for dessert.
Even if the stuff they ate repulsed him, Muir came away from that trip with genuine respect for the Tlingits. He wrote in his journal:
I never saw a child or servant scolded or punished, or any resentment about taking the best place at the fire, or the best bits of food. There is such abundance that this spirit of mine and thine, developed into civilized selfishness, is never apparent, if it exists at all. Many a good lesson might be learned from these wild children. They should send missionaries to the Christians.
The Tlingits, however, were the exception among America’s Native peoples, Muir maintained. In appearance they “differed greatly from the typical American Indian of the interior of the continent,” with an Asian look that in the fashion of the time he called “Mongol.” The Tlingits, he was saying, were of an altogether different human variety than California’s dirty, degraded tribes.
No Indigenous people from Muir’s home state came in for more of his disdain than the Kutzadika’as of Mono Lake. He first encountered them as he descended Bloody Canyon toward Mono Lake while he was working as a summer shepherd in the Sierra Nevada. He found the Kutzadika’as indescribably filthy and even hideous, a debased people who “seemed to have no right place in the landscape.” Their diet further proved their subhumanity.
Muir passed through a Kutzadika’a campsite of “fragile willow huts” where families were “seen lying at their ease, pictures of thoughtless contentment, their wild animal eyes glowering at you as you pass, their black shocks of hair perchance bedecked with red castellias and their bent, bulky stomachs filled with no white man knows what.”
Muir knew what. The Kutzadika’as, he reported as if this reality broke all bounds, favored insect larvae washed up by wave action in Mono Lake:
This ‘diet of worms’ is further enriched by a large, fat caterpillar, a species of silk-worm found on the yellow pines to the south of the lake; and as they also gather the seeds of this pine, they get a double crop from it — meat and bread from the same tree.
Of all the foods offered by the Kutzadika’a homeland, “strange to say, they seem to like the lake larvae best of all.”
Muir held that there was nothing “natural” or “wild” in this dietary choice:
Most Indians I have seen are not a whit more natural in their lives than we civilized whites. Perhaps if I knew them better I should like them better. The worst thing about them is their uncleanliness. Nothing truly wild is unclean.
Still, Muir’s dietary prissiness stands out for its lack of self-reflection. Like all Scots, he knew his native land’s national dish to be haggis, a sheep’s stomach stuffed with chopped animal offal, oatmeal, suet, and spices and then boiled. It is a concoction that takes more than a little getting used to, and so quintessentially Scottish that national poet Robert Burns addressed a praise poem to this “Great Chieftain of the Puddin’-race.” Muir could have recognized that Kutzadika’as relishing brine fly pupae were no stranger than Scots savoring haggis, but no, he painted them as neither natural nor civilized. The Kutzadika’as were irredeemably other, people who, like Springfield’s Haitians, had “no right place in the landscape.”
Cast out of Eden comes to Berkeley
On Sunday, Sept. 29, 12:45 p.m., I’ll be talking about the book, John Muir, and the foundations of the national park system at the meetinghouse of the Berkeley Society of Friends, 2151 Vine St. (near Shattuck Ave.), Berkeley, CA, 94709. Free and open to all, Friends and friends alike. Please join me.
