Wheat’s Prestige: Food Preference and Morality in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1760–1850

In eighteenth and early nineteenth century New Orleans, an inconsistent supply of wheat flour posed problems of both nutritive and moral significance for the city’s European and Creole inhabitants. Wedded to culturally created notions of wheat’s superiority to abundant (but indigenous) corn, the city’s merchants, administrators, bakers, and diners all sought ways to acquire more wheat flour when it was possible, or stretch existing stores when it was not. Pressed by the threat of public unrest, officials and bakers struggled to keep up with demand while still maintaining perceptions of food’s purity and proper regulation. At the same time, enterprising capitalists often hoped to offload spoiled or weevil-infested grain to anyone willing to buy it, regardless of accepted moral standards. Both sides understood that consumers dearly valued regular access to wheat, and even when other foods were available, they spent remarkable amounts of psychological and physical energy on obtaining, marketing, and defining themselves through that most moral of grains.

By examining merchant records, cabildo minutes, market price lists, and private correspondences, this paper will address the ethical dilemmas, capitalist opportunities, and social significance attached to food that heavily influenced the development of a moral food economy in late colonial and early American New Orleans. With attention to the various perspectives at play within the dietary dialog of a city now known for its culinary identity, I will explore the contexts from which that identity sprang as well as the moral life of foodways within a socially unequal and culturally diverse urban landscape. Through the emphasis placed on wheat above all other foodstuffs, we might better understand how early New Orleanians used comestibles to distinguish themselves from cultural and economic “others,” and shed light on the power of culinary ideals within the framework of state and social development.