From “Slave” to “Poor People” to “Traditional” Food: The Journey of Saltfish across the Atlantic to the West Indies and its Movement through the Culinary Landscape of Trinidad and Tobago

The movement of food is intimately linked to humans; foodways would not be the phenomena that they are if this were not so. In the first instance there is the transfer of food from one geographic location to another, which is almost always directly correlated to human migration. Particular to the physical movement of food, this paper highlights the journey of saltfish across the Atlantic to the West Indies, specific to its introduction to the African enslaved population during colonial rule. Following the bodily movement of an item of food, there is its ideological journey through varying communal, cultural and socio-economic spaces and groups. In this regard, focus is given to colonial ideologies and the ways in which these affected the post-colonial attitudes toward, and consumption patterns of saltfish. Further to this, and in the aim of appreciating how changes in attitudes, ideologies and socio-economics have served to propel saltfish upward through the class groups, wherein saltfish has been re-branded to the point that it has become veritably inaccessible to that group to which it was first aligned.