What we consider today to be everyday food and drink—sugar, spice, coffee, tea—actually possess complex histories. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some of Europe’s earliest encounters with racial, cultural, and religious difference were registered via these foodstuffs. The average European may never have met “an Indian” or an enslaved person of the Caribbean, but they would have found products from these regions scattered throughout the foods and medicines they regularly consumed. Join Dr. Gitanjali Shahani (San Francisco State University) and Dr. Jennifer Park (UNC-Greensboro) in a guided exploration and discussion that uncovers the hidden histories of what we eat—and do not eat—in order to understand how cultures construct racial substance and bodies, and how the past informs what we eat, and who we think we are, in the present. Hosted by the Center for Arts and Humanities.