Violent Appetites

Carla Cevasco turns to hunger as a lens on the early northeastern corner of North America, where Native peoples, English colonists and French colonists clashed through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Constant violence left people struggling to find enough to eat, and the book traces how that scarcity affected each group, bringing physical pain along with dread of foods regarded as unthinkable.

In this setting, mealtimes could be fraught. Colonists and Native people encountered rotten meat, plants gathered from the land, and, in the most extreme cases, human flesh, and these experiences changed what hunger meant across cultures. Cevasco shows how scarcity exposed the weak points of the colonial enterprise, and how Native communities developed ways to endure both lean years and the wider upheaval of invasion.

Beyond its historical narrative, the book proposes an interdisciplinary framework for studying scarcity itself. It argues for widening food studies so that it looks at want and deprivation as well as abundance.