Derek Stavarski's List: Island Caribs - Ethnology Paper -Diet, Nutrition

• Dominica's people enjoy relatively good health, and there is no serious hunger  problem on this island where a large variety of food crops can be grown with  little investment in either money or labor.
• Although Caribs have devoted an increasing amount of their time and labor in  recent years to the cultivation of cash crops, and proportionally less attention  to the production of subsistence crops and fishing, their diet has improved.
• Carib gardens are devoted almost entirely to fruits and roots, this diet is low in protein. Fishing is especially poor at certain  times, and many of the food crops are seasonal, providing a diet of uneven quality throughout the year, but the expanded  concentration on cash crops enables the Caribs to have a steady year-around  income, and a high proportion of this income is spent on imported and prepared  foods.

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• Some Caribs own guns and enjoy occasional hunting, but most hunting is done by  children who catch landcrabs and small birds. There is larger game (pigs,  agoutis, and opossums), but they are encountered only rarely. The scarcity of  game was probably responsible for the fact that the Caribs abandoned the use of  arrows before they were able to afford guns
• Today, as in 1950 (Banks 1954: 91), food procured by hunting contributes very  little to the Carib diet and provides no source of  income.
•  Caribs  generally prefer fish to meat, but chickens, pigs, goats, and a few cows are  raised in the Reserve. Most households have no more than one or two farm animals  and several chickens, and many have none.
• Chickens lay their eggs in the bush, and few of these are recovered and used as  food. Milking is done infrequently, and slaughtering is likely to occur only  before a holiday such as National Day, Carnival, Easter, or Christmas. Surplus  butchered meat is purchased by friends and neighbors in much the same fashion as  freshly caught fish.

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• English consumers are paying more for bananas than they have ever paid before,  and the Caribs are receiving a higher price than previously, but prices of  nearly everything bought by Caribs have increased steadily since 1964.
• Because of fertile soil, a year-around growing season, abundant rainfall, and  topographical variation, the Carib Reserve is capable of producing many  different kinds of crops, and an adequate food supply is available for nearly  every household.
• The following crops are grown primarily for local consumption: manioc, sweet  potatoes, dasheen, tanias, yams, pineapples, plantains, soursops, sweetsops,  avocados, kidney beans, castor beans, cashew nuts, okra, cacao, coffee, papayas,  guavas, mangos, egg plants, breadfruit, bread nuts, peppers, ginger, nutmeg,  arrowroot, saffron, tomatoes, cherries, christophenes, pumpkins, and sugarcane.
• Surpluses of some of these are allowed to rot, but others, such as nutmeg,  tanias, dasheen, and breadfruit, may be sold to passing merchants or in the  Roseau market, but seldom on a regular basis.
• Copra is more profitable than the raw nuts, but kitchens burn down sometimes as  a result of fires left unattended during the drying process.

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• The diet of the Caribs is however not complex; it is  almost exclusively vegetable, and is supplemented from time to time by a few  crabs or by fish.
• The trees which supply them with fruits are numerous: these are the mango-trees,  the guava-trees, the coeo-nut trees, the banana trees, and the famous breadfruit  tree
• Meat is an unimportant part of their diet and the few  animals they raise; pigs of Spanish or 139   French origin, and domestic poultry,  hens and ducks serve more as articles of exchange than as  food.

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• MOST famous among the several “retreats and fasts” undergone by the Island Carib  of early Colonial times is that which has come to be identified as the couvade;   and  which still is practised, in a modified form, by the Carib Indian remnant on  Dominica and by the Black Carib in Central America.
• As elsewhere (and notably in South America), this custom is based, immediately,  upon the belief that a child's welfare, both before and for some time subsequent  to its birth, may be affected by either the diet or the  activities of the father as well as by those of the mother;

•  On the other  hand, a new-born child may be adversely affected by the diet or activities not only of its mother and father, but  also by those of any others who come near it.
• Mother and child should not be visited, moreover, by persons who are in any way  “abnormal.” For the Carib this includes—besides those who are deformed,  disabled, or lacking in some sense or faculty—all who are, to use a current  expression, “heaty”
• Girls and women are required to observe both dietary and occupational  restrictions during their menstrual periods. At these times, they must on no  account eat any products of the chase killed by dog or gun.

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