What did slaves do for food?

Enslaved people hunted, fished, and trapped wild animals to supplement their diets and to sell. Animal bones, excavated from the cellar of the House for Families slave quarter, reveal many different species, including deer, opossum, and turkeys. Some enslaved men had access to guns for hunting.

What food did they feed slaves?

Weekly food rations — usually corn meal, lard, some meat, molasses, peas, greens, and flour — were distributed every Saturday. Vegetable patches or gardens, if permitted by the owner, supplied fresh produce to add to the rations. Morning meals were prepared and consumed at daybreak in the slaves’ cabins.

How did slaves make food?

Slaves could roast potatoes in hot ashes while wrapped in leaves, like they would with cornbread or ash-cake, or cook them over the fire with other foods. Nellie Smith, a former slave from Georgia, remembered her grandmother would bake potatoes alongside a roast.

How often did slaves get food?

Slaves usually received a monthly allowance of corn meal and salt-herrings. Frederick Douglass received one bushel of corn meal a month plus eight pounds of pork or fish. Some plantation owners gave their slaves a small piece of land, a truck-patch, where they could grow vegetables.

What foods did slaves bring to America?

They brought the kola nut – one of the main parts of Coca-Cola – to what is now the United States. West Africans chewed the nut for its caffeine. Enslaved Africans also brought watermelon, okra, yams, black-eyed peas and some peppers. These foods are commonly eaten in the U.S. today.

What did slaves eat lunch?

Today’s meal is kitchen pepper rabbit, hominy and okra soup. This would have been a typical meal for an enslaved person — different versions of okra soup were eaten throughout the South, corn was a staple and rabbit would have been hunted by slaves and shared among dozens of people.

What crops did slaves grow on plantations?

Most favoured by slave owners were commercial crops such as olives, grapes, sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, and certain forms of rice that demanded intense labour to plant, considerable tending throughout the growing season, and significant labour for harvesting.

What kind of meat did slaves eat?

Faunal remains in excavations have confirmed that livestock such as pigs and cows were the principal components of slaves’ meat diets. Other sites show remnants of wild species such as opossum, raccoon, snapping turtle, deer, squirrel, duck, and rabbit.

What goods were traded for slaves?

A brief introduction to the slave trade and its abolition On the first leg, merchants exported goods to Africa in return for enslaved Africans, gold, ivory and spices. The ships then travelled across the Atlantic to the American colonies where the Africans were sold for sugar, tobacco, cotton and other produce.