Twelfth-century Chinese sources fused physical traits with food customs to describe Africans

Evidence

Their colour is black as ink, their lips are red and their teeth white, their hair is curly and yellow. There are males and females … They live in the mountains (or islands) beyond the seas. They eat raw things. If, in captivity, they are fed on cooked food, after several days they get diarrhoea. This is called “changing the bowels” [huanchang]. For this reason they sometimes fall ill and die; if they do not die one can keep them, and after having been kept a long time they begin to understand human speech [i. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3308

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s theme of how outsiders are described through food and body, and to Said’s Orientalism scholarship on how colonized bodies are described via diet and biology.