Midway through this fine book, Gregorio Saldarriaga relates a dispute that occurred in Ambalema, in central Colombia, in the seventeenth century. Juan Domínguez, a Spaniard married to a mestiza, was sharing a meal with two hired hands, indigenous men who lived in the same small hut as their employer. Although they were clearly on intimate terms with each other and were eating the same food, Domínguez objected when his wife used his special totuma, or gourd cup, to serve chicha to the other men, whose inferior status he wished to emphasize, not reduce. This small incident encapsulates many of Saldarriaga's themes, for it demonstrates both the elements of shared culture that characterized colonial Colombia and the powerful hierarchies that structured and indeed created that culture. Spaniards and indigenous people might on occasion eat exactly the same things, but these transcultured consumption practices did not necessarily engender any sort of multicultural harmony or sense of common identity.Alimentación e identidades analyzes both the formation of colonial culinary regimes in New Granada and the production systems that made these regimes possible. The book is thus notable in its successful effort to integrate a cultural history approach to the study of food with close attention to economic and environmental context. Throughout it attends closely to the complex meanings associated with particular foods in indigenous, West African, and Iberian cultures, and considers whether these meanings altered in the first two centuries of colonization. Saldarriaga's study, which is based on his doctoral dissertation undertaken at the Colegio de México, is informed by an impressive array of archival and printed early modern sources as well as a familiarity with recent scholarship on the cultural history of food (Massimo Montanari's work seems to have been a particular influence). While the book does not revolutionize our understanding of the place of food in colonial Spanish America, it is nonetheless a really outstanding contribution to the literature on food, culture, and society in the region because of its imaginative and convincing reconstruction of the varied foodscapes that characterized colonial Colombia.The book opens with a discussion of the dual discourses of abundance and scarcity at the heart of Spain's response to the New World's environment and in particular its foods. For Spaniards, abundance did not entail simply a plethora of foodstuffs but rather the ability to reproduce the “alimentary codes” that governed Iberian consumption practices. As Saldarriaga shows, bread lay at the heart of these codes, and the quest for foods that could be converted into bread shaped the colonial culinary culture that emerged in New Granada as well as elsewhere in the Spanish empire. This sensibility explains why the vecinos of Santa Marta complained in 1609 that during a siege by indigenous groups they were obliged to endure five days without eating “any sort of bread,” although they admitted that they were well supplied with roasted meats and other comestibles (p. 101). Saldarriaga makes a serious effort to relate the changes he perceives in colonial food rhetoric to changes in economic realities (a downturn in the mining economy explains a greater acceptance of locally produced food, for example). While these linkages were not always convincing (at times the purported changes did not seem to me to be reflected in the documentation), the attempt to draw such connections is one of the book's many strengths. Another is its consistent attention to regional variation. Colombia's diverse topography, and the varied economic circuits to which it gave rise, allowed the formation of multiple dietary regimes, whose distinctiveness Saldarriaga highlights. Notably, the book does not focus solely on European or creole attitudes but also offers an extended and illuminating analysis of indigenous attitudes toward abundance and scarcity. Saldarriaga shows how under colonial eyes certain indigenous rituals of abundance were repurposed in ways that demonstrate both the changes wrought by colonialism and also the continuing centrality of maize to indigenous culture. West African culinary and agricultural practices are also consistently kept within the frame of analysis, even if Saldarriaga is not always able to determine the significance of particular foodstuffs for the Afro-Colombian population to the degree that he would like.Overall, this book offers captivating details, penetrating insights, and a convincing analytical frame that reveals the power of food to illuminate the lived experience of colonialism. Saldarriaga shows that the roots of Colombia's distinctive regional cuisines emerged from the sanctioned and unsanctioned consumption and production practices to which colonialism gave rise, without ever losing sight of the profoundly unequal nature of the contexts in which these occurred. His book thus demonstrates well the truth of the observation made some years ago by a former president of Burkina Faso that if you want to see colonialism, “look at your plate!”