This dissertation demonstrates that eating was more than a biological function, or “mere sustenance,” in the nineteenth-century U.S. South; the food a person consumed established one’s place in society’s hierarchy, fueled political debates over slavery, and contributed to the idea that black and white bodies were innately different. Framed methodologically, around the fields of U.S. history and African American Studies, “Consuming Bodies, Producing Race” interrogates eating by exploring the symbolic meanings that slaves and slaveholders attached to consumption. Eating provides a way to interrogate another side of enslaved cultural practice, underscoring the way people of African descent, in the words of Bernice Johnson Regan, “expanded the terrain of culture” within the oppressive confines of white supremacy in the U.S. What slaves considered edible went beyond hog meat and wild game. Thus, the eating habits of slaves shed light on their understandings of their own bodies in the face of violently enforced white ownership. Ultimately, this dissertation seeks to show how foodways, and eating in particular, provided an ideological basis for enslavement.