In the fields allotted to them for food production, enslaved Africans forged a new subsistence system that included crops from the world's principal  
tropical regions. However, their access to individual plots was often precarious. In the initial period of plantation development, enslaved people were for the most part put in charge of growing their own food, but a full day working the fields left little time or energy for doing so. During sugar harvests, when cane milling demanded round-the-clock labour, the food fields were forcibly vacated. Metropolitan decrees, such as the Code Noir (Black Code) issued by the French monarchy in 1685, sought to enforce minimum standards among sugar plantations by setting guidelines for food rations. The regulations often went unheeded. In Dutch Guiana, food insecurity was pervasive. George Warren, who spent three years in the colony, wrote that the enslaved growers worked 'till Saturday afternoon, when they are allowed to dress their own Gardens or Plantations, having nothing but what they can produce from thence to live upon' (Conrad, 1984, pp. 55-62; Warren, 1667, p. 19). Correspondence from the Danish West Indies in 1718 presents a similar scenario: 'The negroes were expected to raise all their own food, except for such low-grade fish or defective Irish beef as might be allotted to them when the food supply ran short'(Westergaard, 1917, pp. 158 and 164-165). A Saint Thomas sugar-planter added: 'slaves receive nothing from their master in the way of food or clothing, except only the small plot of land at the outermost extremity of his plantation land that he assigns to each slave' (Carstens, quoted in Highfield, 1997, p. 72).