Food Culture In Sub Saharan Africa

East African, notably, Ethiopian, cuisine is perhaps the most well-known in the States. This volume illuminates West, southern, and Central African cuisine as well to give students and other readers a solid understanding of how the diverse African peoples grow, cook, and eat food and how they celebrate special occasions and ceremonies with special foods. Readers will also learn about African history, religions, and ways of life plus how African and American foodways are related. For example, cooking techniques such as deep frying and ingredients such as peanuts, chili peppers, okra, watermelon, and even cola were introduced to the United States by sub-Sahara Africans who were brought as slaves. Africa is often presented as a monolith, but this volume treats each region in turn with representative groups and foodways presented in manageable fashion, with a truer picture able to emerge. It is noted that the boundaries of many countries are imposed, so that food culture is more fluid in a region. Commonalities are also presented in the basic format of a meal, with a starch with a sauce or stew and vegetables and perhaps some protein, typically cooked over a fire in a pot supported by three stones. Representative recipes, a timeline, glossary, and evocative photos complete the narrative.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Animal products are vital components of the diets and livelihoods of people across sub-Saharan Africa. They are frequently traded in local, unregulated markets and this can pose significant health risks. This volume presents an accessible overview of these issues in the context of food safety, zoonoses and public health, while at the same time maintaining fair and equitable livelihoods for poorer people across the continent. The book includes a review of the key issues and 25 case studies of the meat, milk, egg and fish food sectors drawn from a wide range of countries in East, West and Southern Africa, as part of the "Safe Food, Fair Food" project. It describes a realistic analysis of food safety risk by developing a methodology of ‘participatory food safety risk assessment’, involving small-scale producers and consumers in the process of data collection in a data-poor environment often found in developing countries. This approach aims to ensure market access for poor producers, while adopting a realistic and pragmatic strategy for reducing the risk of food-borne diseases for consumers.

Presents an integrated multidisciplinary perspective on contemporary food issues in Sub-Saharan Africa.

"The Middle East might be the cradle of civilization, but Africa is the birthplace of humanity, where the first early humans evolved around two million years ago. Although Asia is bigger in landmass, Africa has the largest number of countries of any continent, many with complex histories. There are more than three thousand recognized ethnic groups in Africa and more than two thousand spoken languages or dialects. For much of recorded history, starting with the ancient Greeks and Romans, Europeans colonized large areas of Africa. In the nineteenth century's age of colonization, France, Britain, Germany, and Spain claimed swaths of land that were home to many previously independent tribal nations now forced to live under one colonial flag. So once European countries granted former colonies independence in the twentieth century, there was often a struggle between ethnic groups looking to stake out their own sovereign land. Over the centuries, Islamic, Catholic, and Protestant faithful have come to different areas of Africa hoping to convert its people. For as important as political and religious colonization was in the evolution of African culture, nothing trumps Mother Nature. Due to its vast size, Africa has five distinct ecosystems: ocean and seacoasts, deserts, mountains, woodland-grasslands (savanna), and forests/rainforests. Some countries have multiple ecosystems, and over the millennia, Africans have adapted to those specific conditions, which determine local agriculture and resources-or lack thereof"--

A rich ethnographic portrait of food-provisioning processes in a contemporary African city, offering valuable lessons about the powerful roles of gender, migration, exchange, sex, and charity in food acquisition. Based on anthropologist Karen Coen Flynn's study of Mwanza, Tanzania, this work draws on the personal accounts of over 350 market vendors, low, middle and high-income consumers, urban farmers as well as those, including children, who live on the streets. This strikingly original work offers interdisciplinary appeal to a broad audience of both students and professionals interested in anthropology, African studies, urban studies, gender studies and development economics.

Most contributions reflect an evolution of thinking during the 1990s.