Lecture 23: African and Aboriginal Cuisines
placed over a fi re or on a rack for grilling. Cooking usually takes
place outside. Much of the continent still lives at the subsistence level; people
still grow most of the food they consume, or it is bought and sold
at a local level. Famines are still frequent there, and even where
there’s not true famine, malnutrition is a very serious problem—
not to mention all sorts of nasty diseases, including elephantiasis,
shistosomiasis, and AIDS. Africa is among the poorest places on Earth, but the simplicity of
the cuisine doesn’t just have to do with poverty. In Africa, there
has always traditionally been only one class. Everyone makes a
living the same way, and the few individuals who may stick out
either because they’re rulers, tribal elders, or medicine men don’t
constitute a separate class. The result is that everyone eats the same
foods, and eating habits are very slow to change. Another important factor in African cuisine is that many people
remained in a hunting-and-gathering economy far longer than in
most places. They made the transition to agriculture very slowly,
and in most places, it wasn’t complete until modern times. From
about 9,000 years ago, most Africans were seminomadic and
practiced a combination of hunting, gathering, and agriculture.Indigenous Crops
Of the crops that are indigenous to Africa, the most important is the
yam. The fl esh of a yam is pure white and more like a turnip than
a soft sweet potato. Yams are useful because you can plant them,
forget about them, and come back months later. Africans ate yams
by cooking them until soft and mashing them into a starchy mass to
make fufu, which forms the bulk of the diet. Another native crop is sorghum, which looks a lot like a small
cornstalk, but the seeds grow on the top in a big, bushy head. The
seeds are tiny but very nutritious; they contain more calories by
weight than corn and have less fat and more protein. Another food