Pot-and-Pan-Africanism: The Culinary Continent

by Jordan Yerman | July 11, 2007 at 12:03 pm

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Where Africa's political leaders are struggling, the African Culinary network is making remarkable headway: uniting the megacontinent in spite of geographical, political, and cultural divides. The differences between the various tribes, political collectives and nations within Africa are quite real, but everybody's gotta eat...

At TEDGLOBAL in Arusha, Tanzania in June, 2007, we launched the "Africa Cookbook Project," whose goal is to archive African culinary writing and make it widely available on the continent and beyond. A database is being developed and copies of hundreds of cookbooks are already being catalogued at BETUMI: The African Culinary Network. Google has offered assistance in eventually digitizing some of the information.

Says BETUMI's founder:

I was finally galvanized to action by intense frustration over a general failure to take sub-Saharan African culinary history and contributions seriously, by the distorted popular media coverage and assumptions in North America, and the biased "scholarly" information available on (especially sub-Saharan) Africa's food-related history, whether that information was pro or con.

I read about this one on boingboing.

Update: The estimable Greg Lipscomb has shared some documentation of his own Tanzanian culinary adventures...

This
makes
me
very
hungry.