ABSTRACT
Shirin Edwin’s study of African literature reveals the difficulties of a strictly gastropolitical approach even as it valiantly attempts to introduce an African culinary lexicon to the broader field of food studies. Studies of food in African literature have: rarely focused on food in its ordinariness, in the labour that goes into the production of its ingredients, the ways and means through which it is prepared, the way it mediates social relationships, or even quite simply the pleasures that it gives. While African literary criticism has engaged food as political index, the connection between food and everyday life has, until relatively largely eluded critical attention. The thematics of the kola nut in Things Fall Apart are well documented. African ‘denree mentale’ or ‘mental food’ demonstrates a ‘pragmatic pluralism’ that imbricates it in global flows that nourish the production of vernacular cuisines, and philosophical permutations that serve local communities.
