How Not to Write About Africa: African Cuisines in Food Writing

The American culinary canon has greatly expanded in the last few decades to include many “foreign” cuisines from around the world. Americans now regularly consume cuisines that were once seen as “strange” or “exotic” and have become well versed with once obscure ingredients such as galangal root or ghee. This expansion of the American culinary canon has not, however, been universally inclusive. Despite the broadening of the American palate, Americans have shown little interest in the cuisines of Sub-Saharan Africa. This article examines how this lack of interest in African cuisines may lie in the limited and often stereotyped representations of African cuisines by food journalists and restaurant reviewers in newspapers and gourmet food magazines, which still play highly influential roles in the shaping of the American palate. The article also explores how a shift in the narrative on African cuisines in “gastronomic journalism” can contribute to the further broadening of the American culinary canon.