What makes African food culture(s) distinct from Western food practices is, in a word, relation—not just to the thing we call food, but to the entire ecology of life that food connects. It’s about how food extends beyond the plate, rippling into histories, cosmologies, land, ancestors, and futures. You see, in Western food practices, food is often objectified, treated as a consumable product—something to be owned, commodified, fetishized in its isolation. Individuality and consumption reign supreme. You eat to satisfy a singular hunger, an isolated body.
The people who give you their food give you their heart."
But African food culture, like so much else of African life, resists that isolation, refuses to let food be a "thing" in itself. It is woven into the social fabric, the spiritual cadence of the community, the ancestors, and the land. To eat is not simply to consume—it is to remember, to honor, to partake in a lineage of being that exceeds the moment of eating. It’s why agrarian societies in Africa have long seen farming not as work in the mechanized, capitalist sense, but as a ritual, a tending to the earth with the understanding that you’re not just producing food—you’re maintaining a relationship with the world around you. Food, then, is not owned; it is shared, it is relational, it is part of the cycle of life that sustains the communal.
And let’s talk about knowledge: how African food cultures often rely on ancestral knowledge passed down, not written in cookbooks but embedded in hands, tongues, and memories. It’s a knowledge that Western food practices, with their obsession for innovation, extraction, and novelty, often miss—the way an elder’s hand intuitively knows how much grain to pour, the way the land itself tells you what it needs, the way ingredients are tied to the spiritual ecosystems they emerge from.
And then, there’s spice, not just in the literal sense, but in how food is imbued with meaning, purpose, and care. Every spice tells a story, carries a memory of trade routes, migrations, resistances, and meetings. Spices in African food are not about overpowering the senses; they are about invoking the sacred, the ancestral, the historical. They call forth the world from which the food comes, invoking a sense of being grounded in the land and yet always connected to the diasporic flow of people and culture.
In Western food practices, eating is so often a quick act of consumption, a transactional moment. In contrast, African food culture says that food is processual, a sustained dialogue between the eater, the earth, the ancestors, and the community. It’s about the nourishment of the spirit, the body, and the collective memory. It’s about honoring the fullness of what it means to eat, not just to survive, but to be in relation, to be in community, to be human in a way that refuses the isolation of the individual, insisting instead on a collective, cyclical, relational ontology.
So the distinction? African food culture refuses to forget—refuses to let food be alienated from the land, the people, the spirits, the past, and the future. It is a radical act of remembering, of saying that we are always already part of something much bigger than this singular act of eating, this singular moment of life. We eat with the ancestors. We eat for survival, yes, but also for liberation.