Food and Agriculture

The farmland typology, land tenure, and cooperative and unfree labor institutions that produced Yoruba staple crops, and how Atlantic-introduced maize and cassava reshaped the food base from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries.

The kitchen as a physical and technical space, its equipment, its cooking techniques, and the biochemistry of fermentation and palm oil extraction carried out in it.

The core Yoruba dishes eaten day to day, the swallows, soups, legume preparations, and tuber pottages, their regional identities and how they are actually eaten together.

The fermented condiments, palm oil, pepper complex, and salt that make up the flavor architecture underneath Yoruba soups and stews, and how ritual food practice sorts fats and seasonings by which òrìṣà they serve.

Palm wine tapping and its fermentation stages, the cereal beers and grain infusions brewed alongside it, plantain wine, the etiquette of drinking together, and the colonial-era history of trade gin and illicit distillation.

How Yoruba religious thought treats food as a channel of spiritual power, structured by deific and lineage prohibitions, the mechanics of sacrifice as a food transaction, and the ethics of eating together.

How food specifically, rather than trade in general, moved through periodic markets, how women's processing labor turned raw harvests into sellable food, how street food and the bùká became an urban institution, and what colonial taxation and modern supply chains did to that system.

How Yoruba dishes such as akara and moin-moin became acaraje and other Atlantic-world foods, and how the sacred kitchens of Candomble and Lucumi keep them alive today, from Bahian street vendors to Michelin-starred restaurants in London.