Food

Yoruba food is built on a starch staple eaten with a sauce, and almost everything else follows from which starch and which sauce. The starch is yam, cassava, maize or plantain, prepared as a pounded or stirred mass; the sauce is a stew or soup thickened with vegetable, seed or leaf and enriched with palm oil, pepper and whatever protein is available. This is a pattern shared across the West African forest belt, and the Yoruba distinctiveness lies in the specific preparations, the regional preferences, and the ritual weight assigned to particular foods, above all to yam.

Food in this society is not primarily a private matter. Feeding people is the concrete form that hospitality, obligation, standing and reconciliation take, and a Yoruba social event is measured substantially by what was served and to how many. The dinner Onadeko records as following a settled family dispute, with libation poured to the ancestors before anyone ate, is the ordinary case rather than a ceremonial exception: eating together is how a restored relationship is made real 1.

The agricultural base

Yorubaland spans the forest and the forest-savanna margin, and the crop base reflects the transition. Yam is the forest and forest-margin staple and the crop with the highest ritual and social standing. Maize arrived from the Americas and became important. Cassava arrived by the same route and spread widely through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, eventually displacing yam as the everyday starch for most people because it is far cheaper per calorie, tolerates poor soil and can be left in the ground. Cocoyam, cowpea, plantain, okra, pepper, melon seed and a large range of leaf vegetables fill in around them. Oil palm grew semi-wild and was managed rather than planted in the early period. The historical detail is in History: Economy, Craft and Trade.

The farm was separate from the town. Farmers lived in town and travelled to the farm, staying at farm hamlets, àbà, during intensive periods, which is the material arrangement underneath Yoruba urbanism and which shaped the rhythm of eating: a household's food supply came from a farm at a distance, moved to town, and passed through the market.

Yam

Iṣu, yam, occupies a position that no other Yoruba food does. It is the prestige starch, the crop by which a farmer's success is measured, the object of a dedicated festival, the subject of specific prohibitions on when it may be eaten, and the food offered at the most significant occasions. Yams symbolise wealth, fertility and sustenance in a way that no quantity of cassava does, and the distinction is social rather than nutritional 2.

Ìyán, pounded yam, is the highest-status preparation: boiled yam pounded in a mortar to a smooth elastic mass, eaten with a soup. The labour involved is part of the point, since pounding yam is heavy and skilled work, and serving ìyán is a statement about the household's capacity as well as its resources.

The new yam festival. Before the new season's yams may be eaten, the first fruits must be offered. Among the Yoruba the festival is called Ọdún Ìjẹsu, and among the Ìkẹ̀rẹ̀ of Èkìtì it is celebrated to thank the òrìṣà for the land's fertility and for the previous planting season 3. It is associated with Òrìṣà Oko, the deity of agriculture, whose priests and priestesses are the ones who celebrate the yam festival annually 4. Eating the new yam before the celebration is a taboo, since the offering is what secures the harvest and acknowledges the earth and the deities responsible for it 5. The Yoruba festival differs from the better-known Igbo Iri Ji in name, in scale and in the deity involved, and the two should not be conflated.

The structure of the observance is worth noting for what it says about the society: the prohibition is on individual consumption ahead of the collective act. Nobody eats until everybody can, and the priority claim belongs to the deity and then to the community. Festivals in general are treated in Time and the Calendar and in section 06.

The staples and the dishes

Àmàlà is the flagship of the Ọ̀yọ́ and Ìbàdàn region: a smooth dark brown or near-black mass made by stirring yam flour, ẹ̀lùbọ́, into hot water. Yam flour is dried and milled yam, so àmàlà is a yam product with the keeping properties yam lacks. Cassava flour, làfún, produces a white version, and plantain flour a third. Àmàlà with ẹ̀wẹ́dú and gbẹ̀gìrì is the definitive Ọ̀yọ́ meal.

Ìyán, pounded yam, treated above.

Ẹ̀bà is made from gàrí, fermented and toasted cassava granules, stirred into hot water. It is the cheapest and most universal of the swallows and is by volume what most Yoruba people actually eat.

Ẹ̀kọ, also called àgídí, is fermented maize pudding, wrapped and set, eaten with bean dishes.

Ẹ̀wà are beans, most commonly cowpeas, and the associated preparations are among the most distinctive Yoruba foods: àkàrà, bean fritters fried in palm oil, and mọ́ínmọ́ín, a steamed bean pudding, both made from cowpeas ground after the skins are removed.

The soups. Ẹ̀fọ́ rírò, a stew of leafy greens with pepper, palm oil and protein. Ẹ̀wẹ́dú, a mucilaginous soup of Corchorus olitorius leaf, characteristically served alongside a tomato and pepper stew rather than alone. Gbẹ̀gìrì, a smooth soup of skinned brown beans, strongly associated with Ọ̀yọ́. Egúsí, thickened with ground melon seed. Ilá, okra. Ọbẹ̀ àtà, the base pepper stew of tomato, pepper and onion in palm or vegetable oil, which underlies a very large part of the cuisine. Ọbẹ̀ ata dín dín and the fried variants. Ọ̀fàdà rice, the local short-grain rice served with a distinctively rough pepper sauce, is an Ẹ̀gbá and Ìjẹ̀bú signature.

Regional variation is real and locally salient. The Ọ̀yọ́ and Ìbàdàn preference is for àmàlà with ẹ̀wẹ́dú and gbẹ̀gìrì. The Ìjẹ̀bú are associated with ìkọ̀kọrẹ́ (water yam grated and cooked into a thick pottage) and with ẹ̀bìrìpò. The Èkìtì and Ìjẹ̀ṣà areas favour pounded yam and are associated with distinctive vegetable soups. Coastal and lagoon communities eat far more fish, and the Lagos Àwórì and Ẹ̀gún preparations reflect it. These preferences are markers of origin and are joked about accordingly.

Palm oil

Epo pupa, red palm oil, is the base fat of the cuisine and the thing that most visibly distinguishes West African cooking from its neighbours. It is pressed from the fruit of Elaeis guineensis, it is deep orange-red from carotenoids, and its flavour is central rather than neutral. It is used raw in some dishes and cooked or bleached in others.

Its social significance runs beyond the kitchen. Palm oil was the export commodity that replaced the slave trade in the nineteenth century, and because women dominated oil processing and local trading, the transition altered who earned from export, a point treated in History: Economy, Craft and Trade. Palm oil also has ritual uses, and it appears in offerings and in medicine, including as an emergency treatment given after ingestion of a poison.

Palm wine, ẹmu, tapped from the palm, is the indigenous alcoholic drink, and it is the drink poured in libation and offered to guests. Its role in hospitality and in ritual is as significant as its role as a beverage.

Eewọ̀

Eewọ̀ is prohibition, and it applies to food more visibly than to anything else. Within Yoruba culture, eewọ̀ is a strong force against which one does not transgress as long as one is part of the culture 5. The important point for a reader is that food prohibitions are not general dietary law but are attached to particular groups and particular persons.

Lineage eewọ̀. An ìdílé carries its own prohibited items, transmitted with the lineage and explained by an ìtàn: an ancestor was saved by a particular animal, or was harmed by a particular food, or made a covenant. Members of that lineage do not eat that thing. Because the prohibition follows descent, it functions as a boundary marker for the lineage, and a person's eewọ̀ is a piece of information about who they are. The prohibition applies whether or not the person believes the story, which is why lineage eewọ̀ are frequently still observed by Christian and Muslim Yoruba who would not describe themselves as observing anything traditional.

Òrìṣà eewọ̀. Each òrìṣà has its prohibitions, and devotees, priests and initiates observe them. The best-known is the Ọbàtálá prohibition on palm wine, which is bound up with the tradition of Ọbàtálá being made drunk during creation, and which extends to a general association of Ọbàtálá with whiteness, cleanliness and abstention. Ògún, Ṣàngó, Ọ̀ṣun and the others each carry their own. The detail belongs to section 06.

Personal and situational eewọ̀. Ifá may prescribe an eewọ̀ for an individual, either for life or for a period, and these are as binding on the individual as a lineage prohibition. Prohibitions attach also to states and offices: the ọba is subject to eewọ̀ specific to the crown, pregnant women observe prohibitions, and initiates observe them during initiation.

How to read this. From outside, a food taboo looks like an arbitrary restriction. From inside, an eewọ̀ is a boundary that constitutes a relationship: with an ancestor, with a deity, with a lineage or with a destiny. Breaking it is not primarily unhealthy, it is a rupture in that relationship, and the remedy is restitution rather than treatment. The nutritional consequences are real but incidental, and a serious account should not reduce eewọ̀ to a functionalist explanation about protein or hygiene, which the evidence does not support.

Feeding, hospitality and obligation

Food is the medium of Yoruba social obligation, and this is not sentimental language.

A guest is fed. Arrival at a compound entails an offer of food and drink, and the offer is not optional for the host or easily refusable by the guest. Kola, obì, is the minimal form: presenting kola to a visitor is the formal act of welcome, and it appears in the same role in prayer, in divination and in offerings. Kola's ubiquity across the ritual and social registers is why it was a major export crop, since it was in demand across the Muslim savanna where it was one of the few permitted stimulants.

A ceremony is a feeding. Naming ceremonies, marriages, funerals, chieftaincy installations and house-warmings are measured in what was provided. A funeral in particular is an obligation to feed the town, and the scale of the funeral feast is a statement about the deceased's standing and about the family's capacity to honour them. The financial burden this places on Yoruba families is substantial and much discussed, and the persistence of the obligation under conditions of urban poverty is one of the clearer cases of a social institution outliving the economy that supported it.

Feeding creates and repairs relationship. The post-settlement meal recorded by Onadeko is the model: the case is settled, then people eat together, and the eating is what converts a judgment into a restored relationship 1. Libation to the ancestors precedes it, which places the dead among the parties to the reconciliation.

Who eats what, and when. Seniority ordered eating as it ordered everything else. Elders were served first and served the best portions, particularly of meat, and children ate after and separately. Meat was scarce and its distribution was accordingly the sharpest expression of rank in the household. The proverbial standing of specific portions, and the mock-serious politics of who gets which piece of chicken, is a real thing rather than a joke.

What changed

The everyday Yoruba diet has shifted decisively toward cassava and toward imported rice and wheat, driven by relative price. Yam has become a special-occasion food for most urban households, which paradoxically increases rather than decreases its status. Bread, instant noodles and imported rice are now staples of the urban diet, and Nigeria's dependence on imported rice and wheat is a national economic issue.

Palm oil consumption has partly given way to imported vegetable oils in urban cooking, though it remains indispensable for the dishes defined by it.

The obligations around feeding have not weakened proportionately, and the mismatch between a food-based system of obligation and an economy where food has become expensive relative to income is one of the ordinary pressures of contemporary Yoruba life. The commercialisation of ceremony, with caterers, event centres, aṣọ ẹbí uniforms and the rest, is the form the obligation now takes, treated in Contemporary Yoruba Society.

Yoruba food has also travelled. It is the base of the West African restaurant presence in London, Houston, Atlanta and Toronto, and it is a significant part of how diaspora Yoruba maintain the connection. What crossed the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also survived: àkàrà is recognisably the ancestor of Brazilian acarajé, sold on the streets of Salvador by women of Candomblé, and the palm oil, malagueta pepper and bean fritter complex of Bahian cooking is a direct West African inheritance. That is treated in section 08.