Gather and Feast: How African Traditions Can Save the Future of Eating

What African culinary traditions–both modern and carried into the present from the past–can illuminate about the way Americans eat and congregate over food, and how we can move from an individual meals-ready-to-eat mindset to a resourceful and generous one.

We’ve all learned to eat seasonally for health and global sustainability, and now we’re taking the next steps: a glimpse of *how* other continents and cultures eat and why they choose what to put on their plates is the next step in improving our relationship with eating.

Americans have spent the last twenty-five years becoming thoroughly gung-ho about incorporating international ingredients into their flavor palettes: gochujang, matcha powder, za’atar, labne, quinoa and tahini are now familiar in pantries everywhere and each has been a gateway to the culinary practices and food systems of the rest of the world. The African kitchen has been largely missing from that list; most Americans who know it, know jollof rice. Gather and Feast begins at that familiar pot and goes beyond it, from the inside.

Intelligent and intimate, Gather and Feast is an exploration of African eating and community and a new take on alternatives to a diet from the industrial food complex. Atadika, a chef who spent more than a decade in humanitarian service across the continent, focuses on people rather than policy and makes the case for African foodways as a key to how populations are fed under all conditions. She chases her mother's light soup, a recipe that has eluded her for twenty years, from Accra to Westchester County, where her family settled after leaving Ghana in the wake of the 1981 coup. She examines why practices such as lingering at the table after a meal are crucial to keeping groups connected and incorporating new members into those groups. Her experiences from her own life and her research in the field are eye-opening: eating “sustainably” has almost lost meaning–and often ends up as a marketing label to justify a higher price, but Atadika’s *resourceful* eating is a fresh and appealing concept. It’s why you might want to consider millet as the center of your next meal; why speed could be your enemy in the kitchen and why one-pot cooking is generous, ingenious, and always allows for one or two more guests at the table.

Gather and Feast is not a cookbook–it’s a book of principles rather than instructions.