J. D. La Fleur's Fusion Foodways of Africa's Gold Coast in the Atlantic Era examines the foodways of Africans who remained on the continent throughout the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the transformations their foodways underwent. It broadens the ongoing discussion in the Atlantic World literature on subsistence farmers and their food crops beyond rice and brings another geographic region into the discussion, the Gold Coast, shifting the discussion away from the Senegambia and the Upper Guinea Coast. Currently the literature on the history of West African foodways is dominated by rice and rice farmers and is primarily concerned with inheritance and transmission: how West African farmers developed agricultural technology in West Africa during the precolonial period and transmitted their specialized knowledge to the New World. La Fleur instead focuses on change: how farmers in the Gold Coast responded to increased commercial activity related to trans-Atlantic trade first in gold and only later in captives by intensifying agricultural production and experimenting with new crops. While much of the literature focuses on the species of rice that is indigenous to West Africa – there is a second species that is indigenous to Asia – La Fleur's focus is on crops introduced into West Africa from other parts of the continent and other parts of the world.

Due to the lack of traditional historical sources and the absence of historical sources written by Africans, all historians of Africa's early and precolonial periods must utilize interdisciplinary sources and methods, particularly if they are interested in historical periods pre-dating West Africa's contact with the Atlantic World. La Fleur displays a unique sophistication with the methodological challenges that define our field and for combating these challenges by reading European travelers’ accounts as evidence ‘in spite of themselves’. However, the linguistic evidence is less convincing without establishing a genetic relationship among the languages in question, nor identifying regular patterns of sound change and correspondence. The use of scientific or social scientific evidence for the reconstruction of human history requires additional analytic steps that must be laid bare for the reader to evaluate. La Fleur's use of loanwords as historical sources for contact between Gold Coast farmers and European traders and borrowing of food crops would have been strengthened with documentation of how he identified and analyzed the regular sound changes, which he uses to distinguish borrowings in the cultural vocabulary words and the source languages of loanwords, as well as more details about how he is using loanwords as historical sources.

In conclusion, Fusion Foodways takes on large literatures, such as the histories of the Columbian Exchange, the Atlantic world, and the African diaspora. It brings to light the role of African farmers and cooks as historical agents who experimented with growing and processing new crops, cooking new foods, and who ultimately ordered their lives and their societies around the production of new foods. La Fleur's study provides an important, yet all too often, missing link in the Atlantic world literature of the history of Africans in Africa and the ways that transformations in African societies were largely impacted by transformations in the Atlantic world. La Fleur characterizes Africans in Africa who greatly outnumbered Africans who disembarked in the Atlantic world as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade as a ‘hidden diaspora’. In addition, La Fleur's study reinforces the notion that the African diaspora was not only unidirectional. Africans in different stages of freedom left the continent for the New World where they experimented with new crops and cooking practices. Some of the charter generation and many more of their descendants returned to the African continent bringing their cultigens, cultivation techniques, and culinary arts with them. How much richer the world is for their efforts!