During this moment of epistemological decolonization and anti-racism, Amanda Logan's book The Scarcity Slot: Excavating Histories of Food Security in Ghana is a welcome contribution to the reframing of Africa's past. While many contemporary anthropologists now take for granted that human development is nonlinear, and that cultural diffusion means we have been borrowing from one another for millennia, Logan reminds us that there are economists and historians who continue to cast Africa has having always been ‘underdeveloped’. Frustrated by this pernicious misreading of history, Logan uses a transdisciplinary method known as archaeological ethnography. Ethnoarchaeology was taught to her as a graduate student at the University of Michigan and employed while working with her mentor Ann Stahl on Banda history in Ghana. The method requires researchers to check different types of evidence against other evidence, for example checking archaeological evidence against sociocultural theory and ethnographic data. Logan provides material and cultural data showing that Africans were food secure before and during the Atlantic period (1400–1650 CE). Echoing the work of Trouillot, Logan identifies the scarcity slot as the positioning of Africa as developmentally behind Europe, the United States, and Asia. Logan tackles this misrepresentation of endemic food scarcity on the continent, particularly the Gold Coast and later Ghana, as a way to dislodge stereotypes and encourage more work on food security in West Africa.
In one of the first examples of ethnoarchaeological methods, Logan tackles the question of how to interpret documented expressions of ‘hunger’. In the archives, if people self-report a sense of hunger, should researchers simply accept those pronouncements as fact? Logan says no, given that theoretically, sociocultural anthropologists know that there are cultural idioms of distress, including hunger, that are subjective rather than objective. Citing the work of British anthropology Audrey Richards, Logan notes that maize for the Bemba did not satisfy a subjective sense of hunger. An absence of indigenous grains from their diet felt unsatisfying to some Bemba in the same way that lack of bread or rice might feel unsatisfying for people raised with other cuisines.
Logan's study goes on to dismantle the logical fallacies in the work of scholars such as Alfred Crosby, whose 1972 book The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 initiated the field known as environmental history. Crosby's book has provided evidence for economists, historians, and archaeologists to claim that Africa has for centuries been in need of technological assistance from the West — a myth that aligns with the myth of Black intellectual inferiority. The period after Christopher Columbus is notable for the introduction of crops from the Americas into Europe and Africa. Logan shows that the fact that maize and cassava are now staples in parts of Africa does not mean Africans were living with scarcity before. By that logic, one could argue that Italians were starving before the introduction of tomatoes and the Irish before the introduction of potatoes. Critically, Logan argues that many environmental or food historians misread the lack of food surplus as a sign of scarcity when in fact it could be tied to many things, including the lack of an economy built on exploited labor.
After laying out what she is writing against, Chapters Two (‘Choosing Local over Global during the Columbian Exchange’) and Three (‘Tasting Privilege and Privation during Asante Rule and the Atlantic Slave Trade’) present a complex ‘cartography of food experiences’ in the Gold Coast prior to the slave trade and up through colonialism (62). Provincializing narratives of Europe's role in saving Africa with the introduction of maize, Logan documents how local foods were likely grown, processed, stored, and cooked. The evidence indicates that local foods were used as sustenance and a form of currency, and afforded communities a level of political and economic sovereignty. While the Columbian Exchange led to the adoption of novel foods, Logan argues that openness to new cuisines, rather than scarcity, compelled Africans to alter their diets.
Chapters Four (‘Creating Chronic Food Insecurity in the Gold Coast Colony’) and Five (‘Consuming a Remotely Global Modernity in Recent Times’) focus on the food insecurities wrought by the slave trade, colonialism, and globalization. The evidence in these chapters demonstrates how the availability of food and extant agricultural knowledge have rarely been the cause for hunger gaps or famines. She also emphasizes that African cuisines are not traditional in the sense of unchanging, but rather part of shifting global markets. Gesturing to the theorizing of Charles Piot, Logan describes contemporary African cuisine as ‘remotely global’.
The most richly ethnographic chapter, Chapter Six (‘Eating and Remembering Past Achievements’), engages questions of food and identity as it relates to development. Here we see how food is nourishment, an aesthetic, a texture, a way of presenting oneself, as well as an embodied sense of self. It is difficult to find the affective responses to food in the archives, so I appreciated that the book ended with the socio-cultural evidence necessary to imagine what might be missing from the archives.
The Scarcity Slot is an excellent text for undergraduates. The argument is clear, and the historical and contemporary analyses in Chapters Two through Six are fascinating. The only thing missing in the opening chapters is a deeper engagement with ongoing methodological struggles over interpreting archaeological and archival data. In order to make food history readable, Logan chose not to expound on alternative hypotheses which are discussed in other published works. Ultimately, Logan accomplished what she set out to do, which is to write an accessible history of food in Ghana that challenges dominant Western narratives of human development in Africa.
