The Middle Passage — the transatlantic crossing in which approximately 12 million Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas between 1500 and 1900 — was the mechanism of one of history's greatest cultural dislocations. But food knowledge survived the crossing in ways that other forms of cultural knowledge could not — it lived in muscle memory, in oral tradition, in the bodies of the people who were transported. Michael Twitty's work, Jessica B. Harris's scholarship, and the historical documentation of foodways under slavery establish how this survival occurred and why it matters.
The mechanisms by which West African culinary knowledge survived the Middle Passage and reconstituted itself in the Americas.
WEST AFRICAN CULINARY TRADITION — DEEP EXTRACTION