The Scarcity Slot: Excavating Histories of Food Security in Ghana he Scarcity Slot: Excavating Histories of Food Security in Ghana (University of California Press, 2020)The Scarcity Slot is the first study to critically examine food security in Africa’s deep past. Author Amanda L. Logan (anthropology) contends that African foodways have been viewed through the lens of “the scarcity slot,” a kind of othering based on presumed differences in resources. Logan focuses on a case study in Banda, Ghana, spanning the past six centuries, revealing that people thrived during a severe, centuries-long drought just as Europeans arrived on the coast, with a major decline in food security emerging only recently. This narra–tive radically challenges how we think about African foodways in the past with major implications for the future. It challenges the idea that Columbian exchange crop introductions rescued a continent long shaped by hunger.
This article originally ran in the PAS Newsletter, Winter 2021, Volume 31, Number 2