3 ideas
Fonio and other indigenous grains like millet and sorghum were pushed aside by imported rice and wheat and came to be seen as rustic or poor people's food. Thiam argues that sustained demand from cooks and consumers, at home and abroad, is what makes these crops economically viable for smallholder farmers. Fonio's drought tolerance and short growing cycle make it both a sensible crop and a marketable product.
Senegal's national dish of fish and rice depends on broken rice, a taste that took hold when colonial trade shipped cheap rice fragments into the country and displaced local grains. It also depends on fish landed by artisanal pirogue fishermen, whose catches are being depleted by industrial foreign trawlers. The iconic plate therefore carries both a colonial import dependency and an ongoing ecological and economic crisis.
From this view, the Wolof north's millet, peanut, and fish cooking and Casamance's rice paddies, palm oil, and oysters read as expressions of land, water, and trade. The approach turns a recipe collection into a map of where food comes from and who produces it.