Food historian, Ozoz Sokoh, has always marveled at the way in which food connects different cultures. As part of her ongoing mission to educate the world about the influence of West African cuisine, she recently launched a digital archive called Feast Afrique. In 2009, Sokoh created her blog, Kitchen Butterfly, to document how Nigerian and West African dishes spread around the world. Many of the dishes she discovered, from countries like Brazil, Haiti, and Jamaica, were protected and preserved by enslaved cooks. “The goals for them and I were to feel the same: to find comfort, to pay homage, to document history,” says Sokoh. While Kitchen Butterfly served as a place to post her thoughts, Sokoh wanted to create a more academically robust resource for her food findings, in order to “share them with a wider audience, with more of a rigorous, research-based eye,” Sokoh says.
SOURCE: ATLAS OBSCURA
