This episode of the Global Lunchbox podcast features a conversation with anthropologist Amanda Logan about her new book, The Scarcity Slot: Excavating Histories of Food Security in Ghana.
Amanda L. Logan is Associate Professor of anthropology at Northwestern University, where she is affiliated with the Program of African Studies, the Program in Environmental Policy and Culture, and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. Her overarching goal is to connect the past to the present through reframing the kinds of questions we ask and empirically bridging the modern/premodern divide.
The motivation for Logan’s book was her frustration at the lack of empirical historical data surrounding African foods and how they have changed throughout the centuries. By comparing data from specific periods to each other, Logan was able to better understand the food history of Ghana.
The Global Lunchbox series, hosted by the Center for International & Area Studies at Northwestern University, features conversations with scholars in the social sciences and humanities about their current research on a range of critical global issues.