I establish conceptual connections between food, the senses, and political life by drawing upon examples of gastropolitical moments which comprise charged meanings that may be unveiled through a closer inspection of the sensible. They reveal different power dynamics of cohesion and tension between varying sets of political actors. The senses aid in exemplifying political relationships and connections, directing us to particular aspects of political form and practice. This chapter therefore serves as a critical instigation of combining analytical approaches from sociology, anthropology, diplomacy, and food and foodways in appraising the importance of culinary–political encounters both within and between nations. Through such interdisciplinary conversations, it adopts a sensory reading and discussion of gastropolitical exchanges. Subsequently, my analysis is geared towards developing a political life of sensation that builds a theoretical and empirical connection between the political and the sensible. Such a sensory perspective explores the sociopolitical metaphors of taste and other accompanying sense experience. These are addressed through my proposed notion of political gustemology which I utilise in this chapter to illustrate the deployment of sensory knowledge and power in both actual sensorial exchanges and metaphorical takes on the sensory.

This chapter examines contemporary African fiction through the lens of food and foodways, highlighting the ways that recent writers have deployed agriculture, cooking, and eating to highlight the traumas of history, the emptiness of displacement, and the power of community. In We Need New Names (2013) NoViolet Bulawayo uses a piece of half-eaten discarded pizza to indicate the cultural and economic distance between those Zimbabweans with access to America and Europe and those without. Rosa’s District 6 (2004) by Rozena Maart shows the way food acts to bring people of different faiths and races together in a community facing erasure under apartheid. In Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones (2006), the revival of a coffee plantation serves as a metaphor for the rebuilding of Sierra Leone after decades of military coups and a civil war. In all three novels, food is used to chart political and social history unique to each region. Foodways and food security can serve as important markers in ascertaining how liberation is proceeding because access to food is a basic human necessity and foodways serve as cultural and social markers that speak to a community’s comfort with its access to food.