“Food before pressure”: Food and food culture in Muslim inner-city in Maamobi-Accra since the 1980s

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to analyse the cultural eating patterns and values, health beliefs, and nutritional practices and how Muslims review their dietary practices shape social relations in a Muslim inner-city of Maamobi, Accra-Ghana since the 1980s. I choose the 1980s as timeframe because the period marked the economic and political morasses in Ghana that came along with local and global religious resurgence. This necessitated the residents’ incorporation of food for social cohesion and expression of we-feeling as coping strategies. The paper argues the function of food is because food is not just a substance that is eaten for its nutritional values, but a culturally nuanced substance that communicates deeply embedded socio-cultural and political issues. Thus, attention is paid to how men and women deploy food as a negotiating tool to formulate identity, destabilise unequal gender norms, press home their needs, and express conjugal love. More importantly, I explore how food serves as a means of forging religious ecumenism in a community that is increasingly becoming religiously plural. The paper also discusses the effect of globalisation in enhancing the mutability of food cultures in the Maamobi community. In all this, deploying the tools of ethnographic research techniques of in-depth interviews with residents in the community, my own immersion as a resident of the community for more than three decades, and cultural idioms of food pathways, the paper contributes to the growing literature on food cultures in Africa and across the world.