Ripples from the Columbian Exchange?

There is little doubt that the Columbian exchange was one of the greatest disruptions of food production and consumption across the world. The exchange resulted, amongst many other things, in the extensive growing of sugar-cane in the Americas. This encouraged the slave trade, with millions of Africans transported across the Atlantic, while the consumption of the resulting sugar led to the deaths of millions of people. Vast numbers of native Americans died as a result of diseases introduced by the domestic animalowning Europeans. Wheat from the Old World colonised the North American prairies displacing most of the roaming herds of bison. Potatoes and manioc from the Americas quickly became vital food crops in Europe and in Africa. All this is well-known (see, for example, Nunn and Qian, 2010; Boivin, Fuller and Crowther, 2012; Grennes, 2007). In general, food movements both of plants and animals, took place relatively quickly after 1492, especially when compared to earlier episodes of food globalisation, such as the Trans-Eurasian exchange which took place over several millennia (Boivin et al, 2012; Jones et al, 2016). This paper will consider whether evidence of ripples from the Columbian Exchange, can still be found today, in a world of increasingly globalised food consumption and production on both sides of the Atlantic. It might be assumed that the consumption of certain foodstuffs retains an element of resilience in their homeland: for instance, might nationalist gastronomic movements and ideologies promote elements of their own pre-Encounter diet? However, as we shall see, most food products, vegetable or animal, seem to be able to ‘globalise’ with considerable ease

Tinned Sardines and Putrefied Yellow-Fin in Equatorial Guinea: Regimes of Food in the Novels of Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo

In his semi-autobiographical novels, Las tinieblas de su memoria negra (Shadows of your black memory) and Los poderes de la tempestad (Power of the storm), the Equatoguinean writer Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo describes a boy’s, and then the man’s, life in colonial and postcolonial Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only sub-Saharan colony. This paper argues that the numerous descriptions of the food encountered by the protagonist immerse the reader in four different worlds: that of his Fang ethnic group in the Hispanic colony; that of the colonial priests and emancipados of the protagonist’s youth; then the horrors encountered under the cruel postcolonial tyrant, Macías Nguema and finally his recollections of life in exile in Spain. A taxonomy on how food and meals are used in fiction is presented in order to evaluate how Ndongo-Bidyogo’s use of food in his novels might fit into such a scheme. Finally, it is suggested that food may make a more regular appearance in the semi-autobiographical novel than in other fiction

As Soon As the Buck Is Killed, the Liver Should Be Taken Out and Cut Into Thin Slices: On Safari In Africa 1860-1960

A safari is usually defined as an expedition to hunt, or observe animals in their natural habitat. This paper’s aim is to explore what food was eaten on African safaris, focusing on the nineteenth-century and then the first half of the twentieth. Safari guides began taking rich British and American tourists on expeditions from the early 1900s. The hunting and display of wild animals were intimately associated with the ideologies of Empire and with Muscular Christian Masculinity. Large numbers of animals were slaughtered as trophies and their carcasses provided ‘chop’ for the hunters and the African porters. The ‘deliciousness’ – or otherwise – of various meats is discussed, for example, the taste of various cuts of elephant. While the male hunters’ motivation was often to provide meat for consumption, in contrast, Mary Kingsley, on her journeys in West Africa, procured food supplies from local colonial outposts and, for instance, enthused about a tin of herring while climbing Mount Cameroon. In the 1930s Ernest Hemingway continued in typical great white hunter tradition and recounts cooking Grant gazelle tenderloin on sticks around the camp fire. While game meat is the main focus of meals, other foods were sometimes consumed

Jungle Food: Revolutionaries in Lusophone Africa

The role of food supplies and what fighters ate is an understudied, yet vital, parto of successful revolutions. Where then best to look for accounts of the particular foods that were eaten by the guerillas? This paper looks at guerilla armies in Angola and ,Mozambque to explore this topic

The structural basis for the integrity of adenovirus Ad3 dodecahedron.

During the viral life cycle adenoviruses produce excess capsid proteins. Human adenovirus serotype 3 (Ad3) synthesizes predominantly an excess of free pentons, the complexes of pentameric penton base and trimeric fiber proteins, which are responsible for virus penetration. In infected cells Ad3 pentons spontaneously assemble into dodecahedral virus-like nano-particles containing twelve pentons. They also form in insect cells during expression in the baculovirus system. Similarly, in the absence of fiber protein dodecahedric particles built of 12 penton base pentamers can be produced. Both kinds of dodecahedra show remarkable efficiency of intracellular penetration and can be engineered to deliver several millions of foreign cargo molecules to a single target cell. For this reason, they are of great interest as a delivery vector. In order to successfully manipulate this potential vector for drug and/or gene delivery, an understanding of the molecular basis of vector assembly and integrity is critical. Crystallographic data in conjunction with site-directed mutagenesis and biochemical analysis provide a model for the molecular determinants of dodecamer particle assembly and the requirements for stability. The 3.8 Å crystal structure of Ad3 penton base dodecamer (Dd) shows that the dodecahedric structure is stabilized by strand-swapping between neighboring penton base molecules. Such N-terminal strand-swapping does not occur for Dd of Ad2, a serotype which does not form Dd under physiological conditions. This unique stabilization of the Ad3 dodecamer is controlled by residues 59-61 located at the site of strand switching, the residues involved in putative salt bridges between pentamers and by the disordered N-terminus (residues 1-47), as confirmed by site directed mutagenesis and biochemical analysis of mutant and wild type protein. We also provide evidence that the distal N-terminal residues are externally exposed and available for attaching cargo

Interaction of Dd with WW protein.

<p>(<b>A</b>) Aliquots of serially diluted proteins applied in duplicate to a nitrocellulose membrane were overlaid with GST-WW protein as described in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0046075#s4" target="_blank">Materials and Methods</a>. Interacting GST-WW protein was detected with anti-GST-HRP antibody. The average amount of interacting WW protein was determined by densitometry. (<b>B</b>) Cartoon of the trefoil opening between three Pb pentamers shown in pastel colors. A WW domain (pdb 2jo9 <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0046075#pone.0046075-Yamasaki1" target="_blank">[38]</a>) in green is shown bound to the ¹⁹PPxY motif of the disordered N-terminus (residues 1–47) shown in red. (<b>C</b>) The same model viewed from the side represented with a transparent surface. The N-terminus (residues 1–47) is shown in red and the WW domain in green, both as space-filling models. Residues 22–47 can only be seen thanks to the transparent surface of the Pbs. The model does not involve any precise docking but permits visualizing possible positions and relative sizes of the involved molecules.</p