# Conclusion  
Willem Piso was a seventeenth-century naturalist who, while studying plants in colonial Brazil, wrote: 'In the same way that Europeans brought to America plants and seeds that they judged beneficial, so too did the Africans' (Piso, 1957, p. 441). Hidden behind this plain assertion lies a subtle but powerful truth: during the formative plantation period in tropical America, there existed a shadow world of agriculture. This world took root within the interstices of the plantation landscape, on the small, humble plots of land where the enslaved grew their food. African seeds and rootstocks taken from slave ship leftovers gave these plots and dooryard gardens their distinctive character. Here, in what became sanctuaries of food production, Africans combined the botanical heritage of the Old and New World tropics to create new crop assemblages and reconstitute familiar foodways. In these 'Negro plantations', slaveholders and naturalists encountered the novel staples grown by the enslaved. A few, including Piso, acknowledged African agency for their introduction. Generations later, as the institution of slavery came to form an integral part of the burgeoning New World colonies, recognition of the African botanical contributions to plantation societies would all but disappear from historical commentaries.  
The shadow world of African agriculture in tropical America eventually reached into plantation kitchens. Enslaved cooks quietly added new foods and culinary inventions to the dishes served at planters' tables, synthesizing new dishes and shaping the tastes of the white population. Today, these celebrated foodways are experienced by white and black people alike as regional cuisines, creolized signatures of the historical confluence of foods and peoples from three continents. Recognition of this shared food heritage - and its origins in the subsistence plots of enslaved Africans - offers new insights into African contributions to Atlantic history.