This article is based on lengthy interviews with migrants from Senegal and Mali who have settled in Bordeaux, Angers and Paris from various geographic, cultural, ethnic backgrounds and socio-professional situations. Instead of questioning the link between « food and migration » in the usual way by focusing on migrants food « adaptation » in the country where they have settled, we chose to study what happens when they go back to their country of origin. The aim of this article is to present the permanence and changes or, taking up Roger Bastide’s terminology: continuity/discontinuity and discontinuity/ continuity playing a part in food habits, and the idea of ‘eating well’ among “immigrants” when they go back to their country of departure for vacation or retirement. Far from demonstrating the existence of an « original African food culture », this article rather highlights the permanent processes of food culturation taking place among both migrant and sedentary groups, while taking into account the structural constraints existing at national and global levels. Both Malian and Senegalese migrations reveal tactics used to produce alternately identity and otherness in a globalised context, but also according to different local situations.