Food is the source of the nutrients that keep us alive. But what we eat has a lot to do with where we come from and the groups we identify with. So food is also culture, which means it can be saddled with racist stereotypes. An example is soul food.
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00:00There is absolutely no way in the world that Black folks only ate scraps.
00:06How people are making decisions about what they're eating.
00:16A lot of times when we think about the foods of especially Black folks,
00:20we often point to, oh, they're just eating soul food,
00:22and so their food decisions are essentially entangled in the past.
00:26According to the narrative, enslaved Africans in the Americas were only given scraps to eat,
00:32the part of a pig that whites didn't want, what's called offal, ears, snouts, tails, and innards.
00:39The story goes that the enslaved people often used hot spices and sugar to make these parts tastier
00:45or deep fried them. Dishes like that still exist today, but they're generally viewed as bad for
00:51your health and belong to a cuisine colloquially referred to as soul food.
00:57We have eaten a variety of foods. So that whole scraps narrative is one that really
01:04captures a sort of 1800s to 1865 at the end of enslavement, probably a traveler's account
01:13that saw Black folks eating offal or the leftovers or the entrails. But that absolutely
01:20is not the whole of African and African-American diet.
01:26Psyche Williams-Phorson wrote a book entitled Eating While Black.
01:30She's a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland.
01:34When you have people who repeat those narratives without knowing the history,
01:41you repeat the stereotype.
01:44Another stereotype is that Black people love to eat watermelon and chicken. Back in 2008,
01:51when Barack Obama was first elected U.S. president, a caricature circulated online
01:57of the White House with a huge watermelon patch on the front lawn.
02:04There was nothing cute about it. It was absolutely a racist trope.
02:08Its roots can be found in the post-slavery era in the U.S.,
02:12when some Black people sold watermelons to earn money.
02:15A slice resembles a wide smile, which is how Black people were often portrayed.
02:20Always grinning, always happy, always wonderfully delighted to be in servitude to White folks.
02:28We were accused of being watermelon-eating darkies, chicken-stealing darkies.
02:33That narrative goes all the way back to enslavement, when we were often accused of stealing chickens.
02:46But stereotypes aside, another discussion is going on.
02:50Statistics show that Black people in the U.S. are more likely to be overweight,
02:55and they suffer from heart disease and diabetes more often than Whites or Latinos.
02:59An unhealthy diet is usually blamed, one rich in foods high in fat and sugar, like soul food or fast food.
03:10I think one of the things that motivated me to do this research
03:15was this conversation about health disparities, right?
03:19Sociologist Joseph Awudzi Jr. wrote his dissertation on the Black population
03:25in Jackson, Mississippi.
03:28And I wanted to know how Black people up and down the socioeconomic ladder make decisions about what they eat.
03:35I started with people who are homeless. I spent all my days with them. I ate what they ate.
03:40I only ate when they ate. And then after three and a half months,
03:44through connections that I had made, I moved up to people who are in poverty.
03:48Zanani had two children at the time, and she was a single mother.
03:53Had two children at the time, has three children now.
03:56What I did was just spend time with Zanani and start to see what social structures is she experiencing.
04:03And then after three and a half months, I moved up again to the lower middle class.
04:08That was a family that had moved from Washington, D.C. to Jackson, Mississippi.
04:15And I moved up again, upper middle class.
04:17I sort of worked as a paralegal for a lawyer, or maybe paralegal is too strong of a word.
04:23I sort of helped her out in her office a little bit.
04:26If we think about the health conditions of Black folks as
04:31a result of their individual decision making, I think that's misplaced.
04:36If we think about them as just continuing things that happened in the past, I think that's also misplaced.
04:42The term food deserts is often used to describe areas where there's not enough healthy food available.
04:50Many times where socially disadvantaged people live,
04:53where supermarkets offering fresh produce are far away.
04:59The scenario often goes hand in hand with an oversupply of cheap,
05:04unhealthy offerings from fast food restaurants.
05:08But does that description apply to where people like Zanani, the single mother, lived?
05:14If we look at Zanani's food availability by just
05:17drawing a circle around her address and seeing what kinds of grocery stores are available to her,
05:22I don't think we will capture as much.
05:24This includes thinking about how she gets housing.
05:28It includes how she thinks about getting health care, transportation.
05:32I think for me, food availability includes all those things.
05:37And if we're able to think about her food, what she has access to,
05:44as being related to these other structures, I think it gives us a lot more analytical insight.
05:51But back to the topic of soul food, which doesn't just include ingredients like meat,
05:56fat and sugar, but often also plant-based components like sweet potatoes,
06:01beans, kale and okra, foods popular among foodies today because they're considered healthy.
06:10It's a variety of foods that in combination would be most familiar to anyone who has Southern roots,
06:16but also in African-American communities.
06:20We help to build the cuisine and the culinary
06:25legacies of the United States of America and globally.
06:29There's absolutely no way we survived off of merely
06:34scraps. Please don't reiterate the single story.