Introduction

The introduction lays out the major argument that food practices are an understudied but significant form of African American cultural and political behaviour. Throughout the twentieth century, race leaders saw food production and consumption as key mechanisms that could be used to perform and construct ideas about their relationship to the US nation state as well as to a stateless black nation. The issue of black political and national identification was particularly urgent in the post-Emancipation moment. However, this book demonstrates that culinary nationalism continued to animate African American political life throughout the next century and beyond. This examination of food habits also yields insights into the felt, bodily experiences of individuals who did not make these decisions out of political calculation alone but out of concern for their health and quality of life. Although all of the subjects of this volume agreed that food decisions were crucial, their ideas about which foods the race should eat often differed.

Conclusion

An April 22, 1971 soul food dinner hosted by the Bay Area Urban League is emblematic of the emergence of soul food as the preeminent symbol of black culinary identity after the 1960s. However, over the previous century, ideas about proper black food habits varied. Generations of reformers used food habits as a way to explore their relationship to the US nation state as well as to a stateless, black cultural nation. Their culinary debates reveal diversity, complexity, and disagreement over what to eat but agreement that food decisions are also political ones.

Culinary Nationalism beyond Soul Food

This chapter discusses radical black critiques of the soul food tradition that emerged beginning in the late 1960s. Some began to associate the diet with bad health and criticized its linkages to the cuisine of slavery. These food reformers advocated for the rejection of both traditional American foods and the soul food menu. Their largely vegetarian diet was designed to dissociate themselves from the foodways of slavery as well as from the ethos of domination associated with carnivorism. They hoped that their healthful eating practices would strengthen their bodies to prepare themselves for a concerted program of black nation building.

World War I, the Great Depression, and the Changing Symbolic Value of Black Food Traditions

This chapter demonstrates that the push for voluntary rationing during World War I rendered foods like beef and wheat, which were once of enormous symbolic significance to black food reformers, as unpatriotic. Black food reformers had to choose between performing a U.S. patriotic food identity that demanded conservation and sacrifice and continuing to shun foods like pork and corn that were associated with the plantation South and thus with the history of slavery. Assimilationist eaters generally chose U.S. patriotism, a choice that inevitably muted some of the earlier antagonism that members of the middle class had shown toward the iconic southern foods they associated with the history of slavery. Ultimately, the economic pressures of the Great Depression worked to mute the machinations of even the most ardent food reformers as the community’s emphasis shifted from what to eat to the even more dire problem of having enough to eat.

Regionalism, Social Class, and Elite Perceptions of Working-Class Foodways during the Era of the Great Migration

This chapter explores the class tensions inherent in the middle-class project of reforming black food habits, demonstrating that working-class African Americans frequently did not share the certainty that foodways could be used as an avenue for citizenship and doubted many of the assumptions embedded in the project of cultural elevation subscribed to by black food reformers. One of the issues at the heart of the culinary tensions among members of the black community was the emerging question about whether there was a distinctive African American way of eating that was separate from mainstream American food culture. In the context of the Great Migration, “southern” food often became labeled “black” food in the northern cities that served as the terminus for black migrants. This transformation took place much to the consternation of black food reformers who, on the whole, resisted the idea of essential black cultural practices.

Creating the Foodways of Uplift

This chapter argues that self-consciously respectable middle-class eaters aspired to dining practices that emphasized modernity, elegance, and food selections that did not bear the historical taint of slave rations. It situates the maneuverings of members of this group within the wider context of other Progressive Era attempts at food reform, which were often coordinated by self-proclaimed “domestic scientists” intent on practicing culinary social engineering. Uplift-oriented black eaters drew inspiration from their white counterparts but inevitably had an ambivalent relationship with white activists who were steeped in racism, conscious and otherwise, and who promoted, among other things, a rigorous training program for domestic servants, an occupational role that few post-emancipation African Americans were willing to celebrate.

The Civil Rights Movement and the Ascendency of the Idea of a Racial Style of Eating

The chapter begins with an examination of the symbolic significance of the sit-ins at restaurants and lunch counters throughout the South as black protesters asserted their right to eat iconic American food items like hamburgers and to drink the symbolic beverage of Coca-Cola on equal terms with their fellow citizens. At the same time that many demonstrators became disillusioned with the only partially fulfilled promises of the civil rights movement, the alternative concept of a black national culinary identity emerged in the form of “soul food.” Southern food practices were rebranded as an essential black culinary production, and eating dishes like collard greens and chitterlings become a means of expressing fidelity to the idea of a stateless black nation.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Respectable Child-Rearing, and the Representative Black Body

This chapter examines W.E.B. Du Bois’s food politics by closely scrutinizing the health-related advice he gave to his daughter, Yolande Du Bois. This chapter demonstrates that Du Bois and many other middle-class race leaders, self-anointed or otherwise, took great pains to control their children’s diets and to impart the significance of making thoughtful food choices. Du Bois considered black bodies, particularly those of the elite members of the black community, as exhibits of black equality and saw the task of preserving the black body as one not only of enormous individual concern but of significance to the advancement of the entire race.

Booker T. Washington’s Multifaceted Program for Food Reform at the Tuskegee Institute

This chapter gives a case study of Booker T. Washington’s turn of the twentieth-century attempts to transform the African American diet. He micromanaged the dining plan for students and teachers at the Tuskegee Institute, advocating for their right to consume beef and wheat, high-status food items that served as symbols of Americanization. Washington also encouraged the cultivation of performatively middle-class food practices both for the benefit of observers intent on gauging the status of black acculturation as well as for the private benefit of his students, whose bodies he hoped these foods would benefit. Washington drew inspiration from white domestic scientists and the latest nutritional information of his day, but he subsumed the importance of following conventional dietary wisdom to the importance of black self-sufficiency.