Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food Has Shaped African American Life (The African American Experience)

Beginning with an examination of West African food traditions during the era of the transatlantic slave trade and ending with a discussion of black vegan activism in the twenty-first century, Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food Has Shaped African American Life tells a multi-faceted food story that goes beyond the well-known narrative of southern-derived “soul food” as the predominant form of black food expression. While this book considers the provenance and ongoing cultural resonance of emblematic foods such as greens and cornbread, it also examines the experiences of African Americans who never embraced such foods or who rejected them in search of new tastes and new symbols that were less directly tied to the past of plantation slavery. This book tells the story of generations of cooks and eaters who worked to create food habits that they variously considered sophisticated, economical, distinctly black, all-American, ethical, and healthful in the name of benefiting the black community. Significantly, it also chronicles the enduring struggle of impoverished eaters who worried far more about having enough to eat than about what particular food filled their plates. Finally, it considers the experiences of culinary laborers, whether enslaved, poorly paid domestic servants, tireless entrepreneurs, or food activists and intellectuals who used their knowledge and skills to feed and educate others, making a lasting imprint on American food culture in the process. Throughout African American history, food has both been used as a tool of empowerment and wielded as a weapon. Beginning during the era of slavery, African American food habits have often served as a powerful means of cementing the bonds of community through the creation of celebratory and affirming shared rituals. However, the system of white supremacy has frequently used food, or often the lack of it, as a means to attempt to control or subdue the black community. This study demonstrates that African American eaters who have worked to creative positive representations of black food practices have simultaneously had to confront an elaborate racist mythology about black culinary inferiority and difference. Keeping these tensions in mind, empty plates are as much a part of the history this book sets out to narrate as full ones, and positive characterizations of black foodways are consistently put into dialogue with distorted representations created by outsiders. Together these stories reveal a rich and complicated food history that defies simple stereotypes and generalizations. Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food Has Shaped African American Life traces the history of African American food habits from West African origins through the twenty-first century, offering a unique set of insights into the daily concerns of black people in the US. Throughout time, black Americans have utilized food as a nonverbal means of expressing an evolving set of social, cultural, and political concerns. Using food as a prism for examining familiar epochs in African American history, the book will chronicle the fight against hunger, documenting, for example, the innovative techniques enslaved people used to augment minimal and monotonous rations, the skillful ways that freed people used food knowledge to form entrepreneurial ventures, and the persistence with which twentieth-century black activists framed food access as a civil rights issue. Furthermore, the book will demonstrate that from capture and enslavement through emancipation, the civil rights movement, and beyond, African American have embraced an understanding of the importance of food that goes beyond merely having enough to eat. Black Americans have used ideas about proper food habits both to strengthen and to lessen cultural ties with Africa, to enforce and to break down class barriers within the black community, and to embrace and to critique the American political system. ORIGINAL TITLE: Tomorrow I'll Be at the Table (a title taken from Langston Hughes's poem, "I, Too, Sing America") : African American Food Culture from Slavery to the Present Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. Culinary Origins and Exchanges during the Transatlantic Slave Trade Chapter 2. Africanisms and Adaptation during the Era of Slavery Chapter 3. Foodways, Resiliency, and White Supremacy after the Civil War Chapter 4. The Quest to Cook and Eat Chapter 5. The Search for a Common Table during the Great Depression and World War II Chapter 6. Food as Politics during the Black Freedom Struggle Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index About the Author "[T]races the history of African American food habits from West African origins through the twenty-first century, offering a unique set of insights into the daily concerns of black people in the US. The book demonstrates that from capture and enslavement through emancipation, the civil rights movement, and beyond, African American have embraced an understanding of the importance of food that goes beyond merely having enough to eat"-- Provided by publisher