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.
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