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Getting What We Need Ourselves - How Food Has Shaped African American Life (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R974
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Getting What We Need Ourselves - How Food Has Shaped African American Life (Hardcover)
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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.
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