The Spirit of Soul Food

Race, Faith, and Food Justice

Christopher Carter

• Éditeur: University of Illinois Press
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780252053061
• Sujet: Théologie et religion
• Sous-sujet: Religion

Soul food has played a critical role in preserving Black history, community, and culinary genius. It is also a response to--and marker of--centuries of food injustice. Given the harm that our food production system inflicts upon Black people, what should soul food look like today?

Christopher Carter's answer to that question merges a history of Black American foodways with a Christian ethical response to food injustice. Carter reveals how racism and colonialism have long steered the development of US food policy. The very food we grow, distribute, and eat disproportionately harms Black people specifically and people of color among the global poor in general. Carter reflects on how people of color can eat in a way that reflects their cultural identities while remaining true to the principles of compassion, love, justice, and solidarity with the marginalized.

Both a timely mediation and a call to action, The Spirit of Soul Food places today's Black foodways at the crossroads of food justice and Christian practice.

Chapter 1

Transatlantic Soul

A heaping helping of fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, collard greens too big for my jeans. Smoke steams from under the lid that’s on the pot, ain’t never had a lot but thankful for the little that I got. Why that be, fast food got me feeling sick, them crackers think they slick by trying to make this bullshit affordable. I thank the Lord that my voice was recordable…. Come and get yo’ soul food, well well. Good old-fashioned soul food, all right. Everything is for free, as good as it can be. Come and get some soul food.

—Goodie Mob, “Soul Food”

Goodie Mob was a hip-hop group whose members hailed from the southern United States, and “Soul Food” is the title track from their critically acclaimed debut album, which appeared in November 1995. The song waxes poetic about the foods they love to eat—foods they believe are good for the soul. At the same time, the song and the music video criticize the fast food industry for targeting Black communities by selling food they believe to be harmful to our health and well-being. Most poignantly, they argue that eating “good old-fashioned soul food” is a community event, a time when people feed those who may not be able to feed themselves just because they are a part of “our” community.

“Soul Food” melodically articulates a spiritual truth held by many African Americans, the idea that since our ancestors found strength in eating a particular diet, we not only pay homage to them by eating similarly but also find strength. However, how did we come to “know” what our ancestors ate? When does our ancestral culinary history begin, and when did it end, or, rather, has it ended?

My quest to answer these questions brought me to the old plantations in southern Louisiana. Several states have their own “river roads” where you can visit old plantations, but none is as well-known as Louisiana’s. Louisiana’s fabled Mississippi River Road consists of a corridor approximately seventy miles in length located on each side of the river between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The area includes the river, levees, and adjacent lands and cultural resources. Among the latter is the state’s most famous and recognizable group of monumental plantation houses, most built by wealthy sugar planters in the Greek Revival style (figure 1).

My goal in visiting and researching these plantations was to learn as much as I could about the agricultural skills the enslaved Africans brought with them that would ultimately be exploited by their owners. I wish I could say that each plantation I visited was able to share information about the enslaved Africans and their owners. I wish I could say that each tour guide knew more about the agriculture of the plantations than I learned through my own research prior to visiting. I wish these things because it should be improbable to work on a former slave plantation and to make the same mistakes that the white enslavers who owned the plantation made—to dehumanize and render invisible the Black people who were forced to live, work, and die on that property.

Figure 1. The “big house” on Whitney Plantation. Photo taken in June 2016 by the author.

The Whitney Plantation was the only plantation that told the story of the property in ways that humanized and gave voice to the enslaved. Walking the grounds with Dr. Ibrahima Seck, a Senegalese historian who has written about the Whitney Plantation, added depth and complexity to the story of African enslavement.¹ “We are an agricultural people,” he said over and over during our walk. Seck suggests that among the reasons why African enslavement was successful was that slavers knew what ethnic group of Africans to purchase based upon where they were going to sell them. Moreover, because these microcommunities of African ethnic groups existed on many plantations, African foodways and agricultural practices were able to survive.

Decolonizing soul food begins by delinking it from agricultural and dietary practices that uphold the logics of coloniality. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to unearth some of the dietary and agricultural practices among enslaved Africans to lay the epistemological foundation for the development of new liberatory and antioppressive foodways. To do so, I explore the history and development of African American eating by surveying how dietary practices evolved from West Africa to slave plantations to our contemporary kitchens. I pay special attention to the gendered ideologies that evolved around Black food-ways, particularly the ideologies that sustain current notions of what constitutes soul food. How might a reevaluation of what we think we know about gender, agriculture, and Black foodways help us envision something new? What role can compassion play in helping attend to the trauma that lingers within so many Black people with respect to agriculture and Black foodways?

decolonizing knowledge

Social analysis is neither objective nor capable of being completely neutral. Consequently, my analysis of the agricultural and culinary history of African and African American people privileges the knowledge compiled by members of those communities. The challenge of this task is thus to distinguish between colonial knowledge that has been pressed upon Black communities through coloniality and decolonizing knowledges that continue to reconnect Black people to our truest sense of who we are.

To break free from social, political, and ideological structures that inhibit freedom, African Americans and all marginalized peoples should critically examine what we have come to call “knowledge” so that we are able to recognize that there are different ways of knowing beyond what we may have learned within our current culture. That is, we must examine our epistemological assumptions. The dominant ways of knowing within the United States evolved from Western philosophical and theological traditions. As Latin American ecofeminist liberation theologian Ivone Gebara has argued, these traditions have always had an anthropocentric and androcentric bias, and within the United States these theories of knowing also have a Eurocentric or white bias. The knowledge that people of color, women, and the poor have is often referred to as “experiential knowledge, knowledge based on everyday experience” by Eurocentric culture; however, knowledge of this sort “[is] not automatically recognized as real knowing.”² While this does not mean that Eurocentric ways of knowing are necessarily wrong, it does mean that they are limited. By not including people of color and women in the construction of so-called legitimate knowledge, the knowledge fostered by dominant white culture has lost and continues to lose vital contributions to its construction.

Liberation begins through learning and unlearning knowledges that undo the normative grip of coloniality on our consciousness. Decolonizing our knowing is a liberative act because our knowing informs our thinking and shapes our being—what we know about ourselves informs the stories we tell ourselves, and those stories help shape who we see ourselves being and becoming. On a practical level, epistemology informs and shapes ontology. In this way, liberation is more than just a culminating moment in the future. Liberation is a decolonial process, a process of letting go of the narratives that kept us tied to coloniality by grounding ourselves in the truth of who we are and whom we aim to be, a process of decolonizing our knowledge and placing institutions at the service of life, a process of thinking and imagining social systems that sustain and promote life.³

The knowledge hierarchy within the dominant culture of the United States parallels the race, class, and gender hierarchies of modern society. These hierarchies sustain the economic, political, and ideological logic of oppression by excluding the knowledge of the marginalized for the sake of preserving the current power structure, which privileges only the smallest percentage of society. This hierarchy of knowledge is so accepted in our culture that it often goes unquestioned. For Black people, women, and the poor, “the history of domination has so deeply marked the foundations of our culture that [the oppressed] end up claiming, as if it were our own, the type of knowledge put out by those who hold political and economic power.”⁴ As such, decolonizing epistemology is a critical step in our analysis of Black foodways so that we can identify the barriers that have been put in place to hinder our ability to know and accept knowledge crafted outside of the spheres of coloniality as legitimate knowledge. Decolonial knowing becomes constitutive of the process that interrogates these hierarchies of knowledge and the ideological assumptions that normalize racism, sexism, classism, and food injustice.

As it relates to African American culinary and agricultural knowledge, decolonizing our knowing begins by exploring the history of West African agriculture and foodways in order to discern what knowledges enslaved Africans brought with them to colonial America. Ecowomanist and social ethicist Melanie Harris helpfully describes this process as “mining ecomemory,” exploring and honoring the collective ecological experiences of Black people in general and specifically Black women. Ecomemories can be “a collective set of values that guide the earth commitments of an entire community or a singular story that reflects the themes or values about the environment and one’s connection to the earth.”⁵ By recalling and retelling these ecomemories, we are able to expose hidden or forgotten truths and debunk the myths and stereotypes that permeate Black agricultural and culinary history.⁶ In this way, ecomemories can serve as decolonial countermemories that seek to reconstitute a colonial ecological history that often ignores or stereotypes nonwhite bodies and claims Black agricultural and culinary ingenuity as its own. This quest asks us to explore how African diasporic agricultural and culinary knowledges have evolved during the last five hundred years. What knowledges must be gained and retained, and what must we let go of if we are to delink our foodways from coloniality and relink them into a just and sustainable food system? Knowing in this critical self-reflective way is the first step in the cultivation of an antioppressive consciousness.

from africa to america: agricultural and culinary history

The fact that African agricultural and animal husbandry knowledge was critical to the growth of New World plantations is rarely, if ever, mentioned when the story of African enslavement is being told. This convenient omission breathes life into the myth and assumption that enslaved Africans had no legitimate knowledge except for what they were taught by their white enslavers.

Geographers Judith Carney and Richard Rosomoff suggest that Africans began the process of domesticating plant and animal species around 10,500 BP in the areas surrounding the present-day Sahara Desert. The agricultural skillset they honed over the next eight thousand years made them particularly valuable to white slavers, as African knowledge proved vital on plantations and ranches in the United States. Within West and sub-Saharan Africa, cattle domestication evolved to include a variety of species to offset the threat of drought, given that each species “grazed in different parts of the grasslands or consumed plants unpalatable to the others.” African herders experimented with cross-breeding cattle to develop breeds that were more suited to their specific climate, and this knowledge was passed down through generations. When we compare the ranching practices of colonial America to that of preslavery West Africa, it is clear that “livestock-raising peoples such as the Fula brought animal husbandry skills that contributed critically to the New World ranching traditions.” Regarding plant domestication, Africans eventually developed agricultural techniques such as multicropping and intercropping systems that included the “cultivation of seed plants, tubers, and legumes with valuable fruit, nut, and oil-bearing trees.”⁷ This agricultural method reduced soil erosion from tropical downpours and created a natural deterrent to prevent insects from ruining their crops, again, methods that New World plantation owners would replicate. African farmers and herdsmen both adapted to and altered their surroundings to provide for their communities. Similarly, within the history of African and African American foodways, adaptation and improvisation became vital principles.

Food historian Jessica Harris has written extensively on the development of African American foodways. She argues that the earliest records of what would become African American culinary habits can be seen in the travels of Abdallah Ibn Battuta, “a famous Tangine traveler, [who] left Marrakesh in 1352 to head for Bilad al Sudan (the place of the blacks).” Ibn Battuta was sent by the sultan of Morocco to the kingdom of Mali to learn more about the culture and the people, some of whom were Morocco’s primary trading partners. Ibn Battuta wrote detailed accounts of the food and agricultural practices of the people he encountered in addition to his primary task of encouraging continued trade. During his two-year journey, he crossed the Sahara, visited salt mines, encountered gardens filled with truffles, and tasted a variety of foods. Ibn Battuta’s account is particularly useful for the reconstruction of African American foodways because he traveled to the regions that would ultimately dominate the slave trade. His writings reveal that many elements of African American foodways are reflected in the patterns of African eating he witnessed almost seven hundred years ago. These elements include various cooking techniques commonly used by slaves and African Americans today, a women-driven marketplace that mirrors the primary role played by African American women in agriculture and the selling of food, a tradition of warm hospitality, and the ritual importance of food.⁸

Food was indeed an essential part of ritual in West Africa. Harris finds that there are generally two basic types of traditional holidays: the first offers thanksgiving and sacrifice to the ancestors and the gods, while the second celebrates the new harvest. Examples of religious rituals involving food were evident in the region of modern-day Senegal, where inhabitants poured milk into the sea to placate Mame Coumba Castel, the spirit of the island, and “symbolically fed” mashed yams “to the sacred stools of Ashanti.” Another example can be seen in the regions of modern-day Ghana and Nigeria, where the traditional yam festival, Homowowo, which commemorates the communities’ triumph over hunger and famine, is still celebrated today. In Ghana, Nigeria, and other West African countries where ya...