Can We Put the Soul Back in Our Food?
Black people’s relationship with food and the land has always been prevalent – and necessary. Planting and cultivating what the earth provides for us is a natural human instinct. After the atrocities of slavery we continued to cultivate the land and grow our own food out of necessity. It wasn’t until we began to leave the south that we started to stray away from our roots. Soul food has always been, and will always be a part of our culture but the fresh ingredients that our grandparents used have given way to ultra-processed pre-packaged conveniences that give us the taste we are familiar with but strip the vitamins and minerals that fresh ingredients provide.
Today it seems as if home gardens and homesteading are markers of wealth, making them practices that elude everyday consumers because of their financial implications. While our ancestors did much more with much less, they mainly lived in the south with access to an abundance of land. There was no need to buy top soil and fertilizer. They used the skills that were passed down to survive on the land they inhabited. Something that city life has taken away from us and life in suburbia has made us too comfortable to remember.
Home gardens and farms with rows and rows of crops gave way to grocery stores with out of season produce or local corner stores with poor quality options and nothing fresh from the ground. Going from self-sufficiency to reliance on a food system that has proven to fail its consumers time and time again is a fairly baffling phenomenon.
Until recent years, the idea of growing your own food was not a popular notion. Farm? Garden? Why? There’s a grocery store up the street and a street full of restaurants a short car ride away. Aside from the myriad issues with our ever-evolving, poorly regulated food supply, growing our own produce and using it to make the foods we all grew up eating is a legacy marker that many Black people cannot or do not embrace.
The idea that such an important tradition, a survival skill, is dying with our elders does not sit right with me. Our grandparents and great grandparents fled the south because of the unspeakable violence they were facing but they took their traditions with them. Somewhere between our fight for civil rights, our declaration of Black power, COINTELPRO, and the crack epidemic our roots were up heaved and the plot was lost.
The reality is, we have removed ourselves from a very important part of our culture. A root that ensured survival no matter the circumstance. Our relationship with the land is something that always ensured we were cared for. My own maternal great grandfather, who moved with his family to East St. Louis, Illinois from Oktibbeah County, Mississippi in 1944, hunted frequently. My father always raves about his rabbit stew, something I was too young to taste and, to my knowledge, no one learned to make before his passing in the 90s.
The idea of losing something as simple as a family recipe is indicative of the things that we are continuing to lose over time. Things that helped keep us well fed and self-sufficient. In my own quest for more knowledge on Black food history and our legacy of farm to table culture, I came across a legendary Black chef whose name I had never heard until adulthood. Edna Lewis.
In her 1976 book, The Taste of Country Cooking, Edna Lewis not only gave recipes she developed from her life growing up in Freetown, Virginia (an all Black town co-founded by her grandfather) she gave us details on what it was like to grow up surrounded by land and a part of our culture that seems foreign to many of us. Reading Edna Lewis’ book and learning, first hand, about the beauty and wealth that made up her existence growing her own food and eating naturally and seasonally, makes me fantasize about a space somewhere far off of the radar where I can do the same. Realistically, that is not something I plan to do in the near future but it is important, to me, to incorporate some of her lifestyle methods into my own day to day life.
Maybe it’s my age (as I embark upon my last year in my 30s), my inherent curiosity, my desire to learn parts of my history and culture that I was not raised with, or some combination of all of these things, but I am on a quest to become reacquainted with the traditions that once held us closely and nurtured us through some of the most horrendous experiences in global history. And I know I am not alone. The age of social media has given way to a resurgence in natural living that we would not have otherwise been privy to. Homesteaders with acres of land and city gardeners with balconies full of potted crops are popping up all over the social stratosphere, reminding us that we do, in fact, have freewill and can grow our own food if we so choose.
Racism and violence not only took away our sense of security, it robbed us of our traditions and knowledge. We went from self-sufficient survivors who knew how to live off of the land, to dependents who cannot do the most basic of land-based tasks. Moving from the south to the north and west took us away from land and nature and placed us in concrete jungles far removed from the earth that feeds us mentally, physically, and spiritually. This isn’t just a Black problem. To be fair, modern technology, the cost of living, and 9 to 5 culture has turned us into a society of co-dependents seeking convenience and the easy way out of what is deemed to be a difficult, time-consuming task.
While living on the land gives us first hand proximity to a more natural lifestyle the practicalities of modern life often keep us from experiencing all that nature truly had to offer. Exploring that duality has become my goal. As someone who desires to be in a major city (or at least close by) but also wants the warmth of seasonal living and freshly sourced ingredients, I have set out to find a way to make this happen. Even in the midst of a personal, professional, and financial reset that makes this venture that much more difficult.
The reality is, living healthy is not easy. Not because it is inherently expensive, the ingredients needed to make a healthy meal at home often cost less than frozen, boxed, and take-home meals, but because we live in a society that takes most of our time away from us, many people simply cannot always make a home-cooked meal consistently. Even as a single, child-free solo-preneur, I have the freedom of a self-made schedule but I often find myself turning to convenience foods when time eludes me and fatigue takes over. For single parents and over-worked employees, the idea of coming home from a long day, then making a full meal has got to be dreadful. I cannot tell parents how to care for their families. It is wrong to think that I am preaching about a situation I do not have a first-hand account in. However, the reality is, fast food and processed foods are poorly regulated and are the result of hundreds of thousands of deaths each year in the U.S.
Convenience is costing us our soul. It has become a part of our culture and we are losing methods and recipes as a result. In the age of social media, content creators across the country are giving their own insights into how they prepare fresh meals for their families without costing them their time and peace. Cooking at home takes intention. Reducing the convenience foods we have grown used to (something I am still working on myself) and taking the time to reacquaint ourselves with the ingredients that make up our diets and our wellness is imperative to our personal and collective health.
