An Interview with Bryant Terry on Race, Class, Food, and Culture – Part 1

I came to that conclusion because of my own process, having been a vegetarian and then kind of moving into strict veganism and having a moment where I wanted to have some cheese and I wanted to have eggs, and I just felt like I might be hypocritical if I do that, or others might judge me, or the judgment coming from myself. And I felt a similar anxiety from other people who defined their diets in the same way, who felt that they needed to or wanted to shift their dietary pattens. I had a friend who was a strict vegan and she got pregnant, and for whatever reason, she decided that she wanted to start eating fish. And she was so anxiety-ridden about sharing that with friends, with family members, with colleagues, because she felt like it would somehow be such a departure from all the values she had been expressing about who she was. I really want people to feel free to just shift and change and not feel like they’re going to be damned to hell if they do that.

That’s fascinating, especially when you look at the conversations we’re having around food in the public sphere, especially as people are starting to realize that the issue we have around food and consumption and the issues we have concerning the environment are in some way linked. There is a lot of discussion of guilt around people’s food choices, or a lot of moralizing that it’s better to be vegetarian or it’s better to eat more vegetables. You got into that a bit in Grub – [the idea that] there are things that are better for your body, there are things that are worse for your body, but it’s more of a whole conscious eating.

Yeah, before I forget, I wanted to go back to your question about my new book and what motivated me to write it. The impetus to write this book came from me feeling so upset, almost livid, at the way in which African-American cuisine was being – and continues to be, in many ways – vilified, through the media, through public health officials, as kind of the bane of African American health. “African Americans are suffering from the highest rates of obesity and the highest rates of illnesses and it’s because of this soul food!” The big monstrous soul food. After I realized that, it pushed me to investigate the history of African American cuisine more and it hit me one day when I was reading this book, The Welcome Table, by this African American food writer/cookbook author/historian Jessica B. Harris, and she said that “African American cuisine or soul food was simply something black people ate for dinner.”

It wasn’t until the 1960s that it was given this term as a way that black activists, living in the urban north, were reclaiming the cuisine as they were reclaiming a number of cultural things that were important to African Americans – so reclaiming soul music or our roots in Africa. [The idea was] this is our food, this is our cuisine. But unfortunately, the popular media picked up on that, and a lot of white journalists only illuminated the more exotic aspects of the cuisine. So when they wrote about it in these different magazines and newspapers, they talk about pig’s feet and the internal viscera of animals. And all these things that are part of the cuisine, but it kind of reduced it to all these interesting things that “the other” was eating. What it made me realize is that what people think about is just a small part of a very complex and rich diverse cuisine that is very rooted in a lot of things food activists say we should embrace in our eating now. Food is as local as a backyard garden, as seasonal as whatever’s in season, and as fresh as being harvested right before the meal.

And when I think about growing up in Memphis and having grandparents that grew up in rural Mississippi, that brought with them this agrarian knowledge and connection to the land and the environment and all this care for the earth that they had to Memphis, which is an urban center, and having this backyard garden that was kind of like an urban farm, and having these all these fruit trees and nut trees in the backyard that was like a mini orchard, and they way that they were harvesting food for our family, and bartering, and sharing with neighbors…you know, in so many of these practices that people are touting as the way we need to move toward for environmental sustainability, the sustainability of our health, these things are part of our cultural heritage and I just wanted to help people remember. I wanted to help African-Americans remember, help the general public remember that this is as much as part of our legacy as it is anyone else’s.

Whoo, that was a lot!

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