Ologies with Alie Ward - Black American Magirology (FOOD, RACE & CULTURE) with Psyche Williams-Forson

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

What’s the difference between Southern cooking and “soul food?” Is there a correct type of mac and cheese? And whose business is it what you eat? (Hint: no one’s). Culinary historian, scholar of African American life and culture critic Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson is a professor at University of Maryland College Park and department chair in the Department of American Studies. She also authored the books “Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America” and “Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power.” We chat about everything from oral traditions to “soul food” in popular culture, gendered roles in cooking, hyperlocal produce, systemic oppression and why someone would make chicken without seasoning it. On national television. Visit Dr. Psyche Williams-Torson’s website and follow her on Instagram and TwitterBuy Dr. Williams-Torson’s books: Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America and Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and PowerA donation went to: Cultivate Charlottesville  More episode sources and links: Other episodes you may enjoy: Foraging Ecology (EATING WILD PLANTS) with @BlackForager Alexis Nelson)  Indigenous Cuisinology (NATIVE COOKING), Food Anthropology (FEASTS), Bisonology (BUFFALO), Critical Ecology (SOCIAL SYSTEMS + ENVIRONMENT), Melaninology (SKIN/HAIR PIGMENT), Black AF in STEM, Genealogy (FAMILY TREES), Glycobiology (CARBS), Microbiology (GUT BIOME),Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media and Mark David ChristensonTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh hey, it's your coworker who has an umbrella in a trunk, but remembers it halfway between the car and the office store, Alieward, back with a bunch of tasty facts in a broth of history. Let's dig in to this episode about Black American cuisine from origin stories to pop cultural critiques with this guest who completed undergrad at the University of Virginia, got an MA and a PhD in American studies from the University of Maryland College Park where they are now a professor and the department chair and the Department of American Studies. They've authored several books including the new Eating Well Black, Food, Shaming, and

Race in America and 2006's Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, Black Women, Food and Power. And we're so lucky she made time to chat, but before we get into it, quick thanks to everyone who submitted questions via patreon.com slash allergies and everyone who supports a show just by telling others about it and by rating and leaving reviews, which truly helps so much. They mean so much and as proof I read them all. So big congrats to, okay, this is me who wrote in that the field trip colonoscopy right along saved their butt and said, thank you for sharing your journey and probably saved my life. So I read all the reviews thank you so much really onto the episode. So

Black American MacGrology comes from the Greek McGurros for cooking and it means the art science or study of cooking and this guest is an expert in mass media meets nutrition science, the culture of food, how we talk about it, especially distorted and race-based racist notions. We chatted about the writing that inspired her Southern cooking versus soul food, tropes of black women in cinema, historical origins of some foods, if there's a correct type of mac and cheese, and why someone would make chicken without seasoning it. On national television, with scholar, cultural historian,

author of Eating While Black, and for the sake of this episode, Black American Magurologist, Dr. Syke Williams-Forson. Dr. Syke Williams-Forson, she heard. You've got a great name, by the way. Thank you very much. When you set out to start studying this field, did you always have your site set on a PhD or did it start just unraveling and your interest got deeper, deeper? Yeah, you know, I actually did not want to go into education at all. I resisted it with it before. I come from a family of educators. And before I went off to college, my mom was like, oh, make sure you take some education courses.

And I was like, yeah, no, I won't be doing that. I don't want to be a teacher. Because in my mind, though my dad had been an adjunct for many years at the University of Buffalo, I wasn't fully immersed in the college professor, professor, or any of that. So I went to University of Virginia and studied English because that really was talk about

reading and that's my passion that's reading. So I came to graduate school really to study Black women's literature but within context. Right. I felt like what I had studied in undergrad did not provide enough context to the reading. We just studied, you know, the mechanics of books and all that kind of stuff. So when I saw that there was actually a field dedicated to it, I was like, oh yeah, I'm really interested in that. So I came to graduate school as a master student

to the University of Maryland, interested in reading Black women's literature and at that time, a series had just been published by Oxford University Press with the New York Public Library and Henry Louis Gates. And it was the reclamation, if you will, of a number of 19th century Black women's texts. Wow. Yeah, they had been recovered and rewritten and republished some in the original text font

and all of that. So they were amazing. Yeah, amazing books. That must have just felt like finding a diary or finding it like the feeling you get when you find a note in your locker, but you just can't open it fast enough. That must have just been a thrill for you. It was totally new for me. Zorin O'Hourston's work had just been uncovered by Alice Walker

about a decade and a half earlier. Quick side note on that. So if you're not familiar with the work of Dr. Henry Lewis Gates Jr. he's a historian, a professor at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He's a filmmaker with multiple Emmys for work like the African Americans, many rivers to cross. And he has written literally dozens of books on black American history and present. And he hosts the PBS show Finding Your Roots. What a dude. And author Zora Neal Hurston. So she wrote several books, including the 1937 novel,

Their Eyes Were Watching God. And that is set in Florida. It touches on themes of sexual awakening and multi-generational trauma from enslavement. And despite Zora Neal Hurston's talent and hard work, such a figure in the literary world and publishing more books than any other black woman in the country, she was paid very little, she died in poverty. Now, the Schoenberg Center for Research and Black Culture is within the New York Public Library System and it's a research library. It's located on Malcolm

X Boulevard in Harlem, in New York. And in the late 80s, Dr. Henry Louis Gates edited a collection of over 40 works. They included poetry and memoirs and novels and testimonies of enslaved people. And it was released in a big compendium. It was called the Schoenberg Library of 19th century Black Women Writers. And a decade later, as technology marched on,

those works became available as the digital Schoenberg African American women writers of the 19th century. And I'll link that on our website for you to Peruz, but Dr. Williams-Worson dove into those texts. And I was really in love with Alice Walker and the color purple, and she also had like several other books, right? Revolutionary Patunians and all these different texts, right? So I was reading all this stuff and so that really started me on the path to what I'm really trained in, which is the study of the material world or material culture, right? So I'm really interested

in how people interact with objects, right? And things, what do things mean in our lives? How I came to food was because in one of those novels, the author took a lot of care to give us details about the domestic interiors of a black boarding house. Oh, wow. And I was just fascinated. You know, because I didn't know a lot about boarding houses and at the time I was reading this, I was like, huh. So she's referencing the novel Contending Forces, which came out in 1900, it was written by Boston-based author and editor

of one of the first magazines for Black American culture and arts, and her name was Pauline Hopkins. So that's what was really exciting to me, but she spends a lot of time on a couple of different meals in the book. So my curiosity was piqued there, but then I did research for a Jewish historian who was studying food ways. And I said, hmm, never heard of this before. I wonder if black people have food ways. Do we have any? And so, you know, this was before the, the Google age, this was more just internet. So I went online and looked it up. And I said, hmm, what I started seeing were a lot of cookbooks, black cookbooks, black authored, and books that said, hey, you know, this was

where black folks eat. And I said, OK, before I these foods. And so that really is what started me down this path, right? I wanted to know how we understood black food culture within the context of material culture. So what do foods mean to people? Why do certain foods mean certain things? How do people use food to manipulate situations? So I was a undergraduate student and the field of food studies

had already been in existence mostly coming out of anthropology and folklore, but there wasn't a lot being written about in those circles about Black food culture or what was being written about had to do with enslavement. Let's talk like they have to talk about people who weren't enslaved? They're work-free blacks. So I started this area of study, and at that time, food studies was considered by the Chronicle of Higher Education Scholarship Light. What? The thing that we have to do every single day to stay alive and that so much of our economy

and transportation system and history and culture is based on. Really? Based on all of that. Yeah. They said it's scholarship-like. If people are talking about food and culture and, you know, they were thinking about it, I think, from a homeic point of view. Yeah, of course, because it's dead. They gendered it. But they gendered it. Every archaeological site, what do they talk about? They talk about what they were eating, they talk about what they cooked and they talked about how they cooked it, the bones that they found. What? And that's, but that's the thing, right? It was mostly coming out of disciplines that weren't well public, that weren't public, right? Archaeology Anthropology. No one was

really reading that, but other anthropologists and archaeologists, so the archaeologists and so forth. I'm sorry, I found this bonkerskers like so much as bonkers I was not alone. Well food studies took offense obviously and went and so in the next 10 to 20 years because this was in the early 90s so the next couple of decades you started getting all kinds of work published. Oh okay I'm less mad now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so then what started happening in the last decade or so, almost every discipline

and folks in popular space started talking about food. Then we had cooking shows. But they weren't the traditional sort of Julia tile cooking shows, right? We started getting top chef, you know, kitchen makeover and all of these kinds of things. So there's a competitive edge. Your time starts now. And there's an edge that shows different types of chefs and cooking styles and different foods are being introduced.

And now you've got kids cooking. So really, the field of food studies has just exploded now more than ever. And gone is the sort of June Cleaver perception, and you're starting to see all these other avenues. So right around 1999, a colleague of mine came out with a book, Black Hunger, Doris Whitt, and she was looking at literature and issues of power and so forth. But then I came out with my first book, Building Houses Out of Chicken Lives, Black Women, Food and Power, which really looked at the ways in which black folks had been historically associated with chicken and foods like watergon.

But to reverse that conversation, not from a stereotypical point of view, but to look at the ways in which black women have to take their use food to wield and wield power. How did we become entrepreneurs and purveyors of our own destinies? How did we self-define with food? How did we not just become entrepreneurial but para children through school, build houses, earn church mortgages, all of that kind of thing?

And again, that 2006 book is called Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, Black Women, Food and Power. And it examines things like Black Women and Gender Malpractice with chapter titles, like the compelling, taking the big piece of chicken. And just as I know, I recall in college talking about motherhood with two of my best girlfriends, and one of them saying that she was scared to be a mom because that meant she'd never get the best piece of chicken again. And she has two kids now. They're lovely twins but every time I make chicken I think about that. I think about taking the big piece of chicken. But yes, Dr. Williams' foreson followed up on her 2006 building houses out of chicken legs by co-editing a

650 page collection of work called Taking Food Public, redefining food ways in a changing world alongside Miller'sville University Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies Carol Cunahan, because as she explains, that's when we started to see another explosion, right, a farmer's market and eat local and eat organic and all of that kind of, those mantras the into the forefront. Changes for happening for example in dollar stores. Walmart started selling food and Target started selling food and then EBT started being offered. So I was around 2010 working on a piece on eating from the dollar truth and it was widely unpopular and folks

were like, well, the food is expired and I was like, yeah, no, not really. Yeah, that's illegal, probably, to sell. I swear to you. It's a violation of FDA stuff, really. I was like, yeah, but at a time when there's so many food options, why are we not recognizing food options that would help people who are food insecure, become more secure? Yeah. And I mean, everyone from the elderly, in particular, elderly women, to those who are of means, to those who are not of means. Why aren't we expanding how we're talking about alternative food beyond farmers markets and so forth?

Why aren't we having a broader conversation? So that's really part of what led me to eating wild black because I started with that article, but I also started to see a lot of moralizing around I eat clean and I eat healthy and I'm this label or I'm that label on this label, this is it, it makes me a good person. That was the presumption and that was the sort of subtext as if food can save you. And at the same time that I saw that level of moralizing going on,

I saw a lot of demonizing a black food culture. Right? Yeah. So food is bad. You know, soul food, which is the same foods that are eaten in the South more broadly. More on soul food later. But in her first book, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, Dr. Williams-Forson has a chapter called Still dying for soul food and it takes a critical look at the 1997 film called Soul Food, which centers around a grandmother character who cooks Sunday dinners for her family, but spoiler alert dies of complications from diabetes and the family's got to figure out what to do without her. And Dr. Williams-Forson writes about this contradiction of these seemingly strong black women

characters, who actually, as the written, come off as weak and unable to care for themselves, or represent these gendered tropes via a massive pop cultural hit of a movie. But Dr. Williams' force in points out that incidents of white supremacy around black people's food started to appear on the smaller screens in real life captured by the phones in our pockets.

For example, in Oakland, when the black family was at the park, and this woman found the need to call the police to say, hey, there are people barbecuing in the park. It's a link to have a charcoal grill in the park here. No, it's not actually. It's a death-and-death. It says this is a designated barbecue area. It's a link to have a charcoal grill in the park here. No, it's not actually just that the map it says This is a designated barbecue area. No, it's not for a charcoal grill. No charcoal grills are allowed. Do I see it? What year did that did you see that start to escalate? I started seeing it escalate around

2012-13-14 somewhere around there Yeah, and then and then it became it became like a domino effect. Because right after that, the barbecue becky, if you will. Let's not forget 2018's permit patty. It's like the worst Barbie characters ever. This woman don't want to let a little girl sell some water. She call the police on an eight year old little girl. You can hide all you want.

The whole world. I'm gonna see you, boo. Yeah, and illegally selling water without a permit. Then there was the incident of the black man in Starbucks who was arrested in Philadelphia for sitting in Starbucks waiting for his friends. You know, he was waiting for his friends to order. What did they get called for? Did they get black guys sitting here?

Did they get it? Yes, anything like that? What did they get? What did they get? Someone called what they did. guys sitting here eating? Yes, I did. What did they do? What did they do? Someone told me what they did. They didn't do anything. I saw the entire thing. And so I was like, oh wow.

And then Gainian Young, who used to write your public journal, had a picture of President Obama eating a chicken wing. And he said, you know, among the list of things that black people do while black is eating, you know. And so he was like, so eating while black is a thing. And so that's really where I took my title. So in her book, she cites a 2014 blog post titled Perfectly Normal Things, Black Ben Just No Not To Do because America is racist as fuck. And this listicle includes things like jogging at night and getting angry at work or helping any random white woman in public.

And she notes that number eight on the list is eat chicken and or watermelon at office potlucks or barbecues. And Damon Young wrote, which sucks because everyone loves watermelon. And there's nothing worse than loving watermelon, but feeling a certain way about showing your love of watermelon, because you know everyone assumes you love watermelon, which sucks because all caps. Everyone loves watermelon. And Young makes the point. We're all aware of the potential criminality if caught driving while black,

and shopping while black, and walking well black and walking with your hands in your pockets well black and waiting for a bus well black and sitting well black and eating well black and tipping well black and well you get the point he concludes so she named her book eating well black when you're looking at black food culture in America. How do you account for these huge differences geographically and between rural and urban centers and the diaspora coming from so many different food and culinary backgrounds? How do you approach that from an academic lens? Yeah, you know, when you get to the United States, which has its own very complicated histories

of white supremacy, of black racism, and all kinds of denigration of black folks. We're all black. It doesn't matter where you're from throughout the diaspora, right? Because as I talk about this in the first book, we're judged by phenotype, right? So do you look black? In other words, is your skin brown? You know, does your nose look a certain way, is your hair appearing to be coarse and thick. So, you know, it's the reduction of whole identities to categories of race, which of course the census does and so forth. So I'm always amazed by people who are like, why are you making everything about race? Because we live in a country that makes everything about race, including the food that we eat.

And again, what I show in the first book in Building Houses is that, you know, you had legal statutes dating back to the 16 and 1700s that said, do not truck and trade with Negroes or the colors or, you know, the natives because more than likely the foods have been stolen so now you have what a colleague Alan Litching sign calls the disposition toward death. There's this narrative that black people were naturally thieves that came up as or holy as four or five centuries ago which still affects us today Right, and then there's this narrative that has taken hold called totally as four or five centuries ago, which still affects us today. Right?

And then there's this narrative that has taken hold called, all black folks ate scraps. And for many, many years, I grew up thinking that too, that all of our food culture derived from scraps. And of course, we know that is inconceivably untrue because you had different folks who

were brought to this country by way of enslavement from different regions in the African continent and some of us were Muslims, some of us were natural vegetarians, some of us had a predilection toward other kinds of foods, seafood and whatnot. And so it makes seem as if black folks came here and just had no means of survival whatsoever, right? Because we only survived off of what was given to us. Right. Well, that's wholly untrue.

I was just reading a source today that said at one point, the colonial era, that the climate affected the waterways in such a way that hundreds and thousands of lobster and crab washed ashore so much of it that they threw it to the pigs, right? And so it was considered a cheap food because it was so plentiful. I found in my research that black folks had access to pigeon and quail and just I mean because remember you know sometimes I think when we're talking about these things, people only have the vision of today. Right. They have no concept of what it was like three centuries ago before we had buildings

in road. So if you're surrounded by waterways and foliage and you are brought to this country as an enslaved person forcefully, but you have to survive. And you have agricultural knowledge. You can't tell me that Africans in this country did not say, hey, I know that that is an edible berry. I know that I can eat those weeds. I know that I can cook that whatever it is, right? For more on foraging and race you can see the episode foraging ecology with the amazing Alexis Nelson aka black forager who by the way just launched a series called Crash Course Botany on PBS so I'll link that on our website as well. And we also have an episode with the indigications chef the wonderful Mariah Gladstone about indigenous colonology.

We may not have told those who were enslaving us, how we were surviving, but we certainly were able when we wanted to survive. And so, you know, these histories of reducing black people to chicken and watermelon are convenient tropes that remain today. There was a restaurant, by the name, for example, the Kuhn chicken min, which was in existence in the early 20th century out in the Midwest, and the symbol for the Cooan Chicken Inn was a large black face with big lips, red lips, and you know, I had off to the side was the Sambo image, right? And for those who will remember for a long time, there

was a a a restaurant called St. Bones. Wow. Yeah. In this country. That word that rhymes with Rambo was used as a slur and a derogatory character for hundreds of years. And there were over a thousand of those restaurants in 47 states up until the last one in, well, 2020, when after the rise of Black Lives Matter protests,

the last remaining restaurant by that name changed it to Chads. Was this like, in Mississippi? Where was this? Nope. It was in Santa Barbara, California, where I went to college. Gross. When President Obama won the election the first time, some of you may recall that on the South lawn there was a postcard circulating with watermelons being grown on the South lawn. So these really negative images have a long history and they come out

of popular culture, sheet music, greeting cards, all kinds of ephemera that we now have that show that these things literally circulated through people's travels and so forth. Painting black folks is less than human. I'm wondering when did Southern food start to sort of get recognized as a type of American cuisine? And this is also a not smart question, but you are an expert in this. So I feel okay asking, but the difference between soul food and southern food and black American

cuisine, where are some of those lines drawn? I feel like so much of what we consider black American cuisine is things like greens and mac and cheese and things that maybe folks in this South might eat on New Year's. Black eyes peas. I didn't know about black eyes peas until but yeah what's the where's the distinction? Yeah the beautiful thing is that there are a lot more resources today that that open up our understanding of these different foods because the majority of black people in this country came to inhabit the country by way of the South, even though there was enslavement in the North, we were enslaved for the longest amount of time in the South, where the

seasons are very tropical in many ways and so lots of plentiful types of foods grow there. What was eaten by white people was often also eaten by black folks, you know, especially when we could get a hold of it. And when we couldn't, we did different things to get access to these foods. So, soul food and southern food are very similar, right? Corn, butter beans, tomatoes, onions, you know, you name it, identities, things of that nature. Where soul food comes into play, because if you recall, southern food was okay when Paula Dean was talking about it, right?

It's all about butter. And I mean, hunts It's all about butter. And I mean, hunts and hunts of butter. Oh, you got to use fresh butter, you got to use fresh cream, you got to all of that. Nobody was really saying immoral agrocy, nobody was saying, oh my God, that food is unhealthy. Yeah. The moment they fell out of the radar for various reasons,

then it became, these foods are just totally unhealthy for me. But we're eating the same food, but so food itself is actually a political concept. Leroy Jones or Mary Baraka, who's a beatnik poet in the era of the late 60s and 70s, and he was responding to a black journalist and said, you know, who said black folks have no culture. And Leroy Jones, oh, what's we do? We have soul music. We have in our dress, in our speech, in our, in our food, and these are the foods that he listed.

So everything from vegetables to various pork tops, fried chicken, all that kind of thing, chit-lens, and then you know, sweet tea, cake. And so that's actually a really sort of more an earlier concept. It's not, it's only about less than a hundred years over it, the concept of so food that is. But prior to that, it was just food that black people were eating and cooking. But because of its political meaning, it became necessary to make the point that we do have culture. And as the late Werner May Grove nurse said, we cook by vibration. It's how we season our food, right?

And you'll find many southerners who season food the same way, but overwhelmingly, the majority of black folks are prone to seasoning food heavily, partly because we needed to preserve it, but also for taste. And again, many of us coming from the African continent, most of us, or either from the Caribbean, where spices were used plentifully, that's just the way that we cook and we do it with a rhythm, with an ear and an eye toward smell, taste, what it feels like, right? And so that's really where you begin to see the differences and the similarities.

Now, having said that, Regent plays an important part. And why do I say that? Because, for example, Miss Lea Chase, Sheffa Lea Chase, who, you know, is the proprietor and owner of Duky Chases in New Orleans. So, Chef Chase opened her restaurant, Duky Chase, in 1941, and its bright, mustard yellow and cayenne red colored walls are filled with African-American art, and it also served as

a gathering place for some key figures in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, and Chef Chase was honored with a long list of culinary awards in her career. And she passed away in 2019 at the age of 96. She was known as the Queen of Creole cuisine. I remember she told me one time we don't cook so food with cooked Creole soul in New Orleans, right? And so you've got jambalai, you've got of course gumbo, you've got at Defe, you have a different type of soul going on. So it's important to know that there are regional variations that do exist. You can go to Chicago right now and say, I want fried catfish and you're gonna probably be met with folks who

like you want some spaghetti on the side and coalslaw. That's a combination that came to Chicago by way of Mississippi. So you have various migratory strands of people going in different places. Not all of us went north, some of us went west, some went midwest, and many of us went north. And we took those food cultures with us. And so black food culture is pervasive. And it's very much a part of American culture as my former administrative assistant told me one time macaroni and cheese is not a black food

it's a casserole I said you're right but when you put it in combination with collard greens and fried chicken or fried fish that's what makes it a black dish, if you will, or a dish that's more prone to be eaten by black people or people who have a southern sensibility. And you know when you're talking about that mosaic, almost, of when you put those items together, it completes a puzzle of a certain culture. And do you think that there's an attachment emotionally to the safety of that of knowing when this is what your plate looks like, you're in kind of good company or you're in a space that is safer or more welcoming? Well, yeah, I mean, every culture has a comfort food. It is my mentor, Bernamé Groven said, every culture has their get-down foods.

They have those foods that are just so familiar that you know you're at home. I can guarantee you if you go to pretty much any black space that's inhabited by black people and you see fried fish and fried chicken, you're gonna be like, yep, I'm looking for the mac and cheese, I'm looking for the colgrum, looking for the cornbread. Now, do I want my cornbread sweetened or do I not want it sweetened? That's going to be a huge regional variation, right? Because some folks use a jiffy mix, some people like, oh no, cornbread has to be straight up. You know, white is the baby for white corn flour.

What have you? And the best thing about talking to experts is finding out that cornbread is a hotbed for all kinds of gossip and historical context. So white cornmeal tends to be sweeter than yellow, but yellow corn is cheaper. So rich folks had finer white cornmeal that was naturally sweet, but yellow corn, which was usually harvested early before those starches turned to sugars, would get a boost of sugar added for sweetness.

And jiffy mix turns out, which was always my favorite, was the cheapest. And therefore, the sweetest. It had the most added sugar. But why did sweetness even matter? So culinary historian Michael W. Twitty has explained that, quote, going back further than emancipation, no breads made with cornmeal were sweet, no matter who was making them. It originated with British colonists who adapted their baking to use meal ground from white corn, but it wasn't sweet.

So cornbread, it is never just about the yummy-ums or a vehicle for butter. It's about history and class and race and oppression, the industrial revolution, and how people judge each other. So I mean, it's a fun thing to unpack, but I know I can go to any city, and if I hear certain foods, I'm like, yeah, that's where I'm trying to go, because I know who I'm going to see and probably who's cooking. Well, you know, from a historical and anthropological perspective, so many European nations colonized other areas under the guise of looking for spices. Why are white people so afraid to season their food? We can't flavor for shit.

What's up with that? How does someone go on Oprah with a award-winning chicken recipe and no salt or pepper? Do you remember this clip? Tell me you remember this clip. Yes, yes, yes. I first saw this clip because I saw it on a reddit board titled, watch someone die inside. Do you like it? I hope so. To say yes. No, no. to say yes. No, but no. I do like it.

I like it very much. I think we add salt and pepper. I think we need a salt and pepper. No, there's no salt and pepper in it. Culturally, what's happening? Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I think that you may co-opt a thing, but, you know, you may not use it in a way that is constructive.

So yeah, I'm going to co-opt. I'm going to co-opt the spices for the money, but I don't, I can't tell you how to use it. What do I do when I ground cloves and different, you know, turmeric and camera and different spices and open arrow pepper and create a jerk season. Oh no, I'm not going to use that. It's experimental. This is what I think Verta May girls are meant when it was culinary historian and anthropologist when she said we cook by vibration. We're not necessarily measuring. We're going to see how this is going to turn out.

Let's see. And I want to be careful because experimentation with food tends to fall under the category of those who have and can afford to be experimental. But when it comes to spices, we'll do all kinds of stuff. We'll use orange juice along with those things. We may put stuff in vinegar because partly we had to be inventive. So we're not afraid to invent. Even on the slave ships that we were brought on, we use certain spices and whatnot to preserve foods, to prevent scurvy or to prevent the foods from going bad? So we've always come from a culture of innovation.

We riff, we improvise. That's what black people do, right? We can watch you dance and then we're like, okay, I can do that. And then you go one step further and we see it in music, we see it in our hair, we see it in our clothing. Oh, yeah, I'm just going to take this thing and tie it around my back and now I'm carrying my child on my back because I don't need a stroller. I can just tie them around my back. That's the beauty of being black and that's the beautiful part of being free to be literally free to be but also to be expressive. We don't have those fears about being expressive. And I think that freedom of expression is not just in those other material ways in which we carry our bodies, but it certainly is in the ways in which we move about our lives, which is a lot too of what causes so much thinking in society,

because because we are free to move about and we're free to allow our bodies to be wide and to be thin and to be tall and to be short. We run into a lot of trouble because that's how we get surveilled. And that's how we are considered, our bodies are considered unruly. Because we won't just come form. We won't just stay inside the lines. Black people don't stay inside the lines. We live outside the lines. We live out loud, right? And we've always lived out loud. Our cultures prior to come into this country

were about ritual and dance that were free, not ritual that were confined. So we practiced different religions, we practiced different cultural expressions because even though we all come from within the continent of Africa, the ways in which we practice our lives could have been a hundred different ethnic ways of doing that. I asked about the Obama administration's effect on food and culture.

Specifically, Mrs. Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign, which involved the Chefs moved schools program, that focused on healthful food options in schools, and this arose around the same time as a resurgence in interest in organic food and the local war movement. And a year into the presidency, the first lady cultivated the White House South Lawn into a seasonal garden, which she documented in her book, American Grown,

the story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America. And Dr. Williams-Forson notes that, this was an ambitious campaign, perhaps in hindsight overly so, because fresh, homegrown, hyper-local food just didn't quite deliver a miracle cure to the nation, given how systemically marginalized the target populations were and still are. And especially she says, black folks, low-income people, and people who don't even have access to health care. Well, I can eat people and people who don't even have access to health care.

Well, I can eat the best diet and don't have adequate health care in my teeth or rotting or I can eat this diet and you know wake up in the morning and be shot in my house if I'm a black person or I can be out jogging and get hunted down by white supremacists right and killed. So yeah, food is not going to save us. And I think that was where the message went awry, because it diverted our attention from larger, again, systemic issues. I mean, we should just be offering adequate health care to people in this country. Right. So to make people feel like they're being bad citizens because they're not eating well when the reality is all of these things go hand in hand Affordable health care, affordable housing, a living wage, access to various types of foods. All of that goes hand in hand

It's not as if food is going to be the savior. And again, some of us are able to walk that fine line and live really good lives and eat very well in all of that, you know. But it's a small subset of the population because according to a study out of University of California Davis, the more income you have, actually the more you spend eating out. Really? That's interesting, yeah. Yeah, here's the thing. And this is another one of those kinds of subterfuge things.

You may not be eating McDonald's, Popeyes, Burger King, you know, all that, but you might be eating more Chick-fil-A, or you may be eating a cove, or you may be eating it, I don't know, Ruth Chris, or what have you. And so somehow, that doesn't get seen as eating out. It gets seen as, no, no, I'm in a white tablecloth, fine dining establishment, I'm not eating out. Right, right. You know, there's a great book called Behind the Kitchen Door by Saru Duraman, and she

has a great video that goes along with it where she says, let's really look at how sustainable it is when you go to that sustainable eating establishment. From the folks who are preparing your food to the people at the front of the house who are serving your food, you're actually buying into their exploitation because while you're drinking a hundred dollar bottle of wine, ask yourself how much the folks who are doing the real work of picking the grapes, et cetera, are really getting paid. And so if you're only getting them a dollar, a day, or a dollar per bushel, what have you?

How sustainable are you really being? Oh, that's a really interesting way to look at it. And so what's happening? Our money is not keeping up with the prices of production, right? And so that's one reason why folks are like, well, just grow your own food. And here again, all of these things, and this is part of the beauty of studying material culture, it's all messy. There are no neat compartmentalized answers, right?

Because growing your own food can be problematic for a lot of people. Again, you might have a plot somewhere not far from you, but you got to get there every day. And if you live in someplace like where I do in Maryland, where the temperatures are always human and hot, and I'm like, oh my God, this is so unusual. What are we gonna do in August? What are we gonna do in July?

And I remember the time that I was renting a plot of land, I just couldn't get there every day, multiple times a day, to water and to cultivate my plot. At the same time, I'm going to come back to black communities. We have always said to be inventive. We want to say to feel, what are we going to do? If we don't have eggs, what are we going to substitute? Oil, what do we do if you don't have oil? You know, maybe fry some bacon and use the bacon greet. I mean, so, you know, again, this, it comes back around full circle because a lot of us are going to perish, not because we're not going our own food, but because there

are lots of things going on that are affecting how we are living. But I say to people all the time who say, grow your own food, I say, we need people who can do different things. Some of us can harvest, some of us can cook, some of us can sell, some of us can grow, some of us no seeds. We need the collective to be at work here so that we can get through what's soon to be the apocalypse. And I'm not saying this from a doomsday conspiracy. I'm saying it from the reality. You know what, two decades ago we saw a movie about the very thing we just experienced

with the pandemic. So I think we all have to be prepared to be able to contribute to collectives in order to be able to survive. I remember when we were hit with the Blizzard of 77 in Buffalo, New York, my family was living up there, 76. I think it may have been 7677. How did we survive with snow all the way up to our doorsteps, right? Well, we came together with our friends in the community and everybody pulled

whatever you had left on your shelves, inner refrigerators, and you came together. And you, you made it happen, right? And so we're going to be forced to return to a sort of collective way of living, whether in family, fictive kin, real kin, we're going to return to a sort of collective way of living, whether in family, fictive kin, real kin, we're gonna have to come together to figure it out because I don't think any of us are gonna be able to do it alone. Just this week I saw a meme about how fracturing families, generationally, is a great way to make sure everyone needs to buy more stuff. So we move away from our families and then we go to a work to afford childcare, to go to work, everyone needs to buy more stuff. So we move away from our families,

and then we go to a work to afford childcare, to go to work, and also to afford to take care of our parents that live on their own. And in the evolution of humans, the notion of everyone separating off to their own lands, and then paying others to take care of loved ones, is just a little bonkers. And I really think in the next few decades,

we'll return to some multi-generational housing or communal living or raising families with friends. Why does everyone on one street need to buy their own lawn mower that they use maybe an hour a week? I don't know, but it does sell lawn mowers. But right now we're in a system that's expensive, it doesn't always leave us with time or resources to take care of ourselves or each other, and then we judge ourselves for not thriving within that judgmental system.

So to feel better, we judge others instead of judging the system. Here's what eating while black is all about in part, other than looking at this through an anti-black racism lens. That people be, because people know what they have to do for themselves and for their families.

And so this goes back to the rigidity that you were asking me about about the lack of spices. Let people spice their lives the way they have to and the way they want to. Right? And stop trying to tell people where you're a bad person if you don't do it this way or you're not, you're a good person if you don't do it this way or you're not your good person. If you do do it this way. And just I just think the times for that level of judgment is way over and it's just unnecessary. Right. And I think it's so wonderful that you focus on that in your book, that message of,

you know, worry about yourself and stop policing what other people are eating or how they're eating, it feels like it must be partly too with internet culture with so many people feeling like they can pop in and say something in a comment that they wouldn't say to your face or that they have jurisdiction over every single thing that they see. I imagine that that's probably changed a bit with the digital age too.

Yeah, well, we've become armchair experts, you know, behind the computer where we feel like, I mean, we should weigh in on everything and, you know, and I say this to my daughter all the time, I just really come on and no less and we see the fun all the time. I want to know less about the people I don't like. I do, I don't want to know all of those things about you, right? I don't want to know how you are managing in your private moments of whether that's using the restroom or what have you. Two point.

But then on the other hand, there's a certain level of beauty about it because we are let inside people's private domains. And so we do see where they conceive of their creative ideas of living and creative ideas of cooking and creative ideas of eating. And it opens up for us some of those permissions that we were talking about around spices, right? Okay, so and so is doing it. Let me just try it. You know, okay, now I feel like because I saw it on TikTok or Facebook or Instagram or whatever, maybe I have the courage to do a thing.

It's okay. It's okay. It's supposed to be different and it's okay. It's supposed to be similar. Can I ask you a few questions from listeners that New York coming on? Sure. Yeah. And before we do, let's send a monetary snack toward a cause of theologist using.

And this week Dr. Williams' person would like to direct the donation to Cultivate Charlottesville, which engages with youth and community to build a healthy and just food system. And Cultivate Charlottesville grows gardens, they share food and power, and they advocate for just systems to create food equity. So you can find out more or you can donate at CultivateCharlottesville.org, which is linked in the show notes alongside their Instagram, which you should follow. So that donation from us is made possible by sponsors of the show. Okay, I'm hungry for your queries.

I thought Jacqueline Church and Bob Keeney both had great questions about barbecue. Jacqueline Church wants to know if we're in a renaissance at all with Michael Twitty and Stephen Satterfield and Adrian Miller. I'll kind of raising the profile about roots and diversity. Bob Keene wanted to ask if you have a favorite barbecue area. We'll get nominaclature right off the top. Off the top. Okay, so I'm not the barbecue expert. You name the ones who are the barbecue expert, Sederfield, Adrian Miller, that is not at all my area of expertise. However, what I will say is that I think one of the beauties of those conversations is that it's

giving us awareness that we had no idea about, right? I'm not really a big barbecue person, quite frankly, partly because I don't eat pork. But see, that's what I'm talking about. We can't make assumptions about people in their cultures, not all black folks eat barbecued. Now, for me, I call it grilling out, and I'll tell you why. I don't call it picnic because picnic has a derogatory association with it in most black communities, true or not true. Oh, I didn't know that growing up We go around a picnic or whatever, but it used to be that during when when black people were lynched

Bifox would literally pack a Bass and go out and and use it as spectacle and they would eat at these events and and use them for entertainment So if you were to Google you know the the rockatory or the definition of picnic, you may remain the finding. So it's different from barbecue, of course, being the reference to we're going to throw some ribs on the grill and we're going to barbecue and there's going to be a muster sauce or red sauce or honey sauce or whatever. I know you're not you're not much of a barbecue person, but do you feel

like there is a prevailing barbecue Region in the US is it Kansas City is it who's Long time I think it was Kansas City that's the one that we most know about But now we're hearing about North Carolina. We're hearing about South Carolina Texas And in the US there are several styles of barbecue. So many from Memphis, which is pretty pork heavy and served wet with sauce or dry. There's Kansas City barbecue. It's smoked really slowly. It's served with sauce and it includes bonus french fries. There's Carolina pork barbecue or some say it all started and that features more mustard based sauce and southern Carolina

styles in eastern North Carolina. But you pop it over to central western North Carolina and or some say it all started and that features more mustard-based sauce in southern Carolina styles in eastern North Carolina. But you pop it over to Central and Western North Carolina and you're going to find what's called Lexington style, which involves more acidic tomatoe vinegar ketchup sauces. Texas has barbecue, but it leans toward beef and brisket cuts, and because Texas is the size of Mars, it has regional varieties for every corner of its dusty expanse. West Texas uses goat sometimes. And South Texas barbecue, sometimes called barbacoa for its West Indies etymology, that involves cow heads. And I know you want to know more history and gossip about these styles, but honestly,

American barbecue could be its own episode and a seven-part one at that. I think that entire region is so rich with the various different methods. And you know what I would love to see is just the huge barbecue festival. You have all these regions represented and you know and just left folks go from one end of the of the field to the next, just experiencing and tasting the differences. And that's part of what I think we sometimes lose in the competition and in the conversations of origins. How about we just explore the differences?

So what do you use that you use differently, that this method works best for your region, this method doesn't work as well, because your soil and your area of clearance and your air is different and so it's going to affect your taste. Those are the things that really excite me is to get more, I hate origin stories, I hate them because I'm like, none of us were really there. Mm-hmm. And I remember that, right?

None of us were there. Four centuries ago, and we don't really know other than what we have in the written record. And sometimes when we as historians try to interpret the right written record, it's not always the best or the right interpretation. Right. But whatever you sing over open flames, whether it's miso soaked portobello caps or a whole dang goat, what is the word for that gathering? I tend to say grill

out. I grew up in Buffalo, but then also rural Virginia. We say, oh, we're going to grill out. We're going to cook out because you're cooking outside or we're going to grill. We're going to go to Virginia and we'll say, oh, we're going to grill out. We're going to cook out because you're cooking outside or we're going to grill. We're going to grow some salmon on the grill or what have you. There's a great phrase that goes around. If you see, for example, I was watching a video this morning on TikTok and I'll write what we're always doing at dance and you go straight to the comments and it's like, you're welcome to the cook out. You know, because black folks also, since, for for elites for the last 40, 50 years

that I don't know we've always said we're having a cookout meaning we're cooking outside you should come there's gonna be music so forth and so on. Sometimes that's a potluck. Most of the time potlucks refer to it in-door kind of activity where everyone brings a casserole or some kind of dish and we sit around and we do thus and so. Bottom line is it's about commensality, it's about the coming together of different people to enjoy what we hope is good food.

Patrons, Finley, Mullin, Benet Gerber, and Marisa Asher wanted to know in Finley's words about having to clandestinely pass on recipes that had only been spoken and never written. Do you feel like that has influenced how black American cuisine does kind of go by vibe and by rhythm and by flow and by smell and by taste instead of a quarter cup of cornstarch followed by a quarter of a tea like do you feel like that there's an oral history there? Oh yeah, absolutely. There's oral history. And I should say that while we all, many of

us cook by vibration, many of us are also equally classically trained to measure, right? Because, you know, you can mess things up by not measuring many of an enslaved woman, man, boy, girl, or kill because of inaccurate measurements right you have to be sure that you get it just so or or Mrs. or Master will do that since so to you and that could end your life and so we couldn't be carefree and put loose and fancy we oftentimes head to walk a very rigid straight narrow path in order to save our own lives I think that's part of the beauty of black culture and contributions to the culinary styles of the United States is that we've had to be

adaptive, we've had to be flexible, we've had to be both rigid, but we could also in our own homes perhaps be less tough. And so that's what makes for how we help to build American cuisine and how we help to continue to build a culinary styles that we now enjoy in this country. That's such a good contextual point and it's so gutting and wrenching to think about the rigidity in the stakes, literally life or death and that and that's something that without having that experience or having that perspective or having a scholar like you point out might go completely over a person's head like it did mine and you know a little bit lighter note a lot of listeners want to know look at you Bobby Derek Allen Catherine Wood, Jeannie Lewis, said pretty and Aubrey Nelson Taylor

Wade in their word why is good mac and cheese so controversial? And what is the right mac and cheese? That's a good question. You know, mac and cheese is still controversial. It goes back to what I was saying when I mentioned that my administrative assistant said, you know, mac and cheese is not black food. You know, that was again, but it's a casserole, right? And really, what are we talking about here?

Noodles and cheese, right? And really, what are we talking about here? Noodles and cheese. Mm-hmm. Right? But it has been perfected over time. And there's some really great, if you Google, there's some really great articles on the origins of Mac and cheese and how it came to be associated with black culture. One great source of this history is Cookbook Author

in James Beard Foundation Award recipient, Jessica B. Harris, who wrote the book High on the Hog, a culinary journey from Africa to America. In fact, I'll sound familiar telegenically. It's because in 2021 Netflix released a four-part series based on the book, and you can head to episode three for the origins of macaroni and cheese, which have been attributed to James Hemmings, who was an accomplished American-born chef trained in France, who was also born enslaved, and purchased at the age of eight by founding father Thomas Jefferson. And he worked most of his short life at Jefferson's Monticello plantation,

or accompanying him to France, so you can thank him for bringing ice cream and french fries to America. And Jefferson agreed to free himmings, but not until he was forced to train a replacement, which was his brother, Peter. And James tragically died shortly thereafter at the age of 36 by suicide. So in that series, High on the Hog, one of Hemmings' descendants, Gail Jessapouite, joins culinary historian Dr. Lenny Swarinson in the same kitchen in Manichello to cook James Heming's macaroni pie, which boils the noodles in half milk and half water for a really velvety texture. macaroni and cheese, it's much more than meets the mouth.

And so for a lot of us, craft macaroni and cheese just doesn't cut it. It's the way the noodles melt in your mouth. It's the way that the cheese is. You know, come together multiple. Come together with the cream or do you put it on the stove? You know what? I learned a lot of interesting new ways of cooking mac and cheese on TikTok. You know, I'm always fascinated to watch.

If you just go to TikTok and type in mac and cheese, you'll get so many different versions of it. And it's amazing to watch because I'm like, I never thought about that. What I can tell you unequivocally is that raisins do not belong in mac and cheese. Raisins don't belong in many purposes, but certainly not in mac and cheese.

And I've seen people do that. Your TikTok inbox must be, people, but certainly not in Mac and Tuesdays. And I've seen people do that. Your tick-tock inbox must be, okay, you must get so many videos a day. You must get the same video sent to you from 10 different friends. And I do, I often get videos sent. And there's a great, you know, commentator on on Tik Tok and she's also an Instagram and everything. She's like, everyone's so creative. Yes, yes, yes. But the controversy around Mac and cheese goes back to this conversation about barbecue and ownership.

We're so caught up in owning food culture. And why is that? Because we don't want to share the fact that most of us come from cultures where foods were overlapping. When Black African people came to this country, we were brought here as chattel, we were brought here to work, we were brought here as labor, right, and we were perceived as less than human in that labor. If it were not for native people and African people, many of the white settlers would not have survived because the perception was we understood the climate, we could withstand the climates,

especially the hot areas in the South, deep South and so forth. But settlers came to this country and had no idea what foods they were confronting, other than the ones that they brought. And so the fact that we have here many centuries later, people not wanting to dis-acknowledge, hey, this may have derived out of the Midwest, but guess what, it's been perfected over time, just like anything else, it's been perfected over time,

and it tastes good, and I'm gonna enjoy it. Instead, we wanna lay claim to these origins. And those are the things that often also very much divide us as opposed to just recognizing a good plate of mac and cheese collard things and whatever fried other food you may have can make a really delicious meal. And what about you personally? Best mac and cheese you've ever had in your life. Oh I must say my mom. Yeah, what am I gonna say here? What are you saying? I'm gonna say my mom.

Growing up I mean my mom made the best I going to say here? What are you saying? I'm going to say my mom. Growing up, my mom made the best mac and cheese because it was gooey and it had a particular texture. I grew up watching her great, a huge slab of extra sharp cheddar cheese, which she had gotten from our local black owned store. My man named Mr. Coles and you were go up to Mr. Coles and he said, I need a huge thing and you show him by your, I need a huge thing of cheese and he cut it in the cheese wheel and he wrapping in paper and bring it home and then my mom would grade it.

And that memory at the time it just seemed so pedestrian, right? But now to think back on it, I was like, wow, that was a lot of labor in that food that she was making. And it yielded a particular taste and it yielded a particular look. One that often I'll be very honest with you, I cannot replicate. Really?

Because even though I may know, because I don't have access to that same kind of cheese, right? I don't have access to a cheese wheel. I'm getting cheese, that's either pre-shredded, because I'm like, I have to be great in cheese. So I'm either getting shredded, a pre-shredded cheese, or I'm getting something in a block that's made by craft or some other creator, but it's not the cheese that,

you know, we used to give her a mystical store. And I really think that that affects the taste, and it affects the way in which it's now cooked. You know she used to have this huge blue speckled pan with blue white speckled pan that you know the oil gets. She's half the, oh yes, she's half that pan. The dish. Yeah the dish and sheurt her it up or oiled it up and she, you know, made her her mac and cheese and I remember watching her do that and fried chicken with a lot of garlic and I talk about this in a couple of my essays and stuff and our Colligary, you know, that was often Sunday dinner Which ended up stretching to maybe Tuesday, Wednesday for a family of five

so You know those are the memories that I choose to cling to and then hopefully look on online and see what someone else is making that comes closest to and then try to replicate it. But I've not been able to and I'm convinced that some of it has to do with the ingredients that I'm using. They've just not the same. Yeah, just source differently. Source differently. So access and sourcing and production. Yeah, smaller dairies, different probably aging processes,

all of that. Different preservatives, yeah. And the longevity to get shipped all across the country to 1500 different wall marts versus five stores within a day's ride, that's, yeah. That's right. That's right. But as long as we're on the debate, Jocelyn Taylor, Jenny Lewis, Jennifer Mocken,

all need to know, can we settle the debate that sugar does not go on grits? This is a big debate. I'm neutral on this, but sugar on grits is a salt and pepper or is it sugar? Okay. I grew up with salt and pepper on grits, but I personally prefer salt and pepper with a little dash of sugar. I do like a dash of sugar and butter, but my dad grew up, you know, he was a short cook, short-line, order cook for a while in New Jersey, so he was cooking at diners and stuff like that.

You know, and so from him, we learned the different styles of eggs. Sonny sat up, you know, poached, hard boiled, all of that, right? And so with him, Gritz had to be salt and pepper, right? He had to be salt. And there was something about the bitterness of it that just didn't quite rub me the right way. So I put a smidgen of sugar. So yes, I'll do that.

I do a smidgen just enough to take away some of that bitterness for me. I think you just every, everyone satisfied with that answer. And I think that it's not only scholarly, it's also very fair. I'm not fool, but also, but you know what? Everybody's taste there by its palate is different.

And that also goes back to my point about letting people be free to eat and enjoy. I mean, we should be eating enjoy. Right. Right. We should be and enjoy. I mean, we should be eating and joy. Right. Right. We should be eating and joy. And I think that we again put a lot of heavy lifting on food to do so many different things, to represent, to prevent, to characterize, to do so many different things that, you know, those poor greens aren't designed to do all of that really. They just want to be. And they want you to just enjoy them in whatever way, whether that's smoke turkey, whether that's, you know, those poor greens aren't designed to do all of that really. They just want to be and they want you to just enjoy them in whatever way,

whether that's smoke turkey, whether that's, you know, ham hocks or whether that's, you know, vegetarian with liquid smoke or or just no seasoning at all in some way. We just should not be restricting people's ways of enjoying the one of the very few things in this life that could potentially give us joy. Right. And we were talking about things going mainstream and TikTok and last last question, but Rebecca Waffer had wanted to know what your thoughts are on traditionally black ingredients becoming more mainstream and is it cultural appropriation or is it positive for sharing culture?

I'm curious about what she would define as black ingredients. They say I've been seeing lots of ox tail on Twitter as part of this discussion. Oh, okay. Yeah, well you know, ox tail I think up until recently really I grew up knowing ox tail. I'll never forget my first time eating it. Actually, I was at a friend's house and I grandmother made it and, you know, she's like, you want some of you? Yeah, sure can you think, come on and hang in there.

Get some of this potato and so she never said what it was. And so I ate it. I was really enjoying. She's like, now we're going to tell you what it is. And you know, when she did it, I was like, okay, well, still good. But then for a long while, I hadn't heard of Oxfail again until I moved to the DMV and became familiar with Caribbean restaurants.

This is mostly where we tend to see. And it's only been really in the last five years that because I've worked with some folks from the Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica and so forth and they always ate ox tail. So then I, you know, I tried it. So, but here you go. This is what I said about the pros and cons of social media.

Ox tail has now become familiar to a lot of people and now folks are putting the recipes online. But we can't get mad when other people choose to eat that and try to replicate the dish at the same time. What I think the speaker is getting at is when we do that without saying, I kept this recipe on TikTok from someone who was from the care being. And this is the way they said to cook it. You know, or this is the recipe. Because when you don't offer those attributions, then you are sort of saying, Oh, this is my

invention. This is my creation. Now, you can always say, I'm going to modify their recipe because I don't like it as spicy. All of that is fine. But yeah, why not? Why not? We say, you know, this is a typical dish eaten in the carabin. I'll tell you something else about ox tail. A lot of times you'll see a lot of ox tails. And then there was a person from the Caribbean who said, it's ox tail. It's not more than one.

It's just one. It's just cutting to different pieces. So just even in that, you know, learning this bit of culture, you want to attribute that type of learning to the culture that has given you that taste and that has given you those recipes from which it is known. That's just like saying, oh yeah, yeah, I made those islander little tomayles or, you know, their mind took what in. Why not say that I got this from a community of people who are Mexican or a community of people who are Asian American or whatever, but kimchi. Yeah, you know,

you didn't even thought. So I'm just going to do my best to create this Korean dish. Yeah. What's wrong with that? And the last questions I always wrap up with is shorter long as you like, but the hardest thing about your job or this field, the most challenging thing, even if it's a petty annoyance, it could be anything. Origins is the hardest. You know, that's why I tend to stay away from them. I try not to get drawn into conversations where I'm having to, well, where did it come from?

This is what I know on the basis of the research that I've done, and the people I've talked to in the oral histories that I've looked at in the primary sources that I've dug up. But honestly, before that, don't really know, you know, because again, I was half joking when I said none of us were there, but that's a reality. None of us were. And so, when we think about how long the earth has been in existence and how things and people and substances and materials move, we do our best to try and recreate their origins. But we don't really know and you have to ask yourself what your investment in establishing that. I try to help people have different ways of talking about food. Be daring, be willing, just like what spices be willing to try a different conversation.

And I say, you know, this is another way of thinking about it. And what about your favorite thing, favorite dish, favorite element of your job, favorite element of my job? I love learning these new stories. I love this book by Waverly Root, which I have had on my shelf forever, but to find out about just all of the lobster and crab that used to be considered, what is now a delicacy, used to be like plant-a-fall and she, I love reading what other people have written and enjoy, what they have written. That's the favorite part of my job. And the favorite food, calligrain. Love cooking, calligrain. That's my thing.

I grew up on it. I like it. I've perfected how I cook them. And I cook them different ways in different times. It just depends on what I have a taste for. Back to the sugar things. Sometimes I'll put a little sugar in there. Sometimes I don't.

It depends on how I want want what taste I want at that time. Yeah I think those are the best parts of my job. I love this work. I like the discoveries and I especially love learning more and more about how black people have lived, continue to live and we'll live in the future in this world that we inhabit and with the foods in which we eat. Well I'm glad that you're doing research that you love and making it and let the food to the tree. Well, I'm glad that you're doing research that you love and making it accessible to people. And I hope when you go over to people's houses for dinner, they don't get too nervous,

because it's like a cultural critic of food. That would be good. That would be good. That would be good. Sometimes it can get a little dicey, but I'm like, you're okay. There's no, as one of my former students back to Jessica Walker said, there's no pumpkin gig

going on here because she brought, wanted to bring pumpkin bivers as we pay the past for a function. There's no pumpkin gig, I'm open to it all. But I do tend to live my life through a lenses of watching food stories and food issues unfold. So it's fun stuff. So ask brilliant people basic questions because the answers are so complex and might change

the way you see everything on your plate and the world. So thank you to Dr. Syke Williams-Forsen for being on the show. Her website is Syke Williams-Forsen.com and her social media handles are linked in the show notes alongside Cultivate Charlottesville and the web page for this episode which has so many more links and we're at Alligies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm Allie Ward on both Allie with one L. Smaller Gs are shorter classroom friendly episodes in which I don't curse and those are up for free at Alligies.com or Allieward.com slash homologies. Thank you to C. Redrigus Thomas and Mercedes-Mate Lin for editing those. Thank you Aaron Talbert for admitting the allergies podcast Facebook group with assists

from Bonnie Dutch and Shana Feltes. Thank you to Noel Delworth for doing all of our scheduling. Birthday Girl Susan Hale, who will be mad at me for telling you what's her birthday. She handles merch at allergiesmurch.com and so so so much more. I don't know how we do the show without you. Thank you for being bored. Emily White of the Wordery does our professional transcripts and those are linked for free in the show notes. Kelly Art DeWire works on the website and assistant editors are Mark David Christensen who has a dog that looks a lot like mine. And Jared Sleeper who shares my dog because he is also legally wet to me. Lead editor is the wonderful Mercedes-Mateland, of mainland audio of Canada. Nick Thorburn made the theme music,

and if you stick around to the end of the show, I tell you a secret. And this week, it's that our audio booth that we use, most of the time, is built into a closet that also has all my clothes. And this weekend, it slowly collapsed at like 11 o'clock at night, and it sounded exactly like a person hiding in the closet.

And I grabbed the aforementioned dog. I left the house, not even wearing shoes, in pajamas, no bra, until I had some backup arrived and I found out it was just a faulty closet shelf. And I'm hoping that I used up all the cordless all that my body was ever going to make. And I'll just don't have any more, so I'm never going to be anxious again. Who knows? Okay, bye bye. The Philippines.