The Expansion of Soul Foods

It was Amiri Baraka who said a “Harvard Negro” wouldn’t know how to get down, and Ebony’s Freda DeKnight who said we could do so much more. Booker T. Washington urged us to go beyond knick-knacks, opting for beef instead of pork. Dick Gregory used searing comedic wit to argue for its rescue, showing how “saving soul food,” echoing Kimberly Nettles Barcelón, has become an ever-present debate.

The culture of soul food is as much about the imagination as a plate of common foods. The aforementioned soul food arbiters crafted narratives of migration, transformation and survival that hinged on regional differences between North and South.

African American foodways became soul food recently, with folks like Baraka and Vertamae Grosvenor applying the aesthetic and political urgency of the Black Arts Movement to what they saw as the increased Frenchification of American food in the early 1970s. The ‘GORE-May’ culture, as Grosvenor termed it, contributed to the denigration of soul food as low, a fad that sat well outside the definition of cuisine. Yet, these artists not only reclaimed ingredients but also the context of the urban North, describing the food scenes of Harlem, Philadelphia, and Chicago as the most authentic spaces of soul foods’ reproduction. It’s the working-class shacks and joints of Harlem, the kitchenette apartment, and the guidance of vibration, not the recipes of the modern kitchen, that shaped how a soul aesthetic was applied to food at this time. Real soul food was not for Black intellectuals who couldn’t ‘boil water’ and wouldn’t know collard greens from ‘European spinach.’  Multi-hyphenate culinary theorist Grosvenor’s vibrations emphasized intuition and embodied knowledge over inhospitable, instant kitchen culture as a practice that connects cooking across the African diaspora.

Others saw soul food differently. Edna Lewis argued that it was a low version of Southern food that was fit only for survival. As Ebony’s first food editor, Freda DeKnight’s mission was to convince food advertisers that African Americans weren’t stuck on soul food and were ready for an ever-rotating selection of convenience foods. Goods like Jiffy cornbread mix, Lawry’s seasoning salt, and JELLO made their way into soul food’s repertoire through the pages of Ebony and the televisual kitchen of Good Times, marrying Black urban life to soul food’s subpar ingredients. While the North was once a site to defend, embattled as the scapegoat of Southern foods’ decline, I consider reclaiming the Northern foodscapes that have so haunted the trajectory of the cuisine, increasing the distance between soul food and the culinary clout of Southern foodways.

Perhaps it’s the Cleveland in me, but what if the urban North was seen as a fruitful site of soul food’s expansion and not where it goes to devolve? Perhaps today, we can see how urban agriculture is the legacy of Black gardeners, landscapers, farmers, anglers, and cooks, all with different and changing relationships to Southern foodways. Southern migrants don’t just bring food North but adapt and respond to the spatialization of the North.

In applying the soul aesthetic to food, Baraka drew from a jazz aesthetic that used the structure of improvised music as a paradigm for criticizing and even parodying white traditions. It was a signifying tradition with a political impulse toward a practice of revolution. When I think of soul foods’ tomorrow, it’s not jazz but House music that helps triangulate the forces of music, space, and practice–the Agrofuturist approach. From Dr. Ashley Gripper’s Octavia Butler-inspired Land Based Jawns in Philly to the claim that the transformative technology of Grosvenor’s vibrations through Our Mothers Kitchens, the afrofuturistic imagination is at work in the contemporary story of soul food.

Combining agroecology and Afrofuturism animates thinking of soul food that foregoes the either/or of North vs. South, reckoning with the varied stories of return and taking on the food knowledge of the past as sacred, intergenerational learning. Agrofuturism emphasizes farming away from corporatized extraction and toward a healing and regenerative relationship between land and local communities. A partnership between The National Black Food Justice Alliance and FAMU seeded the first of many agroecology centers at 1890 HBCU land grant institutions, galvanizing already long-fought advocacy for preserving Black agrarian foodways. Agrofuturism has a soundtrack, for Grosvenor her soul food was James Brown, Edna Lewis’ Southern food was Bessie Smith, and soul food’s agrofuture is textured by House music.

Named after hallmarks of industrial landscapes and warehouses, the music epitomizes how Northern practitioners can interpret the built environment through the technology of the future, transforming the feel of the landscape into place. It relies heavily on technologies but not in a way that invalidates Black cultural traditions of the past. Similarly, the novelties of food manufacturing technology, like convenience foods, shaped soul food in a similar way. In both forms what we deem tradition and the future are always in cahoots but rarely imagined as so. From my home in Detroit, Theo Parrish’s album Cornbread and Cowrie Shells for Bertha rings with soul food nostalgia.

At the same time, JDilla’s ‘Lightwork’ relays how industrial towns can dazzle, and ‘The Factory’ warns of how industrial machines can ‘hurt ya.’ The voice and legacy of Grace Lee Boggs are echoed in tracks by Kim Sherobbi, Viola Klein, WhoDat, and Stacy Hotwaxx Hale. These are the soundscapes of soul foods’ agrofutures. An agrofuture is one of vibration, sensing the unseen, and an invitation to think otherwise and otherworldly, not just about the possibilities of liberation through soul food but also about where we imagine liberation to take place.