Hog and Hominy: Soul Food From Africa to America

by Frederick Douglass

  Gregory met Fulton during his 1967 campaign for mayor of Chicago against the incumbent, Richard Daley. Fulton came by campaign headquarters and dropped off some salad for Gregory and his staff. “I had been a vegetarian,” says Gregory, “so I said if you are running against Mayor Daley, you cannot eat anything anybody brings you!” He told his staff that if anybody should bring anything by, they were to take their name down and he would stop by and thank them later. Someone at the headquarters informed him that a really nice black woman “‘brought all these salads here for you,’” says Gregory. “I went by one day to thank her,” and the 1967 encounter with Fulton turned “my whole life around.” As they sat and talked, Gregory told Fulton that he was going to go on a forty-day fast in protest of the war in Vietnam. “And she thought I knew something about fasting, which I didn’t! And she taught me from day one to day forty what was going to go on in my body.”37 During the fast, Gregory went from 350 to 98 pounds and ran twenty-five miles a day. After the fast, his weight rose to 148 pounds, he was totally healthy, and he began to fast on a regular basis.

  Over the next several years, Gregory and Fulton became close friends, and they collaborated in sharing their knowledge about fasting, herbs, and nutrition with anybody who would listen. There were plenty of African Americans who had eaten soul food all of their lives and had diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease in part because of it. They went to Fulton with the express purpose of breaking away from this diet. She offered an alternative that improved their health and energy levels; they in turn told their relatives and friends. Fulton’s diet worked so well that it also attracted a lot of black celebrities such as actor Godfrey Cambridge, singers Eartha Kitt and Roberta Flack, gospel artist Mahalia Jackson, and comedian Redd Foxx.38

  Fulton collaborated with Gregory on a cookbook entitled Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin’ with Mother Nature. The book, published in 1973, is the most compelling evidence that Fulton’s work was an important influence on Gregory. In it, Gregory, with assistance from Fulton, denounces soul food for causing bloated stomachs, bald heads, varicose veins, swollen ankles, high blood pressure, heart trouble, and nervous tension in the black community. All these illnesses, he says, are the results of the soul food diet and its tradition of “heavy starch consumption, cooked food and greasy fried food consumption, and sugar and salt consumption.” He argues, “One might say folks with all those difficulties are suffering from consumption!” Gregory also openly indicts African American political leaders and activists who advocated soul food by serving it at their meetings and events: “I personally would say that the quickest way to wipe out a group of people is to put them on a soul food diet. One of the tragedies is that the very folks in the black community who are most sophisticated in terms of the political realities in this country are nonetheless advocates of ‘soul food.’ They will lay down a heavy rap on genocide in America with regards to black folks, then walk into a soul food restaurant and help the genocide along.”39

  FIGURE 9.2 Comedian Dick Gregory speaking to about two thousand students at the University of South Florida, April 14, 1971. AP Image Collection.

  The same year he published the cookbook, Gregory also stopped doing his stand-up comedy routine at nightclubs. He explained to reporter Vernon Jarrett of the Chicago Tribune that “he had a problem in doing anything that would encourage people to consume alcohol or do anything that might be damaging to one’s personal health.” During the interview, Gregory informed Jarrett that soul food is “the worst food that you can eat. Nothing but garbage.” Gregory felt that once African Americans started eating properly, their bodies and minds would change, and they would stop permitting other people to commit injustices against them. In short, starting around 1973, Gregory, influenced largely by Fulton, dedicated increasing amounts of time and energy to food reform. Writing in 1973, reporter Vernon Jarrett reported, “Dick’s near full-time commitment today is to the human body and what is done to it and with it. And there is nothing funny about this commitment.”40

  Gregory’s strategy of raising public awareness about world hunger and starvation by running marathons fueled only by water, fresh fruit juice, and a powdered supplement he created called Formula X (“a combination of kelp—that little green seaweed you see growing in the ocean—and a few other ingredients”) gained him notoriety throughout the black community.41 “He was a real activist” and “he would be on all the stations,” says Fred Opie, Jr. In addition to radio appearances, Gregory lectured extensively on college campuses.42

  “UPPER-CLASS FOLK”

  Dick Gregory estimates that, at one time, he did 250 lectures a year at universities across the country. Gregory says he would “talk about vegetarianism and why you should buy into it.” Those lectures “had a lot of influence on both black folks and white folks in America.”43 Edward Williamson attended Morgan State University, an HBCU located in the heart of Baltimore. He remembered attending lectures given by Gregory, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), and H. Rap Brown.44

  Carmichael was a Howard University undergraduate and member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later the Black Panthers. In 1966 he coined the term “black power” at a freedom rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. Like Carmichael, H. Rap Brown was first a member of the SNCC and later the Black Panthers. Both Carmichael and Brown gave lectures on college campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s in which they mentioned food within a black nationalist context.45 Lamenta Crouch, a graduate of Virginia State College, an HBCU, remembers Carmichael talking about eating in a radically different way. Rejecting the argument that soul food was authentically African American cuisine, he suggested that African Americans should embrace food and cooking styles with African origins. Carmichael insisted that “if we are going to go all the way and claim who we are, then we should be eating as we did indigenously,” recalls Crouch. Yet Crouch had doubts as to the motives of Carmichael’s argument. “I don’t know if his [message] was from a health standpoint as much as from” a black power perspective that “soul food is not really African food.”46 Similarly, Edward Williamson remembers hearing the message “anything that is white is not good for you.” Carmichael especially emphasized that processed and refined white foods “were evil.” His message was “don’t eat white bread, don’t eat sugar, don’t eat potatoes, and don’t eat white rice.”47

  Joan B. Lewis, who taught food safety courses on the campus of the University of the District of Columbia, noticed that vegetarianism became much more fashionable in the Washington metropolitan area around the 1970s. This was particularly true near the Howard University campus, where several vegetarian restaurants opened. Most of the vegetarians in the Washington metro area were African American college students, says Lewis. In addition, she saw vegetarians among the ranks of the area’s college-educated African American professionals and the hard-working black people they worked and socialized with.48 It was in Alexandria, Virginia, in Fairfax County, a suburb of Washington, D.C., that Clara Bullard Pittman first heard African American youth advocating a radical conversion to vegetarianism. In the 1970s “we used to call them ‘upper-class black folk,’” says Pittman. “Those were the ones who could go away to college and educate themselves. . . . That’s where I heard that stuff from.”49

  By the late 1970s African American students at colleges across the country were attending classes, rooming, and sometimes eating with food rebels of various stripes: Muslims in the Nation of Islam, Five Percenters, members of the Moorish Science Temple of America, those in the US Organization, African Hebrew Israelites, and the children of advocates of natural food diets. Among this very small but diverse population of college students 1 percent were full-fledged vegetarians, while others had dietary restrictions against pork and/or highly processed white sugar and flour. A smaller fraction became aware that the meat and dairy industries were using growth hormones to shorten the maturation periods of livestock and poultry. As a result, a tiny percentage became vegans,
meaning that they stopped eating dairy as well as meat. Others students became what I call reformed soul food eaters: they gave up pork, for example, but otherwise ate standard African American, Caribbean-influenced cuisine. Sundiata Sadique recalls that he had friends at Temple University in Philadelphia who took up natural food cooking. When they returned to New York, they opened “soulless restaurants” in the city that specialized in meatless cooking using fruits, nuts, and vegetables. “So we had all these educated blacks coming back from college sharing this information with us,” says Sadique.50

  Perhaps it was a lecture by Gregory or Carmichael that inspired Ralph Johnson and Patricia Reed to write an article denouncing traditional soul food made with beef and pork in a 1981 edition of the Black Collegian, an academic journal dedicated to African American topics. In an Afrocentric article entitled “What’s Wrong with Soul Food?” Johnson and Reed insisted that before the African slave trade West Africans ate a very healthy diet consisting of fresh fruits, vegetables, grains, and wild game. It was European slave traders who introduced inferior foods to West Africa and to African captives. Like Elijah Muhammad, Johnson and Reed insisted that slave owners only provided the cheapest foods to their slaves, such as “white refined rice, cornmeal, potatoes, pig fat, salt pork, grits, and sweet potatoes.” They went on to say that African Americans continued to consume the same foods because they believed that it was the Africans’ “native food, but it is nothing more than slave food. Add to this slave food the chemicalized, refined sugary, fast, convenience foods of our modern society and you have quite a deadly combination.”51 Soul food, they insisted, was responsible for causing in blacks higher percentages of hypertension, strokes, and cancer than in whites. They concluded, “Black Americans can start to reverse those health statistics and gain back their health by utilizing the West African diet, which is rightfully ours to begin with! Black Americans should unchain their dietary habits and let the ‘soul food’ diet die along with the concept of slavery!”52

  It wasn’t only upper-class and college-educated African Americans who moved away from soul food. Religious conversion rather than lectures by Dick Gregory or Stokely Carmichael reformed the eating habits of working blacks like Louisiana-born Mary Keyes Burgess. First in Louisiana and later in Texas, Burgess learned at her mother’s side how to cook whatever the family garden produced. Later in life she apparently became a Seven-Day-Adventist and “skillfully adapted a lacto-ovo-vegetarian” dietary regime to her black Louisiana and Texas roots to create vegetarian soul food recipes. As an adult, Burgess migrated to California, where she first began to cook professionally, at the Family Education Center in a black and Hispanic section of San Bernardino. She became well-known for her vegetarian dishes where she lived and worked, and her fame led to the publication in 1976 of a book, Soul to Soul: A Soul Food Vegetarian Cookbook. “Soul food,” she wrote, “can be more appealing than ever without meat—if you know what to use in its place. . . . Fortunately, modern food research has given us delicious and wholesome substitutes for meat.”53

  FRIED VEGETABLE CHICKEN

  Batter

  1 cup all-purpose flour

  2 teaspoons chicken seasoning (salt, pepper, paprika)

  1 egg

  1 cup milk

  ½ teaspoon salt

  Combine all ingredients and mix well.

  Seasoning flour

  ½ cup all-purpose flour

  2 teaspoon chicken seasoning

  1 teaspoon garlic powder

  Rinse one 19-oz. can Worthington’s Soyameat or La Loma Terkettes. Add 1 teaspoon garlic powder. Let stand for one to two hours. Drain. Dip in batter and then dredge in seasoned flour. Deep-fry until golden brown.

  Adapted from Mary Keyes Burgess, Soul to Soul: A Soul Food Vegetarian Cookbook (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Woodbridge, 1976), 50.

  Alternative voices from the Nation of Islam, the university-trained, and advocates of natural food made important contributions to black folks’ reconsidering the health and nutritional merits of soul food and the culinary legacy of their southern ancestors. Before the 1980s, the Nation of Islam, more than any other African American organization, raised the food consciousness of black people in the United States. In addition to the Nation, college students exposed to natural food activists and natural food advocates on the radio were the most progressive health educators in African American communities in the absence of nutrition-minded physicians. Except for a few radicals, physicians refused to criticize traditional African American cookery.

  Most of the people who became food rebels were exposed to alternative information about food during radio broadcasts, lectures, rallies, and Nation of Islam events or while incarcerated and surrounded with converts to the Nation of Islam. African Americans who left their communities to go to college or those in prison tended to be far more receptive to the message of food reform. The same was true for those who participated in black nationalist organizations in the 1960s and 1970s.

  Yet food rebels did not have a mass influence on African Americans, although they did manage to persuade some younger generations of African Americans and those who spent time outside their traditional communities to reduce their consumption of pork, which was no small accomplishment. Perhaps the biggest challenge for alternative food restaurants like those of Muhammad Ali, Dr. Fulton, and the Nation of Islam was how to attract African American and Caribbean customers without having pork on their menu. A menu without fried pork chops, smothered pork chops, barbecued pork ribs, or greens seasoned with pork struck customers as unappealing. For most, it was incentive enough to leave an alternative restaurant and look for a “real” soul food joint with a traditional meat, meal, and molasses menu. In short, no-pork menus challenged the identity politics of African American and Caribbean customers. Because of their cultural allegiance to pork and pork-seasoned greens, many did not frequent swine-free restaurants like Ali’s, Fulton’s, and the Nation’s even if the word on the street was that the food was good. The influence of food rebels on African American soul food in urban centers was thus limited to changing the eating habits of a very small percentage of African Americans and people of Caribbean descent.54

  Many different factors led African Americans to break with soul food, including political, health, and cultural reasons. Some stopped eating soul food because they did not want to continue following the eating habits set by white slave owners (although, as this book has argued, soul food is the same general diet historically consumed by both black and white Southerners). Others stopped eating it because they were diagnosed with diabetes, hypertension, or cardiovascular disease. The more radical claimed serving soul food was an act of genocide because it was responsible for so many health problems in African American communities. Finally, some argued that breaking with soul food and eating like one’s African ancestors was an expression of black cultural consciousness. During the civil rights and black power movements, breaking away from soul food became another way of resisting the white man’s culture and returning to an idealized African culinary heritage. It was a return to a time when Africans ate darker whole grains, dark green leafy vegetables, and colorful fruits and nuts. In northern cities, politically rejecting soul food meant rejecting part of one’s African diasporic urban identity. And perhaps that is the reason why so many food rebels tried to develop healthier food eateries. They understood the close association between soul food and people of African descent with southern and Caribbean roots. The people and the traditions of the cuisine were too interconnected simply to disengage black people completely from soul food; it would have to be adapted to the new circumstances. I have tried argue throughout this book that African peoples have always creatively adapted their food to their new realities. They learned to cook with new crops and animals before and after the Atlantic slave trade. As people of African descent today learn more about diet, obesity, and risk factors for high blood pressure and diabetes, they will adapt again. The masses of African Americans will continue to adapt sou
l food, as they have done for centuries, rather than yield to a call for complete abstinence.

  EPILOGUE

  Desegregation, urban renewal programs, poor business practices, and the death of the original owners of some restaurants caused the closing of some community soul food eateries. There are still barbecue rib and chicken shacks in large cities and smaller African American communities across the country. Older, larger, more established soul food restaurants like Sylvia Woods’s in Harlem and Pascal’s in southwest Atlanta have expanded over time.

  Sylvia’s renovated its Harlem facility near 125th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard and built a room for catered events. These additions allowed the restaurant to stay in competition with Amy Ruth’s soul food restaurant, located south of Sylvia’s on Malcolm X Boulevard. Amy Ruth’s is an example of a newer upscale soul food restaurant opened in a gentrified section of Harlem catering to an ethnically mixed clientele. The restaurant’s Website and word of mouth attract a long line of customers on Sundays. People patiently wait outside for a seat at its Sunday brunch. In the South, a new Pascal’s opened in 2003 in an upscale building in the vicinity of the increasingly gentrified Atlanta University Center section of southwest Atlanta. Sylvia’s opened a second restaurant in an upscale space near the Georgia government buildings in downtown Atlanta. Following the tradition of Well’s in Harlem, recording artist Gladys Knight opened Gladys Knight’s Chicken Waffle in midtown Atlanta. Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and New York also have relatively new alternative restaurants that specialize in health-conscious soul food. Many of these restaurants are responding to the war against trans fats raged by food activists in cities like New York and Chicago. These activists have called for health departments to ban restaurants from using partially hydrogenated cooking oils, which contain trans fats that raise bad cholesterol levels and eventually cause clogged arteries and heart disease. The activists gained one of their greatest victories in the fall of 2006 when New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the “nation’s first major municipal ban on all but tiny amounts of artificial trans fats in restaurant cooking.”1