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
FIGURE 10.1 A Sunday morning at M & G Diner on West 125th Street, Harlem, New York. Photo taken by the author.
When I was finishing this book, I came across a Newsweek article entitled “Saving Soul Food.” The article reports that African American entrepreneurs, nutritionists, and pastors are “on a mission to improve African American diets, not by condemning their rich culinary heritage, but by reinventing time-honored recipes.” Chefs like Lindsey Williams, Sylvia Woods’s grandson, are publishing new health-conscious soul food cookbooks and opening up new restaurants with trendy healthy soul food menus.2
Chicago, St. Louis, Charleston, Tallahassee, Atlanta, and metropolitan Washington, D.C., have restaurants, juice bars, and delis run by Rabbi Ben Ammi, the spiritual leader of the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem movement that started in 1966. The predominately African American members of the movement are vegan.3 Their restaurants go by the name Soul Vegetarian, and they feature entrees made from nonmeat (mostly soy) and nondairy ingredients. They also sell fabulous nondairy ice cream in a variety of flavors. Another such vegetarian soul food restaurant is the Uptown Juice Bar, located on 125th Street in Harlem, just around the corner from Sylvia’s. This unique restaurant and bakery serves delicious non-meat, nondairy soul food as well as Caribbean dishes and baked goods made with soy, vegetables, fruits, and nuts.
It is not only eateries that have changed soul food; churches have as well. Progressive African American ministers are delivering sermons that challenge their parishioners to be better stewards over their bodies and are making an effort to serve healthier soul food at church-sponsored events. According to Newsweek, over two thousand churches have signed on to the National Cancer Institute’s Body and Soul program. “Church leaders pledge to include more fruits and veggies in their meals and to preach healthy eating.” The article goes on to say that the program in a sense champions “salvation, one fresh veggie at a time.”4
FIGURE 10.2 Manna’s Buffet and Catering Service, Harlem. Betty Parks and her family started Manna’s Buffet and Catering Service in 1984. Today Manna’s has two locations in Harlem and two in Brooklyn. This is a photo of the location at 2331 Street and Eighth Avenue in Harlem. Photo taken by the author.
The reform of soul food is happening on the home front as well. Admittedly, there is a greater concern with food reform in families exposed to information about healthy cooking and nutrition and where parents are college educated or well read. Still, many are making the change to a healthier form of soul food. I close with some personal stories of how some families have changed the way they prepare soul food to make it more heart healthy.
Yemaja Jubilee, originally from Charlotte County, Virginia, insists that her mother was obese because of her cooking style. Eventually, she died of complications commonly associated with obesity, such as diabetes. Jubilee’s grandmother died of similar complications, and her father had a heart attack that motivated him to change his eating habits. Her two brothers also suffered heart attacks, one of them twice. Jubilee thus had plenty of motivation to “change my ways.” Starting in the 1980s, she learned through trial and error in the kitchen that soul food could be reformed. “I really think soul food can be healthy because I have learned how to modify all of the recipes.”5
While living in Nashville, she fell into catering when she covered a party for a girlfriend after a contracted caterer backed out on short notice. Those who came to the party were so impressed with her healthy soul food dishes that she went into business. She makes seasoned collard greens with turkey instead of pork and has perfected the art of seasoning other vegetables, like cabbage, with herbs, spices, and some powdered soup mixes instead of pork. She uses soy and vegetable dairy substitutes, along with egg and sugar substitutes, to make macaroni and cheese, rice pudding, and sweet potato pie, “and it still comes out good,” argues Jubilee. In Virginia, she grew up eating pork and beans, cole slaw, and fried fish for dinner on Fridays. Now she sprays spots (a type of fish) and king fish with butter-flavored Pam, breads it with Jiffy corn bread mix, and then bakes in the oven; “it comes out crispy brown and you can’t tell it from fried fish,” she says. “My mother didn’t believe that, or my uncles. What happened was I took my uncle some fish, and this was in the country. He said, ‘Can’t nobody fix no fish, I know you can’t [without frying it].’ And I said to him, ‘Look and just wait.’” When he finally tasted the modified fish, she said that he couldn’t tell the difference between it and a typical Virginia Friday night fish fry.6
In the 1980s Lamenta Crouch’s husband was diagnosed with high blood pressure. As a result, the Prince Edward County, Virginia, native became very conscious of the foods she brought into the home and began to cook family meals low in both salt and animal fats. “We made some major changes and some subtle ones. For instance, we just took out all the red meat.” In addition, Crouch perfected what she calls “healthy fried chicken”: skinless chicken parts dipped in seasoned soy flour and then oven-baked with a little oil in a pan. After the chicken has browned, it is covered with aluminum foil and cooked for a few additional minutes. Crouch also learned how to make reformed collard greens by simmering them in a wok with olive oil, garlic, onion, and sea salt until they are tender. On the first Sunday of the month, however, when her family and friends come over, Crouch does “some down-home cooking.”7 Cardiologist Dr. Elijah Saunders recommends that people should enjoy soul food once in a while, the same way you would enjoy fine food when eating out. But the key is not to eat such rich food at home. Saunders says that he recognizes “that there is something special about [soul food] and that it is part of the cultural traditions of the South, and we [African American physicians] understand the emotional attachment to it. But you don’t want to make it a regular part of how you eat.”8 Healthy limitations on soul food consumption include eating it sparingly when traveling or visiting away from home, modifying recipes using heart-healthy ingredients, and using one of the many new soy meat substitutes, including imitation chicken and ribs.
Other healthy cooking suggestions include measuring out what you are consuming. “It’s more portion control than anything else,” says nutritionist Joan B. Lewis. Before you sit down to eat, decide how much you should eat, measure out your desired portion, and stick to your decision. “If they would get to the point where they would regulate their portions, they would be fine. But what you see is a lot of young people that just totally overeat. [They] eat all day long, and nothing that is good for them. . . a whole lot of fast food and a whole lot of junk food,” says Lewis. Make a decision to move beyond what Yemaja Jubilee calls the “sit and gobble lane” of salty, fatty, greasy, and sweet fast food. Cook more often using wholesome food. Lewis suggests that people make several meals over the weekend and refrigerate or freeze them for consumption later in the week.9
The National Council of Negro Women has provided some excellent tips for cooking health-conscious soul food in The Black Family Dinner Quilt Cookbook. This cookbook suggests cooking and baking with margarine or liquid vegetable oils such as canola oil, safflower oil, or olive oil instead of lard. Other instructions for heart-healthy meals include avoiding deep-frying, cooking vegetables with animal fat, and baking with lard or butter. Avoid seasoning with salt or using seasonings containing sodium. Instead, try products like Wiley’s Healthy Southern Classic soul food seasonings. Roast, bake, broil, grill, and stir-fry instead of deep-frying. Use smoked turkey, turkey bacon, and imitation soy meat products instead of ham hocks, fatback, and bacon to season greens. Remove most of the skin (which is primarily fat) from poultry before cooking. Eat more fiber-rich foods such as legumes, whole grain products, fruits and vegetables, brown rice, red potatoes, and whole wheat, spelt, or spinach pasta. Avoid organ meats as much as possible. Use olive oil and vinegar and vegetable-based mayonnaise dressings instead of dressings made with real mayonnaise. Eat soy or rice milk ice cream with zero cholesterol instead of high cholesterol ice cream.10
This book has attempted to explain how African American eating habits evolved before, during, and after slavery. It analyzed the world history of soul food, arguing that, like all cultures, African American culture is a hybrid. African American cookery originated in Africa, but Africans absorbed, in part, European, Asian, and Amerindian food cultures before their arrival in the Americas. Later, a hybridization of African foodways took place among the Africans that arrived in the Americas during the height of the slave trade (1701–1810). In the southern colonies of British North America, enslaved African cooks of various ethnicities gradually incorporated the food staples that were rationed to them by British, French, German, Scottish, and Irish masters. They also adapted their cookery to the food they could gather, grow, hunt, and fish in their new host regions. As two scholars have argued, “The history of any nation’s diet is the history of the nation itself. . . mapping episodes of colonialism and migration, trade and exploration, cultural exchange and boundary-marking.”11 Throughout I have tried to show that the origins of soul food are rooted in world history, specifically, the European colonization of the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade. In addition, the origin of soul food is embedded in slavery in the South, jim crow segregation after the abolition of slavery, and black nationalism. Perhaps most interesting is the declining influence of southern-based soul food with the proliferation of African-influenced Caribbean-based soul food restaurants in northern urban centers like New York City. For example, the first company featuring African-influenced cuisine to franchise itself successfully has not been a soul food take-out company but the Brooklyn-based Golden Krust, which features Caribbean fast food such as jerked chicken, oxtail, curried goat, and an array of meat and nonmeat patties, including one made from soy.
I agree with culinary writers Jim Harwood and Ed Callahan, who wrote in 1969, “There’s nothing secret or exclusive about Soul Food. . . . The Redman and poor White Southerner had an important share in its development, too. Not to mention any number of soldiers, explorers, settlers, traders and others of varied nationalities.”12 The central argument here is that the history of soul food is not quintessentially an African American history but a world history, with the contributions and creativity of Africans and African Americans at the center. You cannot talk about the origins of soul food without a discussion of the history of international travel within the Atlantic world and the cultural collaborations and clashes within that world. The second important point the book makes is that soul food took on many complex meanings in the 1960s, serving as a source of ethnic and family pride to some and as a reminder of slavery and nutritional miseducation to others. The health and fitness craze that started here in the United States has caused a minority of African Americans to move beyond soul food. Similar to the efforts of black power activists in the 1960s and 1970s, however, the message of critics of soul food and advocates of natural food diets has made few inroads in black communities. As I have discussed, soul food has been under attack but is still standing strong because it tastes good and is rooted deep in African American culture. Reforming soul food is in vogue, but not radical calls for its expulsion from African American restaurants, churches, and homes.