Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America

During the 1960s and 1970s several debates developed over soul food. Some African American intellectuals such as Amiri Baraka and Verta Mae Grosvenor argued that soul food was a unique part of black culture and therefore the intellectual capital of black folk. European American food critics like Craig Claiborne insisted that soul food was a southern regional food that belonged to southerners. And three groups of African Americans I call “food rebels” argued that soul food is nothing to be celebrated or guarded as our own because it was killing us. I argue that black Muslims, advocates of natural food diets, and university-educated African Americans have filled an important role neglected by medical professionals in influencing many African Americans to question the wisdom of eating traditional soul food.

Alternative diets to soul food, such as vegetarianism, have their roots in the dietary teachings of the Nation of Islam and advocates of natural food diets such as Alvenia M. Fulton and Dick Gregory. African Americans saw how the diets advocated by the Nation and naturalists improved people’s health and began investigating the role of nutrition in health. Some, like Marcellas Barksdale and Yemaja Jubilee, reduced or completely stopped their consumption of soul food. Barksdale says that he only eats it on special occasions because his doctor warned him that his heart and blood pressure could no longer take such rich food on a regular basis. Jubilee explains, “I had a lot of medical problems and used to weigh 238 lbs.” She argues it was because of the soul food: “I cooked it myself, just the way my mama taught me to cook it. I had clogged arteries, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and the doctor said I had to make a change!”¹

Before the 1970s most medical associations did not talk at any length about the health effects of the traditional American diet. Dr. Elijah Saunders, who was head of cardiology at Providence Hospital in Baltimore, insists, “The medical profession as a whole has not done very well at teaching doctors and medical students in training about nutrition.” Historically, nutrition has been one of the “most undertaught subjects” in medical school. In many places, the medical school curriculum still crowds out content on nutrition. It has only been since the late 1970s that the health care professions have realized “how important nutrition is.”² This coincides with the experiences of several people interviewed for this book. They stated that few medical professionals talked about the relationship between nutrition and health until the 1970s.

Joan B. Lewis is a member of the American Dietitian Association and a registered dietitian with more than forty years of experience. She has worked in hospitals in metropolitan New York and the District of Columbia, predominately with African American clients. She observed that before the 1970s most people paid little attention to what they ate unless physicians spoke to them about it.³ Clara Bullard Pittman says recommendations to exercise, watch what you eat, stop eating pork, and reduce your intake of sugar and salt, “you didn’t hear any of that in the 1960s and 1970s.” She adds that you also did not hear medical professionals talking about the alarming rates of high blood pressure and diabetes among African Americans.⁴ Lewis, born in 1935, says that, growing up, “We didn’t have a whole lot of sodas, we drank water or milk.” In addition, “everybody walked everywhere.” But in the 1970s it seemed like “everybody got a car,” and walking became the exception, not the rule. Many people drastically increased their portion sizes at the table while decreasing their daily physical activity. Before the 1990s doctors rarely talked about the need for more fiber in people’s diets or referred to childhood obesity as a national problem. “Schools took out the physical ed. programs, and everybody needed to do some exercise,” recalls Lewis.⁵

Dr. Rodney Ellis, who specializes in cases of obesity, agrees. African American southerners who have lived past the age of one hundred generally ate pesticide-free foods, walked a lot more, and did regular physical activity that kept their blood pressure low and their high-density lipoproteins (favorable cholesterol levels) up. Moreover, before World War II, people drove less and depended less on power tools to do manual labor like cutting wood, brush, and grass. In the rural societies that most southerners lived in, people did more physical activity, which reduced incidents of obesity, hypertension, and diabetes. In contrast, in post-1960s North America, in both urban and rural settings, Americans started getting much less physical activity. Classic soul food contributed to poor health because the consumption of animal fats clogged arteries. Foods high in saturated fats like lard-fried chicken “are just not good for you,” says Ellis. In addition, “classic soul food has a fair amount of salt in it. And chronic high amounts can cause hypertension.”⁶

Over the years, Joan B. Lewis has observed that “predominately black people have high blood pressure and hypertension, that’s the salt involved. And large numbers of African Americans have diabetes,” passed on to them genetically. “Remember now, high blood pressure leads to strokes and heart attacks. Diabetes leads to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and strokes and heart attacks. . . . And now we have a lot of black people that have what we call renal or kidney failure and my father had that, because his blood pressure was so high that it destroyed the kidney.” North Americans are historically more overweight than residents of any other nation in the world; African American eating habits are just as problematic as the eating habits of other ethnic groups within the United States. According to Lewis, historically the eating patterns that you see among most Americans including consuming “sugar, salt, fat, you know fatty products, a whole lot of fried stuff, a whole lot of pork products, a whole lot of fast food, no vegetables, no fruit, [and generally] no good wholesome things.” Lewis goes on to say that, over the last eight to ten years, the younger generation has “leaned heavily” on “vegetarian items. It was a blessing in disguise” because those that do are consuming less fat and reducing their chance of obesity and risk factors for high blood pressure and diabetes.⁷

In the 1970s there were a few African American physicians who spoke out against the soul food diet by publishing articles in Ebony magazine that called for food reform. For instance, Dr. Therman E. Evans was way ahead of his time in his understanding of the relationship between food and health. In March 1972 he wrote that, as African Americans, “We cannot continue to disregard what we eat as if our diet has no effect on our health status. In fact, what we eat is both directly and indirectly related to every major illness we know of, including heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, diabetes, and infectious diseases.” Evans observed that African Americans needed both more nutritious food and exercise.⁸ Five years later, Ebony published the article “Good Health Is a Family Affair: Good Nutrition, Exercise, Sleep, Physical Examinations, Etc.,” in its May 1977 issue.⁹ In this article, Dr. Keith W. Sehnert recommended the increased consumption of “raw fruits and vegetables because they add necessary vitamins and minerals and valuable bulk to your diet.” Moreover, Sehnert wanted African Americans to cook and bake with “polyunsaturated vegetable oils” instead of high-cholesterol saturated fats like butter and lard. He also championed the replacement of whole milk products with skimmed milk products and advised the consumption of only three eggs per week. As for meat, Sehnert believe it was much wiser to consume more fish, fowl, “beans, nuts, and new soya-meat extenders and substitutes. . . because they are lower in calories and fat than beef, lamb or pork.”¹⁰ A year after that, a Dr. Lemah of Meharry Medical College, an HBCU in Nashville, was interviewed for an article in Ebony that said African Americans needed to reduce the amount of refined carbohydrates in their diets. In different ways, all three physicians were calling for radical food reforms, or the transition to what Dr. Elijah Saunders of the University of Maryland Medical School calls “heart-healthy meals.”¹¹

Yet these reforms would not be easy. Dr. Saunders found that it was far easier to suggest changes than to implement them. For example, during his tenure as head of cardiology at Providence Hospital in Baltimore, Saunders remembers the battle he faced in getting the food service department to serve heart-healthy meals to his African American patients who were hospitalized for heart attacks and strokes. Moreover, Saunders could not persuade the hospital’s cafeteria to move beyond a typical soul food menu: “they voted me down,” he says. In contrast to the four doctors quoted, historically African American physicians have been resistant to reform the soul food diet because of the belief that to do so would make African Americans into “somebody else,” says Saunders.¹²

The silence of black doctors on nutrition left an opening filled by the Nation of Islam, college students exposed to alternative views of eating, and advocates of natural food diets. For almost twenty years, these three groups were the only ones within African American communities talking about the importance of diet and exercise. The Nation of Islam, for example, had no concerns about African Americans becoming something they were not. They argued that that had already happened during slavery: “Peas, collard greens, turnip greens, sweet potatoes and white potatoes are very cheaply raised foods [boldfaced in the original text],” said Elijah Muhammad. “The Southern slave masters used them to feed the slaves, and still advise the consumption of them.”¹³ Elijah Muhammad argued that African Americans learned a destructive culture from an oppressive white Christian power structure during slavery and that this included their traditional diet. The change of the African American diet was one of the first radical changes a person made after joining the Nation of Islam.

In the 1960s the Nation’s training program for new converts at its Mount Vernon temple in Westchester County included extensive teaching on nutrition, with particular emphasis on not eating pork. Convert Eugene Watts recalled receiving about eight weeks of diet and nutritional instruction, much of it in the form of taped lectures given by Elijah Muhammad on the subject.¹⁴ For many non-Muslims, the introduction to Nation’s teachings on eating came from Elijah Muhammad’s two-volume book How to Eat to Live, published in 1967 and 1972.

Despite the popularity of soul food in the 1960s and 1970s, food rebels like Elijah Muhammad had an impact in black communities. Yet there were no problems between food rebels like the members of the Nation of Islam and black nationalists like Amiri Baraka who advocated soul food as black folk’s cuisine. “I mean, look at Elijah Muhammad, there were a whole lot of Baptists that would never be Muslim, but they stopped eating pork,” says Dick Gregory.¹⁵

Many were familiar with the Nation’s swine restrictions, but Muhammad was also a staunch proponent of eating whole grains and opposed the consumption of processed foods like white rice, bread, and sugar. “Eat wheat—never white flour, which has been robbed of all its natural vitamins and proteins sold separately as cereals,” says Muhammad. “You know as well as I that the white race is a commercializing people and they do not worry about the lives they jeopardize so long as the dollar is safe. You might find yourself eating death if you follow them.”¹⁶ Muhammad theorized that blue-eyed white devils had conspired to use deadly white eating habits to eliminate blacks. Whites, he explained, promoted the consumption of unhealthy processed food and spicy and greasy food in order to weaken and eventually wear out black folk. “Muslim lore,” as one historian puts it, maintained that years of following white foodways were ultimately responsible for multiplying sickness and disease and severely lowering life expectancy in African American communities. The Nation argued that the white’s food conspiracy worked both to eradicate black people and to make white medical doctors and undertakers rich.¹⁷

Most likely, members of the Nation sold copies of How to Eat to Live the same way they sold the Nation of Islam’s paper The Final Call and its delicious and nutritious bean pies: by direct marketing on street corners and in businesses operated by its members. In African American communities in metropolitan New York as well as in other parts of the country, the Nation operated its own supermarkets, fish markets, and restaurants. Male members of the Nation also hawked merchandise at busy intersections. Some street vendors were sympathetic to the message of the Nation and contributed by selling literature and the recorded lectures of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X.

BEAN PIE RECIPE

2 cups navy beans (cooked)

1 stick butter

1 14-oz. can evaporated milk

4 eggs

1 tsp. nutmeg

1 tsp. cinnamon

2 tbsp. flour

2 cups sugar

2 tbsp. vanilla

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In electric blender, blend together beans, butter, milk, eggs, nutmeg, cinnamon, and flour for around two minutes on medium speed. Put mixture in a large mixing bowl. Mix in sugar and vanilla. Stir well. Pour into pie shells. Bake for around an hour until golden brown. Yields two to three pies.

Adapted from www.muhammadspeaks.com/Pie.html

Starting in 1954, Malcolm X and the members of Temple 7 were the face of the Nation of Islam’s message about food in metropolitan New York.¹⁸ The only African Americans he knew of “who had any sense of being very disciplined nutritionally would probably be the Muslims,” says Harlem native Roy Miller. “I think that Malcolm X personified that publicly,” Miller maintains. On many occasions, “he spoke very vigilantly about, ‘you don’t eat that pig,’ and all that sort of stuff.” In what he said and how he lived, Malcolm, says Miller, “made a lot of people conscious about what they were eating and being very careful about what you were eating.” Rudy Bradshaw, another Harlem native, had a brother who was very close to Malcolm. He said that if you went to a place to eat and ordered pork, “Malcolm would ridicule you in a joking way. . . he did that with [Harlem intellectuals] John Hendrik Clarke and Dr. Benyohagen [aka Dr. Ben].” He would remind them that the pig is the dirtiest animal on the farm and subsequently over time persuaded them and others to reform their eating traditions. In contrast to soul food restaurants, Black Muslim restaurants served beef and fish meals with brown rice, fresh vegetables, bean soup, and bean pies.¹⁹

The earliest challenges to soul food traditions in Westchester came from members of the Nation of Islam in the 1960s. Reginald Ward became a permanent fixture in Mount Vernon’s African American community. Speaking of the influence of the Nation in the city, he recalls that a number of people he knew became Muslims and reformed their eating habits. In fact, Louis Farrakhan, who assumed most of Malcolm’s responsibilities in metropolitan New York after Malcolm left the Nation in 1965, came to speak in Mount Vernon in the 1970s. Eugene Watts from Virginia was one of Ward’s friends who converted to Islam.²⁰

During the 1960s Eugene Watts operated a barbershop on Third Street in Mount Vernon. Next to his shop was a restaurant called Philly’s Bake and Take owned by a member of the Nation of Islam. The restaurant “did really really good” business, says Watts. “I still hear people, and this has been over fifteen years, talk about how they miss that restaurant.” The restaurant’s cook at one time was a “Sister Lana.” She also cooked for the Muslim convert and heavy-weight champion Muhammad Ali and “would go down to Harlem to Temple 7 and help them prepare food, and then come up here to Mount Vernon.” Her specialty, recalls Watts, was bean soup. “That was an important staple for Muslims, the great northern bean. And [Sister Lana] would fix it in such a way that people would be lined up out the door to get a cup of this soup. . . . These were regular [non-Muslim customers].” When people heard that Sister Lana was in town, they quickly made their way over to Third Street. After a while, Watts began attending the Nation’s Mount Vernon temple and eventually converted.²¹

After his conversion, Watts regularly played Nation of Islam audiocassette “tapes on how to eat” in his barbershop as a way of disseminating the teachings on food to his male customers. Watts recalls that in the 1960s the Nation had a major impact on black Mount Vernon, particularly on young African American males. There were also those who never converted but agreed with the Nation’s message on food reform. He insists there were plenty of sympathizers who would say, “I admire what you are doing and I have your back. I just can’t give up too much like you’re giving it up.” Watts goes on to say that, back then, if you went down to the Temple and showed an inability to sit still or sweated profusely, “the brothers would take you to the side and tell you that you were not eating the right stuff.”²²

Watts decided to become a vegetarian for health reasons shortly after converting to the Nation of Islam. “Afterwards I found out that my family had a history of high cholesterol and high blood pressure, a lot of medical problems associated with rich food.” Watts’s mother died at age thirty-seven of an aneurysm brought on by high blood pressure when he was a senior in high school.²³ Hypertension specialist Dr. Elijah Saunders confirms that the consumption of foods high in cholesterol and saturated fats leads to atherosclerosis, or cardiovascular disease, which is what causes heart attacks and brain aneurysms, both particularly prevalent among African Americans. Cholesterol and fat levels in the blood are directly related to diet and lifestyle. Saunders argues that “pork organs and extremities” such as chitlins and pigs’ feet are also very high in saturated fat and increase one’s risk factors for an aneurysm or heart attack.²⁴ Two nights before Eugene Watts’s mother died, she ate a large bowl of chitlins. Watts says his mother “loved chitlins, and she was not supposed to eat them, and a neighbor brought them over, saying ‘Ms. Watts, I fixed them just for you, you are going to love these chitlins.’” Once on the Nation’s eating regimen, Eugene Watts stopped eating beef and fish as well as the pork so beloved by his mother.²⁵

In 1962 the Nation of Islam claimed a membership of over a quarter of a million people. Elijah Muhammad sent Malcolm X, perhaps the Nation’s best evangelist in the 1950s, to organize new temples in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Atlanta. In New York, Malcolm and his assistants sought to draw in possible converts to the Nation of Islam by “‘fishing’ on those Harlem corners—on the fringe of the Nationalist meetings.” Of this activity, Malcolm X recalled that “everyone who was listening was interested in the revolution of the black race.” He also fished at “little evangelical storefront churches. . . . These congregations were usually Southern migrant people, usually older, who would go anywhere to hear what they called ‘good preaching.’” Yet there was also the offer of a soul food dinner. There were always members of the church “who were always putting out little signs announcing that inside they were selling fried chicken and chitlin’ dinners to raise some money.”²⁶

The Nation also fished among the black working class and underclass. Particular efforts were made to fish incarcerated African American men, and indeed many who converted to Islam did so while in prison. Malcolm found that most of the people he preached to believed what he had to say about racism in America and immorality and ignorance among African Americans. But in the words of Malcolm, “our strict moral code and discipline was what repelled them most.” He would explain to potential converts that, among other requirements, giving up “eating of the filthy pork or other injurious or unhealthful foods” was necessary if blacks were to move beyond the white man’s goal of keeping them “immoral, unclean, and ignorant.”²⁷ It was a lot easier to give up eating pork economically when you were in an institution and state officials provided you with three free meals a day. The economic reality for meat-eating African Americans living outside the controlled environment of prison walls was very different. Bobby Seale (originally from Texas) was the cofounder and designated cook of the “shotgun, rifle, and pistol-packing” Black Panther Party for Self-Defense of Oakland, California. He cooked affordable meals for the organization’s meetings in the early days of the party. “I cooked our meals of piles of spaghetti or [pork] neckbones and greens, and while we ate, sucking and shining our neckbones, I raised jokes about the Muslim’s organization not eating pork,” says Seale. He goes on say, “Our grudge was against the racist white power-structure,” not against ham hocks. It was a whole lot cheaper to buy a ham hock than other cuts of meat.²⁸ The Nation’s antiswine message hit people’s pocketbooks, but, more important, it challenged their traditions. Many met it with contempt, believing it to be foolishness because they had been raised on pork. For this reason, the Nation’s antiswine message had its greatest influence among younger folk without well-established traditions of their own.

Clara Bullard Pittman, born in 1948, observed that in the 1970s the Nation’s food reform message made virtually no impact on her older relatives who relocated from Pinehurst, Georgia, to St. Petersburg, Florida. “That age group, they were like, ‘No! We grew up on soul food, that’s our diet, and we are not going to stop. Pork has not killed me yet so I am going to keep eating it.’” In contrast, during the same period, Clara Bullard Pittman observed, “A lot of the young brothers” in northern California joining the Nation and reforming their eating habits, including no longer eating pork.²⁹

Joan B. Lewis made similar observations about metropolitan Washington, D.C., in the 1960s and 1970s. She remembered quite a few African American men who had been incarcerated and returned from prison as non-pork-eating members of the Nation. She and others living in the District of Columbia described a scene in which the presence of the Nation of Islam was very strong.³⁰ Dr. Rodney Ellis, a native Washingtonian, was a Howard University undergraduate in northwest Washington, D.C., between 1966 and 1970. Ellis, too, argues that a change in African American attitudes toward some soul food can be traced back to the 1960s and to activists like Dick Gregory and the antiswine teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the members of the Nation of Islam. For example, Ellis recalls, “I will never forget Muhammad Ali coming to campus about 1966, 1967, and making fun of black folks eating pigs’ feet. . . . You know everybody was enthralled by him, and he must have had a sellout crowd of people. . . . I remember him on two occasions talking about ‘sticky pigs’ feet, it sticks to your hands, it gets stuck together. You know what that is, that is pus, you’re eating pus!’ Man, that turned a whole lot of people, I think. . . to having some concerns.” Ellis goes on to say that, though many African American students at Howard may not have given up “bacon and ribs” after hearing Ali, they did leave the lecture reevaluating their eating habits and the wisdom of continuing to eat pigs’ feet and chitlins.³¹

Exposure to food rebels like Muhammad Ali and other members of the Nation of Islam led some African American undergraduates and graduate students to consider a radical break from traditional soul food, but others broke away after hearing a lecture on natural living from Dr. Alvenia M. Fulton (1907–1999) or Dick Gregory. Gregory says, “I don’t know anybody, other than Elijah Muhammad, and his was an organization, that had the ear of African Americans like [Dr. Fulton] did. [Elijah Muhammad] had it on a national level, she had it beginning in Chicago, then [her message] started reaching out more toward white folk when she would go to the conferences.” He adds, Dr. Fulton was “at the forefront” of what has became a trillion-dollar health and fitness movement. “She was very well respected by that whole white movement because they knew about her fasting knowledge, and in the black community” because her knowledge of herbs and nutrition was making sick people well.³²

In the 1960s the Playboy Club was the most famous in the country. Hefner caught Gregory’s show and in 1961 signed him to a three-year contract worth $250 a week. “After Hefner hired me, all kinds of things started to happen,” recalls Gregory. “I started to get press notices, the newspapers sent people by to review my act, and the columnists started quoting my jokes.” Meeting Martin Luther King, Jr., changed Gregory from a comedian to a civil rights activist. It was during the civil rights movement and Vietnam War that Gregory became one of the country’s leading nightclub comics, political satirists, and activists.³³

In an interview, I asked him how he became a vegetarian. He explained that one day, possibly during a civil rights march in the South, a sheriff kicked his wife, and he didn’t come to her defense. “I had to convince myself,” says Gregory, “that the reason that I didn’t do anything about it was because I was nonviolent.” He adds, “Then I said, ‘If thou shalt not kill,’ that should mean animals, too. So in 1963 I just decided I wasn’t going to eat anything else that had to be killed,” he explains. “I still drank a fifth of scotch a day and smoked four packs of cigarettes. So my becoming a vegetarian didn’t have anything to do with health reasons. And I didn’t even know how to spell it; I didn’t know what a vegetarian was.” But, after about eighteen months of being a vegetarian, his sinus trouble disappeared, and about six months after so did his ulcers. That “was the first time I realized that there was something about the food that they didn’t tell us about.”³⁴ Starting in 1967, even more enlightenment came when Gregory met Dr. Alvenia M. Fulton.

Fulton migrated to Chicago from Pulaski, Tennessee. In the 1950s she opened Fultonia’s, a combination health food store, restaurant, and herbal pharmacy at 65th and Eberhardt on Chicago’s South Side. When Fultonia’s started, it was a real oddity; it was only later that people embraced the message of natural living in the United States, especially in African American communities where soul food constituted a large part of local cultural traditions.³⁵ Fulton’s restaurant had a full menu that included soups, vegetarian chili, brown rice, vegetables, all varieties of fruit and vegetable juices, and whole grain breads and cakes. Fulton called her food, “soul food with a mission, and the mission is good health.”³⁶

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

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

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 soul food, as they have done for centuries, rather than yield to a call for complete abstinence.