Foodies Clan

With pop-ups like Honeysuckle, Black Feast, and the Vegan Hood Chefs, Black innovators engage with food for a greater purpose

Soul food and Southern food are undeniably rooted in the African-American experience, but Black food in America can’t be defined by just these two categories. The movements that mark the African diaspora mean that Black culinary influence in this country is much farther ranging: Enslaved Africans brought with them crops and agricultural skills, which they adapted to the American South; later, African Americans migrated north and west, taking the culinary traditions they developed in the South to these regions, shaping culinary styles across the country. More recently, immigrant communities from Africa and the Caribbean have brought ingredients and techniques to cities like New York and Miami, adding even greater diversity to the landscape of Black food in America.

Dinner series and events, characterized by their own ability to move from place to place, are one medium through which Black chefs, artists, and community organizers have centered the Black culinary experience and its roving nature. Across the country, this format, more so than any single restaurant, has been a wellspring for exploring what Black and African-American cuisine is and can be, introducing diners to new concepts, ingredients, and history while showcasing culture on the plate. Over the past few years, pop-ups, like Honeysuckle in New York; Black Feast in Portland, Oregon; the Vegan Hood Chefs in San Francisco; and others have exemplified the mutability of Black food, providing a variety of answers to the question: What is Black food in America?

During the pandemic, these projects might look different than they once did, or be placed on pause altogether, but they’re no less a jumping off point for discussions of Blackness in food. With Honeysuckle, Omar Tate has explored Black culture through food with intimate and elegant dinners and a particular focus on considering African-American cuisine outside of the South. Salimatu Amabebe started Black Feast in Portland, Oregon, to use food as a medium to celebrate Black art. Finally, Ronnishia Johnson and Rheema Calloway, the Vegan Hood Chefs, are community organizers making vegan soul food and bolstering the health of their San Francisco community in the process. While a brick-and-mortar hub for their work might be in the future for each, it’s the ideas they launched with pop-ups that make them a part of an ongoing legacy of Black innovators engaging with food for a greater purpose.

Honeysuckle

Neal Santos

Honeysuckle began as a New York City pop-up dinner series that, as Omar Tate put it in an essay on Eater, “explores the continuing narrative of the Black existence through food and storytelling.” During multicourse meals, Tate takes elements of African-American history and culture and puts them on the plate, like the homemade Kool-Aid that starts a meal, a nod to childhood and an acknowledgment of stigmas around Black food, or a “New York Oyster circa 1826,” a dish that references the story of a freed man who sold oysters that year; he makes the narrative of each course apparent through poetry and storytelling. Honeysuckle will eventually become a community center in West Philadelphia (it’s in fundraising stages) with the mission of claiming space for Black food in America. Currently, Tate is also the chef in residence at Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

Monica Burton: Can you tell me a bit about how Honeysuckle came to be?

Omar Tate: Honeysuckle is about three years old, but if you really want to quantify it, it is probably about 34 years old, which is how old I am. I’ve been cooking for 10 or 11 years as a chef, working in primarily French, Italian, Spanish, and all these Eurocentric kitchens at all sorts of levels. I’ve worked in Michelin-starred kitchens, I’ve worked at a bar, I’ve worked in so many different facets of service, but none of them spoke to my existence as a Black American. Even in the research phase and coming up with the concept of Honeysuckle, I’ve worked at restaurants that make Southern food, and I’m not Southern.

My great-grandparents’ generation moved to Philadelphia in 1929, so my family’s been here for three or four generations. In trying to pinpoint what [Honeysuckle] looked like, I had to remove everything that I thought that I learned from my education as a chef and really consider my upbringing — what I ate, what the evolution of those things were, where that food came from. The environment that I grew up in doesn’t show up culturally in a lot of spaces, not just in food; it’s not the kind of thing that people represent in art so much, at least not until very recently. I grew up in the hood, the ghetto, so the things that we ate are a direct reflection of that environment but also the policies that create a ghetto. That’s where Honeysuckle came from: to tell the several stories that are in the package when you unwrap the word “ghetto” or “hood” or “North” or “urban.”

You’ve drawn from history for some of your dishes, as in a dish of turkey neck over lima beans dusted with ash on a plate of smoking hay that referenced the 1985 MOVE bombing. How did that idea come to you?

There’s a strong consideration of myself and the world around me. In this specific case, I was born a year after the MOVE bombing. [But I saw] a documentary [about it] called Let the Fire Burn, which was the command made by the police commissioner on the ground [after the bombing]. When other officers were saying, “This fire is burning out of control,” they said, “Let the fire burn.” I latched on to that statement. There was another statement that was said from the bullhorn: “MOVE, this is America.” Obviously, it’s the MOVE organization, but also “move,” like “move out of the way.” Saying, “This is America” to me, that’s saying “You’re not American.” It’s saying, “We are America, and we’re going to make this America again by burning this place down.”

All of that created a sense of disregard and disrespect of humanity, regardless of whether or not they were Black — and not to say that they just so happen to be Black. This is the kind of thing that happens to Black people. I wanted to show that disregard aesthetically on the plate from the outside perception, but [also show] the interior with all the care and deliciousness and the beans being cooked the way they were — that internal piece is the human element, is the humanity part on that plate.

I use history as a tool, as colors, as material to tell stories that are both present and past. History is not our past; it’s always with us. Whether we acknowledge it or not is the question.

From a culinary standpoint, Southern food has certain traits. Do you think food of the northward migration can be distilled in a similar way, or is it solely based on your lived experience?

I usually point to soul food as that Northern part. Soul food doesn’t only exist in the North, but it is the food of the party, to me, the ones who can’t reach back home. That’s the experience that I think people are looking for from soul food: the grounding that it gives you. Soul food is delicious and amazing, but it doesn’t have the nuance and all of the characteristics that make up the multiple, varied experiences one can have with regional Southern cuisine.

Soul food finds itself represented in different ways, depending upon the locale and the places where those migrations landed. You’ll find different distinctions within the soul food canon, and oftentimes, those things include parts of other immigrant cuisines and experiences within that location.

If you were to go to Los Angeles, it’s not far-fetched to have a jazzed-up, soul-food version of a taco or tacos next to macaroni and cheese or something like that. The same can be said here in the Northeast with a huge injection of Italian. It’s not far-fetched to see people eating spaghetti with turkey meatballs. So it’s an amalgam of things with soul food being the nucleus, then grabbing from other cultures intermingling at the dinner table.

Do other elements of the African Diaspora pop up in your pop-up, or factor into your conception of Black food in America?

Not very many, and that was very intentional. The unique thing about Honeysuckle is that all of the context and the things built around the food make it a very uniquely Black experience, but you can’t categorize it — I wouldn’t categorize it — as a cuisine representative of people. It’s really food as a means to tell stories. I use French, West African, Italian techniques. I use anything that I have at my disposal to assert Blackness. That’s Honeysuckle in a nutshell.

What I do do is I intentionally use certain things, like okra powder to thicken sauces. I source intentionally from Black producers and farmers that I met in my travels and in my research. I would intentionally not use Eurocentric or French language when I was talking to the cooks that I was working with, like I wouldn’t use the term “mise en place.” That was a deep part of the deconstructions I had to endure to rebuild and recreate a framework that made sense for me that was Afrocentric and free.

What about a pop-up makes it the best medium for exploring these ideas?

It doesn’t have the restrictions of a brick-and-mortar space. I’m not paying rent, I’m not paying a lease, my labor cost is really low, our food cost is whatever I want it to be. I don’t have to make a profit to make sure it exists. Basically, I’m not beholden to capitalism to make this thing happen.

I like to look at it like how rappers make mixtapes. They’re not working with a label, they’re not paying into an institution. It is literally their words over beats, and they distribute it in the way that they want, which, again, kind of speaks to freedom. But I never wanted this to only be a pop-up. My goal was to assert this experience as valuable and put it on par with an experience that one could have at, like, a Blue Hill or at Osteria Francescana, or anything like that where chefs are delivering an experience that’s larger than the meal components and the dining experience itself.

How are you continuing the work that the pop-up started with your current projects and your community space?

The values of Honeysuckle still exist even without the pop-up: the value of Afrocentricity, the value of highlighting Black experiences, the value of sharing capital and being in community with other Black folks who are artisans or producers. All of that still exists, even in a pandemic world where I can’t do the pop-up like I used to do.

But what the pandemic has really done for me is broaden the scope of value of my work and how it can serve multiple needs within the community. It still exists in the professional realm, but with Black Americans or the Black population being my inspiration, I wanted to bring that back home and back down to earth, and learned that I could use all of those ideas around sourcing and growth in agriculture to serve the needs of my community and bring that economy into my community. And then I want to still also do pop-ups when it’s time to do so again, but make it a more accessible experience, as opposed to an artistic, ephemeral experience. Those experiences always have barriers. No matter how far I reached, I still felt like it was happening in an ivory tower.

Black Feast

Chelsea Kigano

Salimatu Amabebe’s Black Feast dinner parties were designed to create space at the table for Black people in Portland, Oregon, although they have since expanded to other cities. Each event was hosted by Black people and centers Black people as its audience for a four-course, vegan, gluten-free, and cane sugar-free meal themed around the work of a Black artist. During the pandemic, Black Feast has embarked on another project that celebrates and centers Black people with “Love Letters to Black Folks,” which sends desserts and care packages to anyone identifying as Black.

Jaya Saxena: Were you drawn to pop-ups as a format because they led to more creative freedom, or was there something about the traditional restaurant world that was off-putting or inaccessible to you?

Salimatu Amabebe: When I moved to Portland, I had just finished an artist residency in Berlin focusing on food, art, and ecology. What I really wanted to do was focus on merging food and art, and playing with the entire format of a sit-down dinner. Pop-ups are great because you can constantly shift the format, and you can play with new ideas, both in terms of the culinary experience and the sit-down dining experience. You can try something out, see what works, see what didn’t, and then your next event can incorporate those things that work and then try something different. I also liked getting to be able to try new recipes that were exciting to me, and just constantly breathing new energy and new life into the dining experience.

How do you think food winds up making people look at things like art, queerness, or Blackness differently?

My intention is to literally put these concepts and ideas on the table for people to discuss, think about, and process on their own, to the extent that they want to. There’s something really approachable about the dining table; it feels like people are more comfortable. A lot of what we’re focusing on with Black Feast is creating a space that centers Black people, but is also open to everyone. That experience of being a white person in that space, from what I’ve heard, is somewhat uncomfortable, but also you get to eat really delicious food.

It’s playing with that discomfort, and then also nourishing people and allowing people to be uncomfortable. It’s okay to be uncomfortable in a space that isn’t designed for you, isn’t meant for you as a white person. It’s important for white people to know that experience. Simultaneously, it’s really important for Black people to have all of these spaces that center us, center our community, and make us a priority.

Are there things that you learned while doing Black Feast that you didn’t necessarily anticipate?

One of my white friends said that she needed to tread lightly in that space. We’re not interested in equating Black experiences to white experiences. We’re not interested in cosplaying what it is like to be a Black person. That’s not the goal at all. But I think a side effect of centering Black folks, and centering Black community, in an event is that non-Black people are also going to have to contend with their own role in all of that. [The idea of] treading lightly, part of being hyper-aware of yourself is an experience that Black people have constantly — being unsure, [wondering] “Is this really for me?” or knowing that it’s not for me and yet choosing to purchase a plate in it anyway.

You’re talking about not wanting to play into the stereotypes of the Black experience, and you’re cooking food that is vegan, gluten-free, and cane sugar-free. I think unfortunately, a mainstream assumption about Black food in America is that it’s not vegan. What are your thoughts on expanding the definition of what Black food is, or why that assumption is wrong to begin with?

Black food is something that is still being defined, and will probably be defined and redefined forever. Black American, Southern cuisine, or soul food, is probably known for not being super vegan-friendly, but also, there are a lot of plant-based soul food eateries. That’s becoming more and more popular as we’re recognizing how many people have dietary restrictions. I’m interested in making food that a lot of people can eat. It would be a lot easier if I didn’t try to cater to a lot of different dietary restrictions, but those are also all of my dietary restrictions. If I’m making food for other people, it would be great if I could also eat it.

For Black Feast, all of this food is really about the art. That practice of creating a menu becomes somewhat spiritual and nebulous, and this game of free association. What sticks out from this work? What resonates with me personally? How do I see this reflected in food? How is this reflected in flavor and texture? That is something that transcends categorization in terms of what the roots are for this cuisine.

How do you want to keep using this format in the future?

I’m a Virgo with way too much Leo in their chart with the energy I’m bringing. I’m full of plans but also completely unreasonable. What I’m dreaming about right now is having a permanent space for Black Feast. Having a commercial kitchen, storefront retail so people can come into a space with an outdoor dining area, and also having a residency space so we can support artists in their artistic practice. I definitely see a multidisciplinary space for Black Feast. I would love to own a piece of property for Black Feast.

I want to create something that I can pass on to younger generations. Black Feast is not about centering me or my work. It’s about creating the space and freedom, something that I can leave, and someday that other people who are younger and smarter than me can take over. I have things that I want to do in my life, too, that go beyond Black Feast, but I think this type of work is something that I will always be involved in. These kinds of mutual aid projects are something that I want to keep doing until I am dead.

Vegan Hood Chefs

Michelle K. Min

Three years ago, Ronnishia Johnson and Rheema Calloway started serving vegan soul food under the moniker the Vegan Hood Chefs in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood. Their vegan versions of dishes like mac and cheese and fried chicken have been a hit, and their repertoire of dishes keeps expanding. But Johnson and Calloway are community organizers first, and their pop-up has a larger mission: to increase health education and access to healthy food for disenfranchised communities. Before the pandemic, they served their food at large events, but these days, they keep the pop-up going with weekly deliveries throughout the Bay Area.

Elazar Sontag: I would love it if you could tell me a little bit about your pop-up and what it is that you do.

Rheema Calloway: We like to say that the community chose us because we are community organizers by trade. Some of the work that we have done in the community around food justice has informed the way that we are now. We started doing pop-ups, basically trying to educate the community around the food disparities that exist in San Francisco. We both come from communities that are considered food deserts: We like to call it “food apartheid” because it’s very intentional that our communities have a lack of access to healthy food options. We’ve been able to broadly touch our community and introduce them to people who have healed themselves through eating healthy foods, and we started campaigns in the community around healing the hood.

Food has been something that you’ve thought about as part of social justice and part of finding security in your community, but when did that translate into actually starting the Vegan Hood Chefs? When did it become clear that that was actually at the center of your work, not just at the periphery?

Ronnishia Johnson: In 2017, I started an Instagram highlighting our personal food transition because, as we’re doing all this organizing, we figured that if you transform the way that you eat, it starts to transform other areas of your life. We were on a personal journey around how we were eating, and then Instagram became super popular, and we created a page called the Vegan Hood Chefs.

It was never any intention to be a business. That’s the crazy part about it, and that’s why Rheema says that the community chose us. We had an Instagram page, and it started to get a very small following, and one of our friends had an event and the chef backed out and she was like, “I know you aren’t professionals, but would you mind doing an event for me?” At the time, we had a partner, my cousin who was in culinary school. So, I was like, “Well, let’s just try it! Why not?” For our first event, we cooked for 200 people, and it was so popular that, ever since then, it has been in demand. We never thought at all that this was going to be a business, but after that first event, we were like, “Okay, we’re really on to something.”

The portrayal of veganism in mainstream media tends to be overwhelmingly white, but there’s nothing inherently white about veganism, and it’s central, in so many ways, to other cultures. As you were getting into vegan cooking, but also sticking with soul food, how did your vision and understanding of veganism as part of Black food culture grow or develop?

RJ: It’s empowering. This is a huge part of who we are — merging the food with our culture. There are a lot of myths, especially growing up in our communities, that veganism is not for Black people. Although what we feel comfortable cooking is soul food, we also have traveled to a lot of different places as well. As two girls from the hood, we went to Jamaica during this process of building the Vegan Hood Chefs, we went to Panama, we went to all of these different places.

Traveling outside of our neighborhood broadened our horizons of how connected the diaspora of Africa and people from Africa are. There were people who looked like us who didn’t necessarily speak the same language. Although the culture isn’t the same, you will see many similarities in the music or the way people look, the style of dance, and, in particular, the food. For example, a lot of Black Americans make jambalaya, and jambalaya is very, very similar to dishes like jollof rice or paella.

When we went to Jamaica and came back, we made an intention to go to different restaurants throughout San Francisco to try different foods because, up in the hood, we weren’t exposed to that at all. It really was an aha moment, knowing that plants had been a traditional diet for a lot of us. We tend to talk about soul food around all of the fried stuff, and that has been a direct reflection of our oppression: the idea of having the scraps and being able to turn them into something beautiful. But you will also see that with a lot of plants and our connection to a lot of the plant-based foods. We want to use our food as a conversation piece to debunk the myth that veganism is not something that is connected to our culture when it really is.

As you planned out your menu and moved forward in this project, were there certain challenges that you two faced in adapting these traditional soul food dishes to be vegan but also feel familiar to your customer base? What was that process like?

RC: It’s mostly in the seasonings. We were able to take some of our traditional meals that our grandmas made, and did a lot of research around what vegetables would take that consistency. For chicken, we fell in love with jackfruit. We went through the traditional practice of frying it or cooking it like our grandmothers would and then started to learn more about different techniques like using spelt flour or chickpea flour. Then, we focused on using our traditional seasonings but finding different fresh herbs to season our foods. It’s a lot of trial and error, but we were basically taking staple meals that we would eat at home and figuring out ways to transform them into healthier alternatives.

RJ: People often want us to cook fast food, and our whole goal and our mission is to make sure that we can cook food that is good but that is also still nourishing for the soul. That’s challenging because comfort food is great, but we want to make sure that we continue to brand ourselves in a way where people know that if you need something that is healthy, that you can come to us.

Who are you feeding these days?

RC: Recently, we’ve had a lot of vegan folks, but in the beginning, it was a lot of people who were interested in trying something new and on that journey of self-exploration and trying to heal themselves, folks who have had some health scares. A lot of the people that we’ve touched have been people that are not vegan and just wanted to come in to see what it was about.

RJ: Most of this is transitional vegan. People are like, “I’m trying” or “This is my first time eating vegan food.” Then, we’ll see them come back as repeat customers.

What are your plans for the future?

RJ: Our goal this year is to use our blog and our YouTube to do more online recipes along with dropping our cookbook. We have our signature sauces that we would always use for our po’ boys that we have now bottled as a product. We want to saturate the market as much as we can around providing healthy food options.

We also started a partnership with a young man called Cat Fitness to put on what we call “Heal the Hood.” We visited three different communities — the Bayview, West Oakland, and Richmond — where we partnered with community gardens and gave away produce and also had a lot of speakers talk about health and plant-based eating, and we gave away 200 to 300 meals to the community. We recently made our first partnership with a school — Aspire Public Schools — where we did an online version of that. We hope to get more grant funding and support to be able to do that piece as well this year.

Your work is still intersectional in providing for the community. Are there ways in which being a pop-up and maybe being a little bit more fluid than a brick-and-mortar has actually allowed you to explore more arenas than if you had started as a more traditional restaurant space?

RJ: People who have been following us for a long time are like, “When are you going to open up a restaurant?” But if we had walked in and opened up a restaurant, we probably would have limited ourselves in many different ways in terms of who we can reach. When we did our sauce orders, we serviced almost every state. So much of our community engagement is around who we are, and it’s missing in the conversation around veganism.

People are happy to support Black vegan businesses, but we’re super overt around saying, “This is for the community, by the community, for us by us.” Having a pop-up model has allowed us to go to different communities and talk about who we are and have more flexibility to go into people’s homes or provide health education. If we were in a brick-and-mortar, we would, honestly, just be there every day, just serving meals.

Lead image photo credits: Klaus Vedfelt, Vegar Abelsens, Evergreen Planet via Getty Images

Malinda Russell’s “A Domestic Cookbook” offers more than culinary advice. It also gives clear attribution to figures who are typically erased or lost to history.

In 1866, Malinda Russell self-published A Domestic Cookbook: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen. The book holds the distinction of being the first known, cookbook published by an African American, and the first book to offer culinary advice by an African-American woman (The House Servant’s Directory by Robert Roberts and Never Let People Be Kept Waiting, a hotel management textbook by Tunis G. Campbell, precede it). But it’s remarkable for other reasons, too. Russell published it as a free woman living in Paw Paw, Michigan, as a fundraising effort to return to Tennessee, where she was born and raised. As Toni Tipton-Martin describes in her 2015 book The Jemima Code, the book concentrates on baking, with recipes like gingerbread and cream cake (“one and a half cup sugar, two cups sour cream, two cups flour, one or two eggs, one teaspoon soda; flavor with lemon”), but there are also instructions for savory dishes like chicken soup and onion custard as well as methods for preparing household items like cologne and shampoo.

More than its recipes, though, which showcase deep knowledge of technique and a range of culinary influences, A Domestic Cookbook is notable for the way in which Russell presents her knowledge. The book opens with “A Short History of the Author.” There, she gives an overview of her trajectory: After a thwarted plan to emigrate to Liberia, she wound up as a cook and lady’s companion in Lynchburg, Virginia. She married, and four years later her husband died, leaving her to raise a disabled son. After returning to Tennessee, she ran a boarding house and pastry shop for eight years before being forced to flee to Michigan when she was robbed and threatened.

It’s in this “short history” that Russell also acknowledges all of the cooks who helped hone her kitchen skills and thus contributed to the book’s publication. This includes mention of the cookbooks she’s studied, like The Virginia House-Wife by Mary Randolph, published in 1824 and thought of as the first regional American cookbook (The Kentucky Housewife by and The Carolina Housewife, other 19th-century explorations of Southern food from white women, would follow). Russell also describes her tutelage under Fanny Steward, a Black cook, giving clear attribution when the roles of such figures are typically erased or lost to history.

Russell herself was nearly one of those names — A Domestic Cookbook was only brought to light when cookbook collector Jan Longone stumbled across a copy in the early aughts, publishing a facsimile in 2007; in the years prior, Abby Fisher’s 1881 cookbook What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking was thought to be the first published cookbook by an African-American woman. And the work to lift up the contributions of African Americans in the the history of American cooking continues more than 150 years after the publication of A Domestic Cookbook with books like The Jemima Code and, more recently, The Rise, which pushes back against the erasure of Black authorship by showcasing excellence in cooking from across the African diaspora. Here, Tipton-Martin, the editor-in-chief of Cook’s Country, and The Rise co-author and food journalist Osayi Endolyn consider Russell’s legacy.

Monica Burton: How did you come to learn about Malinda Russell?

Osayi Endolyn: Well, my answer is easy because I learned from Toni.

Toni Tipton-Martin: That’s really cool. I learned about Malinda Russell at [cookbook author] Nathalie Dupree’s house. Many years ago, I was involved in a program with the College of Charleston and visited Nathalie’s home afterward. She had arranged for me to meet with [cookbook collectors and curators] Jan and Dan Longone, who had just gotten access to a copy of the book. They invited me to be part of the research team and, ultimately, to be the one that introduced her to the world.

Did you have any expectations around what the content of A Domestic Cookbook would be?

TTM: Abby Fisher was the book that we originally all assumed was the first African-American book, so she set the standard for the expectation of the time period. What Malinda Russell did was exceed that, not only by being the actual first but by including so much attribution, which is important to me as a journalist to focus on sourcing. She lets us know who trained her, she leaves a record of her training and basically establishes her pedigree.

OE: I’m certainly nowhere near as studied on the topic of Malinda Russell as Toni, but I’m interested in what that reveals to us about how much we’re still learning. I feel like when you learn something like this, you’re just like, what else have we missed? What else was erased and hidden from view or just undervalued?

It’s exceptional for me in terms of the cues that you can take from decisions that she made, like acknowledging her peers and people whose names would have some kind of meaning for her audience. And we still do that, in our book acknowledgments and dedications, these days, but that tells us something about the kinds of access and ideas of power. It’s really easy to truncate and make general what people’s experiences were during this period. This shows that there were many, many different ways of navigating being a Black person cooking professionally — a Black woman cooking professionally.

TTM: In terms of recipe development, one of the important cues, as Osayi mentioned, is her expertise in baking. This is important because, up to this point, we are being told that African-American women were not responsible for baking because that was where the intellect of cooking resided, because of its dependency on chemistry and the knowledge of leavening and all of the scientific variables — very much like the NFL used to say that Black men couldn’t be the quarterback.

A lot of that early writing misrepresented African-American knowledge in the sphere of baking, and [Russell] really does a terrific job undercutting that because she places so much emphasis on the baked goods that come out of her bakery. She identifies the fact that she’s an entrepreneur and has had not only a boarding house, but a bakery.

Can you trace her legacy and her influence through history?

TTM: There’s a subtlety embedded within Black culture that we are great bakers: the hot roll mix that was created under Lucille Bishop Smith and later adopted by Pillsbury or the mentions of Bisquick and the [Black] anonymous, trained chef that spurred that idea.

The fact is that Black baking persists to this day. We all have a grandmother or an auntie who makes the best rolls. She holds that knowledge. But was it spoken and formalized in books or in other mechanisms that society deems the valuable way to transfer knowledge? Not necessarily, but in our own traditions, baking, for sure, conveys through generations.

Courtesy of MOFAD

How do you think we should think of Malinda Russell as a figure in culinary history? It’s still not a name that most people know.

OE: We want to make familiar everyone who’s a part of this history who simply hasn’t gotten their due. We can’t do that enough. I know people from Louisiana who don’t know who Leah Chase is or was. So, I feel like we have a lot of work to do. I would like to see her celebrated more and efforts to imagine her life, or put in context her work, more clearly parsed out.

I read in this article recently about how the intention of domestic labor is to render it invisible. I’m paraphrasing that quote, but if you dusted a shelf, there’s no evidence that you did it, that you took the time. It’s just a clean shelf. There’s no trace of the labor that was done. I was reading this in context with what’s happening right now in many households, where men are being forced to be domestic in a way that women have almost always had to confront. Many men are doing that for the first time, and it’s actually resulting in a lot of abuse and chaos in households throughout the world.

We don’t have a framework in which Malinda Russell can really hold court because we still undermine the very arena of work in which she operated. You have to do the individual recognition at the same time that you’re addressing these huge lapses in our society where we don’t want to recognize that expertise and effort because, if we did, then we would have to change how you value it. We don’t want to do that.

TTM: That is so true, and I’m experiencing that now making this transition into magazine leadership and functioning in a space where the precision of French-classic technique has been the bar of success. It’s established that that’s where the knowledge is, in the formalized training of what started as domestic science, and now we think of it as just culinary academy work. Black people were left out of that conversation, and that’s why their cookbooks matter so much, because there was no other evidence that they could function in the same capacity as professionals.

Once food society decided to draw this hard line between home cooking and what is taught at academy and domestic-food-science schools and the Boston Cooking School... once we had that division happening, then the default was to say, “The thing that those Black women do isn’t really rising to the level of what the rest of us professionals do,” and that has persisted.

Now fast-forward, and everyone’s talking about the aroma in their grandmother’s kitchen as the inspiration for them becoming professional chefs. It’s like, Jesus, every time we try to make a step forward, you move the bar. So that’s why I am just so awed by Malinda Russell as being the first [African-American] cookbook, going so far back in the midst of the domestic science evolution or revolution of the home, and the embedded areas of agency that she claims. There are numerous spaces that she occupies for us.

Do you see a future in which we do recognize the domestic arena as valuable as it should be? Are we getting there?

TTM: The Jemima Code certainly opened the door for that, but what Osayi has accomplished with The Rise is the next phase. It is drawing from anonymity some people that have, maybe, a social media presence, but they aren’t on that big, giant food-industry stage yet, and putting them side by side with those of us that have been around for a while now.

OE: I think it’s happening and, as Toni said, part of that is the zeitgeist that we’re in, there are just tools that we have now that weren’t available 150 to 200 years ago that allow some easier access. But even within something like social media, you still have a lot of Black figures who have trouble getting verified, which is something that’s been discussed a lot. So you still have these constraints, even within these new opportunities.

You have people who are telling their own stories. I saw recently that Howard Conyers is self-publishing a book about the history of Black people in barbecue. You have people saying that this oral tradition that we’re part of is very important and that will remain, but how you keep something in the conversation in this society is writing it down. It’s not the only way, but it is the way that we have become accustomed to valuing and being able to reference as evidence of something.

The self-authored stories, increased opportunities for people to document their own work in different forms of media — that’s all happening. But I also think that there is a push that is exacerbated by the effects of COVID-19 on people who work in the food world and in service. We are pressuring these systems that have been part of the oppression of Black people, and a lot of these outbursts we’re seeing, these violent outbursts, are in response to this pressure mounting. You feel the energy shifting. I want to say that I hope that day is coming. I just don’t know what timeline we’re on at all because it’s already, like, centuries late, as far as I’m concerned.

TTM: I’m cynical enough and have been around long enough to be fatigued as well, but also to understand that the system has a way of springing back. So every time there’s Black advancement, you get Rosewood [the 1926 massacre and destruction of a Black town]. Or, if you get a Black president — we all know what you get after that. I’m excited to see the pushback and the bursts and the claiming of identity and self-publishing, but we function within a system that knows how to continue to exist the way it always did, by promoting the few and continuing the marginalization.

I don’t want to speak those words out into the ether and be the dream-killer for the next generation, especially since I was so eager, using my work to disrupt the system, to create those opportunities for the next generation. But I also want to encourage everyone to be careful. As Osayi said, we’re still functioning within a certain kind of system. That system, right now, values the written word. That doesn’t mean our oral traditions don’t matter, and we shouldn’t value them, and it doesn’t mean that having a great social media platform doesn’t matter. But if the system says publishing is it, we have to decide if we’re going to play in that arena or not.

And when it comes to the history that we preserve, it’s the stuff that we can see and that was written down, like those early cookbooks.

OE: Part of it gets lost. I think about the formalization of jazz education. There was a time when you didn’t learn that stuff in college. You weren’t at Berklee School of Music, you weren’t at USC, you were in a band in school, then you got hired on someone else’s band, and you learned that way, or you studied under someone, and they say, “You’re an apprentice,” and then you went home to practice. It was one-on-one and lots of storytelling and the opportunity to engage directly out of a creation of music, not out of creating a curriculum.

We’ve done that a lot with food, but even still, you don’t know a chef comes from a certain tutelage (to use that Malinda Russell word) unless you know that chef, unless you practiced where they cooked and who was at that restaurant at that time. It’s all still an oral history in many ways, in the ways that matter to the people doing the work. I hear stories about Darryl Evans from Duane Nutter, even though Darryl Evans has been passed for a long time and I never met him, but I know what he meant to Atlanta chefs because of people like Duane. That’s not really written about. It’s just part of a conversation.

History is valuable and it’s important, but this culture has really forced some of these styles and these traditions to move in other places, and sometimes that ends up deracinating it even further from the people who helped originate it. The same thing is happening in jazz. Now, you have to pay $50,000 a year to learn this music that you were getting for free and getting paid to create. It’s wild. It’s capitalism.

TTM: It’s absolutely true. And you can see it in the word choices that are used, when we’re talking about the precision of language and food technique and [how] what Darryl knew as a chef is transcribed as “making gravy at home.” I just love that as an example: To say that we’re all talking about making a French classic sauce and bechamel and beyond that, we’re talking about roux-making. But when we’re talking about the Black cook, suddenly, somehow, that’s only gravy. It’s not one of the fine dining mother sauces.

If a grandmother is talking about putting on a pot of beans, she’s making a stock. And chefs put a lot of effort into that, from the roasting of the bones to what vegetables they throw into the pot to how high they boil or not boil. What’s the fire under the pot? How does it simmer, depending on what you’re trying to extract from the bones? And so on.

There’s all of that nuance that’s embedded in the knowledge. Both chefs Nutter and Evans know those techniques inherently because they do the work. But how it’s observed and recorded is very different, depending upon the sphere that they’re functioning in. And that’s why it’s been important to me to not dilute the cultural aspect and importance of gravy. Gravy matters to us, too. I don’t want to over-chef-ify Grandma’s home cooking, but I want to give her the props that she deserves for making a French sauce.

And it’s a very nuanced line that we’re navigating. Are you diluting the original mother-culture food? Everyone keeps asking us, “Well, then what is true African-American cooking?” The hyphenated version of everything else? African American, German American, Spanish American? Well, what is that now, for us? Because there is a time gap, an experience gap where we didn’t own our own food in the ways that other immigrant communities did. We lost control of the way we would depict what we were bringing from West Africa and the Caribbean. So, now, it’s all lost in this mish-mash of what is Southern and what is American, whereas there are still some strains of Italian culture that you can still see in their food, even if it did, in some ways, get reduced to Spaghetti-Os. That’s a challenge for us — the need to legitimize, in a broader sense, what we have accomplished without feeling like it got whitewashed somehow.

I feel like we’ve covered a lot of ground, but I’d like to know, what do you think people should know about Malinda Russell, aside from the fact of her being the first African-American cookbook author? Are there any biographical elements to her story that should be more widely considered?

TTM: She was a single mother. Here was a woman who was existing in a slave society, who managed to save money and create a business and try to care for a handicapped child. I think that is so inspirational for us on a personal level, for the everyday person that does not know about her or about cooking and has no interest in cooking.

My [forthcoming] memoir is looking at a dozen of these authors through the values that they offer us beyond the kitchen. It uses the kitchen to tell their values because that’s where they preached their gospel, but they are social values that we all hold dear. In her case, the short version is she was a working, single mother with a handicapped child working outside the home, and many women in our community served in that way.

OE: I would suggest that as we learn about people like Malinda Russell, we think about all the ones that are standing as silhouettes around her. Maybe we’ll know who they are one day, most of them we won’t, but we know that for every single story we hear, you just have to imagine across so many different cities and moments in time and just the completely inextricable way that Black people were embedded at every aspect of society in this country. We’ve always been there, but stories like Malinda’s give us permission to lock into that even more.

TTM: Someone wiser than I posted on Twitter in the days following the removal of Aunt Jemima from the package by Quaker that the rationale was we don’t need any more singular Aunt Jemimas to fetishize because we have The Jemima Code. And I don’t mean to keep making this about my work. I’ve intentionally made this work broader so that what Osayi just described can happen. Anyone can approach it, see a story that resonates for them, and then go hunt down all the other people that this one author stands in the gap on behalf of.

But what this Twitter follower said was, ‘Now, we have The Jemima Code.’ There are real people — at least 400 of them that we know of — that can be the catalyst for other research, and we don’t have to resort to, with all due respect, making Edna Lewis the next version of the fetishized Black woman. And then Leah Chase will come after her. And then Jessica B. Harris and me somehow.

So what do we do to make sure that, as we are talking about equity, we’re looking at African Americans and our participation, as Osayi said, in so many other spheres? I’m not suggesting that Edna Lewis hasn’t earned every accolade, but it places so much emphasis on just the one, and that makes us seem like anomalies, and we aren’t that.

Lead image photo credits: NYPL Digital Collections, MOFAD, Getty Images

Racial discrimination has long contributed to the steady decline of Black-owned farms in America, but a movement to grow those numbers may soon be bolstered by real support

African-American farmers are disappearing.

The legacy of structural inequality has steadily depleted their ranks. For nearly a century, racial discrimination in agriculture, exclusion from federal relief programs, and laws that preyed upon the economically disadvantaged have slashed the number of Black farmers in America from the nearly 1 million who farmed in 1920 to fewer than 50,000 today. This systemic dispossession of acreage and wealth makes farms like Julius Tillery’s in Northampton County, North Carolina, increasingly scarce.

Born into freedom in 1871, Tillery’s great-great-grandfather became the first farm owner in his family. Hog farming in North Carolina dates back to Colonial times, so the farm included pigs from the outset as well as crops like cotton, soybeans, peanuts, and corn. Across generations, the family resisted “this notion of moving away from farming to make more money in town… or wanting to get a more white-collar job,” says Tillery, who, as the North Carolina state coordinator for the Black Family Land Trust, helps African Americans preserve their land, pursue land ownership, and farm sustainably. “My dad grew up farming, and his dad was farming, and my great-grandfather farmed, so we’ve always stayed in the business.”

But for Tillery, the past year in agriculture has run the gamut “from extremely high highs to some low lows.” His company Black Cotton, which sells cotton jewelry, accessories, and home decor, garnered unprecedented attention following the calls to support Black businesses in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests. But shipping delays, supply shortages, and the need to suspend travel to vendor markets to avoid contracting COVID-19 cost him opportunities to expand his clientele, sell more goods, and showcase his products to new audiences. To enforce social distancing, Tillery also hired fewer farmworkers last year. Although he and his father planted what they could, a larger team could have planted more crops, which, in addition to cotton, include soybeans and green leafy vegetables on 125 acres. Tillery recently lamented that he was “land rich but cash poor.”

Although farming can be a thankless industry, Tillery contends that the hard work is worth it. “It takes sacrifice to really be able to hold on to land,” he says.

For a once-enslaved people forced to work the land of their oppressors, landownership has always symbolized freedom. Black farm owners argue that possessing land enables them to be their own boss, grow their own food, and live on property they control. Historically, farming catapulted some African Americans squarely into the middle class, including jazz legend Miles Davis, a farmer’s son. And during the civil rights movement, Black farm owners allowed activists to use their properties to organize; they often fought for racial equality themselves.

Today, achieving autonomy though farmland acquisition is an experience familiar to few African Americans. White landowners possess 98 percent of all farmland, and 95 percent of farmers are white, according to a report from the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC). The events of the past year have only made things more difficult. Through 2020, Black farmers have fought to retain their farmland amid discrimination from the federal government, mass commercialization of agriculture, racial violence, economic instability, and, now, a pandemic.

At the start of 2020, the United States agriculture industry was still reeling from the effects of former President Donald Trump’s 2018 trade war with China. After Trump raised tariffs on Chinese imports, China responded with retaliatory tariffs on the U.S.’s agricultural exports, which caused the cost of American agricultural commodities to drop and led to a decline in soybeans and other exports. These developments, along with higher farm machinery costs as equipment grows larger and more technologically advanced, reduced net farm income by 16 percent during the trade war’s first year.

Courtesy of Julius Tillery

All kinds of American farmers felt the impact of the revenge tariffs, but when the pandemic hit — causing global shutdowns that evaporated consumer bases and disrupting the food supply chain — Black farmers in particular lacked a safety net. According to a report from the Counter, white business owners received 99.5 percent of the subsidies designed to help farmers survive the trade war. And although Trump handed out record subsidies to help farmers rebound from COVID-19, African Americans in agriculture largely didn’t receive these monies. For the most part, Black farmers did not obtain federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP) aid designed to help businesses weather the pandemic.

“We’re holding on by a thread here,” says National Black Farmers Association (NBFA) president John Boyd Jr., whose organization includes 116,000 members, including farmers, landowners, and advocates in 42 states. “We [Black farmers] didn’t really fit into a lot of the relief programs. The PPP — they tried to say we weren’t eligible for that. And a lot of the payment programs that the Trump administration rolled out didn’t seem to find their ways to Black farmers. … It was a really painful year.” Critics of these programs say the multibillion-dollar efforts bailed out large and well-connected farm owners while excluding the small farm owners, Black or otherwise, most in need of help.

The lack of federal relief for Black farmers amplified the stresses they’ve contended with during the pandemic. “The cattle markets, the livestock markets, were closed,” says Boyd, a fourth-generation beef cattle and grain farmer. Grain elevators closed, which Boyd says he’s “never seen” happen before during a harvest, meaning that crops normally stored in these facilities instead remained in the field, lowering the grain’s quality and costing farmers money. “And soybeans went down to about $7 a bushel; corn and wheat hovered around $3 a bushel,” Boyd says. “These were unseen times in America, and I’ve been farming since 1983.”

As the coronavirus interfered with day-to-day operations, access to credit dried up for farmers, Boyd says. With a 1,300-acre operation in Baskerville, Virginia, Boyd is fortunate to have a farm that’s 10 times the size of the average Black-owned farm, but last year marked the first time he didn’t have a farm operating loan. Farmers can use these usually short-term loans to cover everything from livestock, seed, and equipment to farm operating costs and family living expenses; farmers usually borrow on a year-long basis to cover annual expenses, and pay it back after harvest. Boyd was forced to use his own credit cards to keep his business afloat. He blames the “devastating” turn of events on the nation’s leading financial institutions and the USDA refusing to meet the needs of African-American farmers during times of crisis.

Black farmers struggle to compete with their white counterparts when they don’t have equal access to federal relief, but there are a confluence of factors that prevent them from gaining equal footing in agriculture. Having fewer industry connections, less access to credit, and smaller farms makes it difficult for African-American farm owners to improve machinery, modernize, or expand, all of which would generate more revenue. Smaller revenues make it harder to qualify for the financial assistance that could give their farms a competitive edge. What’s more, racial discrimination in agriculture has long locked African-American farmers out of the support they sorely need, contributing to the demise of Black-owned farms across the country.

It’s a longstanding pattern. During the 1930s, structural racism began to erode the gains of African Americans who had toiled and sacrificed to acquire their own farmland as newly liberated people after the Civil War. “Farmers of color … were left out of a lot of these policies that supported farmers following the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, when it was a really challenging time to be a farmer, as it always has been,” says Holly Rippon-Butler, NYFC’s land access program director. “The fact that these programs left out farmers of color, and Black farmers in particular, led to a … really sharp decline in the number of Black farmers that’s disproportionate to white farmers at the same time period.”

The New Deal, the set of public works programs, financial reforms, and other policies President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented to help the country bounce back from the Great Depression, established the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) to offset the effects of the economic downturn on the agriculture sector. The AAA organized committees that controlled agriculture in counties across the country, according to historian Pete Daniel, author of Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights. White power brokers who were primarily interested in amassing more farmland for themselves (or for others who shared their racial and class backgrounds) made up the bulk of these committees. They ignored or antagonized African-American farmers, who were excluded from serving on the committees and lacked the resources to challenge the decisions of the all-white members bent on limiting the amount of crops they could grow.

Courtesy of Julius Tillery

“In those days, there were allotments for crops, for example, cotton,” Daniel says. “Each farm owner was given so many acres to grow. If you were an African-American farmer, white people could just cut you right down to nothing.” In short, the powerful individuals who served on the county AAA committees could allot African Americans significantly less land to cultivate than they allotted to whites, allowing white farmers to thrive while curtailing Black progress in agriculture.

Officials at the USDA’s now-defunct Farmers Home Administration (FHA), founded in 1946, also engaged in discrimination, namely by denying loans to Black farmers. By withholding the financial resources these farmers needed and limiting the crops they could grow, officials at various levels of government made it difficult for African Americans in agriculture to flourish.

State laws directly served to separate Black farmers from their land as well. For example, many Southern states had (and still have) heirs’ property laws that took effect when landowners died without wills, rendering the decedents’ heirs owners of a fractional interest in their property. The number of heirs multiplied with each new generation, and any of them could sell their fractional interest or ask a court to force a sale of the property, even if the other heirs objected. But historic barriers to legal services mean that as many as 50 to 75 percent of African Americans die without wills, causing them to lose farmland. Although heirs’ property is worth an estimated $28 billion in the South, court-ordered sales of this property, often to white buyers, have resulted in it being purchased for “pennies on the dollar.”

Heirs’ property laws and loan denials continued to plague African-American farmers well into the 20th century. In 1997, Boyd participated in Pigford v. Glickman, a class action lawsuit against the USDA for discriminating against Black farmers seeking loans and support from the agency between 1981 and 1996. The government settled the case for $1 billion two years later. Boyd took part in the lawsuit after FHA officials repeatedly turned him down for small loans while granting sizable loans to white farmers in his region. On more than one occasion, FHA officers reportedly engaged in overt racism, including spitting on Boyd and tossing his loan application in the trash without reviewing it. He launched the NBFA after connecting with other Black farmers who’d endured similar ordeals.

Winning the Pigford case proved bittersweet. A number of the Black farmers who’d experienced racial discrimination while applying for USDA support were already dangerously in debt or unaware of the class action suit when the federal government disbursed $62,500 apiece to the 400 farmers represented. Some lost their farms or died before receiving the settlement, but the NBFA’s ongoing advocacy prompted then-President Barack Obama to sign a bill in 2010 approving a $1.25 billion payout, known as Pigford II, to the Black farmers excluded from the original class action. Neither settlement, however, could help the African Americans who lost an estimated 36 million acres of farmland from 1920 to 1978 because of systemic racism.

Courtesy of Asaud Frazier

“Pigford did things in that people got money, but you can’t possibly atone for the racial discrimination that happened in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s,” Daniel says. “You can’t bring back those farmers to the land. They’re gone. The people in that case endured even after all that discrimination, but it was tough.”

And it isn’t over. Black farmers today say they experience bias in the public and private sectors alike. As the coronavirus rocked agriculture in 2020, the NBFA continued to call out discrimination, initiating a boycott against agriculture equipment manufacturer John Deere. The group alleges that the company does not respond to Black farmers’ calls for service on its machinery in a timely manner and remotely shuts off tractors when these farmers try to repair equipment on their own. Additionally, NBFA accused John Deere of refusing to exhibit its products at the NBFA’s annual conference. More detrimental, Boyd believes John Deere has made it difficult for African Americans, who must often rely on their own financial resources and not federal loans, to buy equipment.

“The issue with John Deere is that many Blacks are C.O.D. [cash on delivery] borrowers, and we don’t have credit there,” Boyd says. “They’re [one of] the largest agricultural lenders in the world, and when you don’t extend credit to somebody, we can’t get the equipment … unless we have cash money to do that.”

A John Deere spokesman says that it takes Boyd’s allegations seriously and is “committed to eliminating the systemic inequities that have prevented generations of Black Americans and communities of color from having fair access to social and economic opportunities.” The representative notes that the company recently joined a new coalition with the National Black Growers Council, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives to help Black farmers overcome systemic challenges.

For hemp farmer Asaud Frazier, getting a tractor, be it from John Deere or another manufacturer, is a top priority. The 28-year-old just launched his Alabama farm last May, two months into the nation’s coronavirus pandemic. His family spent years combing through paperwork to prove they were the rightful heirs to land that had lain fallow since an ancestor bought it in the 1920s. But after winning legal challenges brought by others who tried to claim the land as their own, hiring contractors willing to help him cultivate the 40 acres proved nearly impossible. After multiple contractors abandoned him during the pandemic, Frazier managed to find one to drill a well, connect electricity and water to his greenhouse, and loan him a much-needed tractor. So far, he’s cultivated five acres of hemp.

Although the USDA offers small-farm operating and ownership loans to beginning farmers, Frazier says his application was unsuccessful because he’s starting out with too few resources to qualify. So, as he builds his farm from the ground up, he does so without federal financial help.

“A lot of the USDA programs for beginning farmers aren’t really for true beginner farmers like myself getting started on virgin land,” says Frazier, who earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in environmental science and plant science, respectively, from Tuskegee University. “For instance, if I want to get a fence for my farm through the USDA, I already have to have … so many acres of fencing to qualify for that. … If I want to get a well for water put on my property, I already need to have animals out … grazing on my land.”

Courtesy of Sankofa Farms

Courtesy of Sankofa Farms

When Frazier didn’t receive the support he needed from the agency, his family pooled their resources to help him begin the work to get his farm up and running, though he has not yet purchased a tractor of his own. “It felt great; that was one of the success stories of 2020,” Frazier says. “I felt a sense of liberation, and I feel like this goes back to the whole movement of Black people wanting to get back to the land. … It’s really a great time.”

The movement of African Americans reclaiming their “oldest occupation,” as Boyd puts it, may soon be bolstered by real support. On February 8, Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) reintroduced legislation in the Senate that seeks to give Black farmers the training, financial resources, and farmland they need to succeed, while Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia) introduced legislation to provide $5 billion in assistance to farmers of color, including African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans.

Warnock would like his Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act to be folded into President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package that’s now making its way through Congress. And Booker’s Justice for Black Farmers Act has the potential to usher in a new era in agriculture: The landmark legislation would create an independent civil rights oversight board to end racial discrimination in the USDA and start a program within the agency to give existing and aspiring Black farmers equitable access to land. If enacted, the legislation would also provide young adults from disadvantaged communities with skills to pursue farming and ranching careers and fund a new bank to support Black farmers and ranchers. Notably, Justice for Black Farmers would forgive the USDA debt of the African Americans who filed claims in the Pigford lawsuit.

Advocates for Black farmers have applauded both bills, arguing that even if this ambitious legislation doesn’t get passed, it has the capacity to raise public awareness about the struggles of African Americans in agriculture historically and today, which could eventually lead to policy change.

According to the National Young Farmers Coalition, access to farmland is the top barrier facing aspiring farmers, even now. In 2019, the staff of Fresh Future Farm in North Charleston, South Carolina, raised $75,000 to buy the less than an acre of land they lease from the city to run the urban farm and an accompanying USDA-designated grocery store; they’re still in talks with North Charleston’s city leaders about the possible sale. “It’s very difficult for a farm to thrive if you don’t own the land, which is our struggle right now,” co-founder Germaine Jenkins says. Jenkins is a culinary school grad who first took an interest in farming nearly 20 years ago, after experiencing “food apartheid” while mothering young children. She hopes to one day acquire land throughout the city. If the Justice for Black Farmers Act passes, it would help farmers like her access up to 160 acres through a USDA land-grant system.

But rather than any one piece of legislation, many Black farmers are hopeful about the new Biden-Harris administration, particularly that the nation’s new leaders will be more willing to act on their concerns than their predecessors were. During his transition to the White House, Biden announced plans to “ensure the U.S. Department of Agriculture ends historical discrimination against Black farmers.”

And if Black farmers don’t see results from the Biden administration, Boyd says they’re prepared to hold it accountable. Having fought against injustice for generations, these farmers are accustomed to self-advocacy and want to ensure that they receive federal relief in greater numbers. “If we don’t start getting this money, we’re going to become extinct,” Boyd says. “That’s where the focus of the National Black Farmers Association is going to be this year.”

Although Boyd doesn’t doubt that the new administration will at least attempt to meet the needs of Black farmers, Biden’s decision to choose Tom Vilsack as the U.S. secretary of agriculture has raised concerns from critics who argue that he had a poor civil rights record when he held the same post in the Obama-Biden administration. In 2015, for example, Black farmers received less than 0.2 percent of the $5.7 billion loans available under a Vilsack-led USDA. And during his tenure, Vilsack forced African-American Shirley Sherrod, former state director of USDA rural development in Georgia, to step down after a conservative news outlet doctored a video to suggest that she discriminated against white farmers. Sherrod recently said that she holds “no ill will” toward Vilsack, but that this time around, he “definitely needs to pay more attention to family farmers, and especially African-American farmers.”

Boyd points out that African Americans in agriculture have struggled during both Democratic and Republican administrations. Because of this, they have long taken the initiative to address the needs of their communities — from providing fresh produce to food-insecure neighborhoods to preparing the next generation of African Americans for agricultural careers.

When the pandemic forced most of the nation to lock down, Fresh Future Farm received grants and donations to give groceries to vulnerable community members on a bimonthly basis. And in light of the Justice for Black Farmers Act, the organization launched the Black Farmers Coalition for South Carolina. “I see where there are resources available for farmers at the state level, and the recipients of those resources tend to be white,” Jenkins says. “There needs to be equity in how agriculture resources and land are distributed in that there needs to be an intentional effort to support the growth of Black farms.”

Since the average Black farmer is older than 60, Jenkins particularly wants to engage young African Americans in agriculture. It’s a goal that Kamal Bell, chief executive officer of North Carolina’s Sankofa Farms, shares.

With a master’s degree in agricultural education from North Carolina A&T University and middle school teaching experience, Bell launched the Sankofa Farms Agricultural Academy with the goal of improving the perception of STEM and agriculture professions. The academy now includes six students. “We’ve been able to produce food for our community, and we also have an education piece where these young men have learned about STEM concepts, entrepreneurship, and how to grow the food, so they’re really taking control over their own destiny,” Bell says. During the pandemic, Sankofa, which produces honey and grows watermelons, squash, leafy greens, and other vegetables, has been able to source all of the supplies it needs. Bell attributes this success to his involvement in organizations like the Farmers of Color Network, which assists farmers from marginalized groups.

Having launched NBFA to support a similar population of farmers, Boyd has learned to dictate his own fate. “For people who want to count us out, I’m going to die a farmer,” Boyd says. “No discrimination is going to stop me from putting my plow in the ground. No policy is going to stop me from putting my plow in the ground. That’s the determination that we have to have to survive in this country.”

Nadra Nittle is a senior reporter for Civil Eats. She lives in Los Angeles.

Lead image photo credits: Asaud Frazier, Fresh Future Farms, Marion Post Walcott, NYPL Digital Collections

Black food is “omnivorous and multinational,” says historian Jessica B. Harris. And it’s nourished this nation.

Many assume African-American cuisine consists solely of fried chicken, collards, and cornbread. These are indeed touchstones of Black food in America, but that assumption is limiting in more ways than one, most obviously because it too narrowly defines the diversity of what we bring to the table. African-American food is omnivorous and multinational. It encompasses the food of the formerly enslaved and the meals that were prepared by black, brown, and tan hands for those who enslaved them. It has taken foods from European culinary customs and the traditional ways of American Indians and adapted and inflected them with some of the tastes and techniques of the lost African motherlands.

Balkanizing food like fried chicken and gumbo as simply soul food ignores the fact that African-American food is not only the matrix of Southern food, the most distinctive of all American regional cuisines, but is in fact the backbone of American food itself. From enslavement to today, African Americans have played foundational roles in transforming the landscape and identity of the United States. In the 400-plus years since enslaved Africans first arrived on the North American continent, we worked the fields, harvested the crops, wrote the recipes, brewed the beer, distilled the whiskey, cooked the food, set the table, served the food, cleared the table, and even emptied the chamber pots. In so doing, we made this nation’s table and have long been the stewards of some of its most important dishes.

Historically, African Americans’ agricultural and botanical skills built this nation. Expertise in cattle-rearing, a trait that was especially evident in those people stolen from herding and cattle-rearing groups like the Fulani, created some of the original cowboys. In the early 19th century, around one-third of the cowboys who herded cattle across the western United States were African American. These skills with animal behavior and husbandry led to many African Americans working with chickens; long before they were the most consumed protein in the country, they were the center of celebration dishes prepared by those who cared for them.

On the country’s Eastern Seaboard, Africans and their descendants became experts in oyster cultivation. They became some of the country’s most noted watermen and best-known purveyors of oysters, including New York’s Thomas Downing, who shipped the mollusks to Queen Victoria. Traditional African planting methods (deliberate planting rather than scattering of seeds) resulted in higher crop yields, and African foods like okra, black-eyed peas, and watermelon became staples on American tables, especially in the South. At the same time, in South Carolina, West African knowledge of rice culture created unequalled wealth for slave masters and added myriad recipes to the American culinary repertoire.

African Americans created or popularized some of the country’s most iconic dishes. Consider just a few of the African Americans who laid some of the building blocks of some of the country’s food. James Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved chef, traveled to France in 1784 and was trained in the French cooking at the highest culinary level. He returned to the nascent United States and was instrumental in introducing macaroni and cheese, ice cream, and french fries to American palates. South and North, African Americans worked in all levels of food service. Street vendors’ cries provided the soundscape of American cities. Black caterers, victuallers, and purveyors sold foods and catered the parties of the wealthy who were not able to afford the lavish staffs that the truly rich could afford. Black Philadelphian Robert Bogle virtually invented a system that allowed for those without sufficient wherewithal to hire household staff to help them with their events; this system would develop into today’s catering industry. Free-born Anne Hampton, wife of Solomon Northup of Twelve Years a Slave, worked as a highly regarded cook and kitchen manager in hotels in Saratoga Springs, New York. The same town became the birthplace of the all-American potato chip when African-American and Native American chef George Crum, who cooked at Moon’s Lake House, transformed the British game chip.

The list goes on and on. African Americans have expanded America’s food journey in ways too numerous to note. Yet, as centuries passed, the contributions of the continent’s sons and daughters and their descendants became subsumed under the weight of time, or erased by the inadvertent forgetfulness or deliberate removal that is a part of our national character when the achievements of African Americans are concerned. While too few may recognize it, hundreds of thousands of unnamed African-American domestics and restaurant workers nourished this nation. So, consider the potato chip, macaroni and cheese, ice cream, french fries, and the beef in your hamburger, and the next time someone says, “African-American food is American food,” just quietly think on this and all those folks, and nod your head, and say yes.

Jessica B. Harris is an educator, culinary historian, and the lead curator of MOFAD’s African/American: Making the Nation’s Table.

Lead image photo credits: Getty Images, NYPL Digital Collections, MOFAD

Black folks creating their own support systems are continuing a longstanding practice in their communities

During the summer of 2020, as chef Kia Damon watched her community in Brooklyn take to the streets to protest police brutality, she asked herself, “What can I do for my people?”

Damon, who has led pop-up dinner series and worked as the culinary director of Cherry Bombe, had long noticed how difficult it was to access nutritious, affordable groceries in her Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. It was a void she knew she could help fill, building something that was “bred from the moment, but for forever.” The idea was the starting place for her organization, Kia Feeds the People Program, a budding nonprofit dedicated to putting quality produce and pantry items in the hands of underserved Black and queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) in Brooklyn.

The best solutions for the problems facing communities often come out of the communities themselves — no one knows as intimately the depth of need, or the nuances involved in addressing those needs. Little wonder then that over the past year, Black-led initiatives like Kia Feeds the People have felt especially vital as the Black Lives Matter protests, which filled streets around the country in response to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, became a broader reckoning with the systemic racism inherent in so many U.S. institutions, our food system included. In the months following the protests, and as the effects of COVID-19 continued to be felt disproportionately in Black communities, the exploding discourse around the vision of an anti-racist future compelled some activists and lawmakers to advocate for policies that would dismantle structural racism. But a more grassroots-led path forward for Black folks also presented itself: creating organizations outside of these institutions to provide meaningful representation and support.

The need for Black folks to construct their own support systems has existed since they arrived in this country. Just as enslaved Africans brought their agricultural knowledge and ingredients with them to the New World, they also brought a culture of collectivism that undergirds many African societies. In her book Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, Jessica Gordon Nembhard writes, “Africans in the Americas and African Americans have showed throughout history their willingness and ability to organize themselves in order to survive enslavement and poverty.”

David Fenton/Getty Images

The civil rights era, as well the subsequent Black Power era, provides countless examples of Black people building support structures as a means for mutual uplifting. During the 1960s, Black cooperatives of all kinds, including supply co-ops, credit unions, and housing co-ops, flourished, but farming co-ops in particular thrived as civil rights activists in rural communities began to realize political participation meant very little without economic empowerment. Black Southerners, particularly those in rural areas, were essentially locked out of the economy. Black farmers were denied necessary support by government agencies like the USDA; the co-ops kept many of them in business.

In some areas, Black-owned cooperatives helped revitalize communities by providing jobs and new streams of income. Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Collective purchased hundreds of acres of land for members to cultivate and raised pigs to feed thousands of families. The success of Black-led Southern cooperatives made them a target of violence from local white business owners and white supremacists, who were angered by the economic competition and fearful that the cooperatives might lead to increased Black political empowerment.Still, they were proof that Black people had the capacity to create meaningful economic change in their communities by pooling their resources and creating a network of support.

Food apartheid is a term used to analyze the racial and socioeconomic inequalities that leave so many in our country without access to fresh foods and produce, and which disproportionately affects Black communities. A growing number of Black-led organizations, like Damon’s upcoming nonprofit, are championing food sovereignty to end food apartheid in these communities. Damon in particular is inspired by those who carved out space for themselves instead of waiting for the powers that be to intervene, and Kia Feeds the People is in part modeled after the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for School Children Program, which fed thousands of children from 1969 until the Black Panther Party dissolved. “I’m not claiming to create a new program or system,” she says. “It’s just me picking up where my predecessors have dropped it off for me to continue that same vision and that same work for my people.”

Food co-ops can keep money circulating in the community and provide support for other efforts within the food system that consciously carve out space for Black people and people of color. In Brooklyn, for example, Central Brooklyn Food Coop, a Black-led grocery cooperative, has plans to open its first store later this year, while in Oakland, the Mandela Grocery Cooperative, a Black-led, worker-owned grocery store sources goods locally from Black and brown farmers and entrepreneurs. Community farms, meanwhile, focus on promoting food sovereignty and eradicating racism at the agricultural level. Soul Fire Farm, an Afro-Indigenous-centered small farm in Petersburg, New York, gives away much of its produce to Albany residents living in neighborhoods grappling with food apartheid. Co-founded by Leah Penniman, author of Farming While Black, the farm also offers training for aspiring Black and brown farmers to give them the tools needed to thrive in an agricultural system that is steeped in racial inequality.

The legacy of collectivism carries on today with projects elsewhere in the food space. In February 2019, Colleen Vincent and Clay Williams launched Black Food Folks, a community of Black food professionals invested in supporting each other’s success and growth. The community is not only a space for networking and building connections, but also for sharing useful knowledge and experience. In pre-COVID times, this took the form of in-person gatherings, but since the pandemic began, Black Food Folks has continued fostering its community online, particularly through Black Food Folks Live, a series on Instagram Live featuring Black folks in the food industry sharing what they do and their experiences working in food.

“In connecting with Black people throughout the food sphere, we were hearing a lot of the same stories and the same challenges,” Williams, a Brooklyn-based photographer, says. He and Vincent realized how useful it would be to create a space where those folks could connect with one another. They’ve used their platform of over 40,000 Instagram followers to highlight Black people thriving in the food space throughout the country, lending more visibility to their work and talents. In November 2020, they furthered this work by announcing that they would be awarding $50,000 in grants, sponsored by Talenti, to 10 Black folks doing work in the food space. The grants were sponsored by Talenti, which reached out to Black Food Folks during the protests in June.

“It’s great that everyone is paying attention to us now, but we have to build things for ourselves, so that once the attention has moved on to something else, and it will, we still have structures in place that can continue to help us grow,” says Williams. “Unless we’re in a position to make things for ourselves and have structures that are built specifically to support us, everything is just at the whims of the people in power, which is still not us.”

Over the summer, some of those people in power were held to account for failing to recognize people of color in their sphere: In June 2020, Adam Rapoport resigned as editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit after a photo of Rapoport seemingly in brownface surfaced online and amid reports of a wider culture of racism at the Condé Nast publication. People of color were quick to point out that the problems at Bon Appétit were part of a much larger conversation surrounding food and race. On social media, stories of the culinary world perpetuating issues of pay discrepancy, tokenization, and exclusion of Black talent proliferated. Media brands admitted to past failures to meaningfully include Black voices. Many of these brands promised to do better in the future, but as the events at Bon Appétit showed, these problems can’t be solved by merely hiring more Black people into a structure not set up for them to succeed.

For the Culture, a magazine celebrating Black women in food and wine, aims to combat the structural issues that prevent adequate representation in food media. Founded by chef and author Klancy Miller, it released its first issue January 22, with food historian Jessica B. Harris on the cover and featuring contributions from 35 women; it was funded through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for $40,000, which went mainly to printing costs and paying contributors. “Black women have shaped so much of cuisine in the U.S., and in other countries throughout the world,” Miller says. “But our stories about our expertise and about our relationships with food don’t get highlighted that often.”

Already unique in its focus on Black women, For the Culture stands even further apart from traditional food media for the fact that all the stories are not only written by Black women, but also photographed and illustrated by Black women. Tangibly, this means more opportunities for Black women to grow in the food media space in a setting that’s dedicated to affirming them. It also means more exposure for Black women working in food. Food media can be extremely insular; editors often hire or commission work from those already in their networks, which can leave Black women out of the fold. For the Culture is a necessary intervention, a publication that, as Miller puts it, is “essentially by us and for us.”

But as more Black-led food spaces emerge and flourish, it will only open the door wider for others. “One of the things about being Black in this space, and other spaces like it, is that most of us are trying to help support each other,” says Williams.

Kia Feeds the People is banking on some of that support. In December, Damon launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise $300,000 by fall 2021. When that happens, the nonprofit will be able to distribute 200 boxes of organic produce and 100 holiday turkeys and chickens, as well as serve hot meals and launch a free breakfast and lunch program — and become one more testament that Black folks, just as they always have been in this country, are very much at work building their own table.

Nicole Rufus is a food writer, recipe developer, and grad student in Food Studies at NYU Steinhardt living and working in Brooklyn, New York.

Lead photo credits: Black Panther Party, David Fenton/Getty Images, FPG/Staff/Getty Images

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