African Heritage Health Week
February is Black History Month in the US, an opportunity to learn about the African diaspora and Black contributions to the experiment that is America. African Heritage and Health Week is also in February, to commemorate the foods, flavors, and heritage of African Americans.
The NYC Diaspora
Gerald Miller, a program director at a California nonprofit organization, is a Black man from New York City. He came of age during the heady, turbulent 1960s and 70s in the city, spending time on NYC’s once-notorious 42nd Street “Deuce” strip of movie theaters, bookstores, and restaurants. “Man, it was a wild time,” he recounts. “You could grab a beer, have a $1.99 full meal (!) at Tad’s Flame Steak, and see three movies for $1.50.” He left NYC to see the lands beyond his homeplace, and ended up the only Black man in a small Idaho sawmill town. He continued west to California’s Bay Area, a place once heavily populated by African Americans going from the South to World War 2-era jobs in the war effort, but now experiencing a dwindling population due to gentrification and rising costs. Gerald works in San Francisco, a gourmand’s delight, with its intense diversity of cultures and foods. “Soup is bum food!,” he once joked. “Nah, actually it can go either way. Soup can be really elegant and elevated, or, yeah, it can be just a bunch of stuff thrown together. I’ll try anything once.”
Southern Roots
Traditional Black food is, of course, heavily rooted in Southern culture, with origins and flavors from traditional West Africa. Grit lit author Harry Crews, who is white, nonetheless grew up dirt poor on a south Georgia sharecropper farm. His best friend, Willie Lee, was a Black youth from a neighboring farm. “I didn’t even know there was a racial divide until I left the farm,” Crews wrote. “Willie and I were just friends, boys, fellow human beings in a rough, hand-to-mouth culture. We weren’t superior or inferior.” As Crews grew older, he found himself craving and favoring foods that many would associate with lower-class eating. “I love to chew, I love pigs feet, hock, neckbones, meat off-cuts that you find more easily at – I don’t mean to offend anyone – stores considered ‘ghetto.’” However, much Southern food is rooted in heaviness and grease, and old-fashionedness. (Ever been to a traditional Southern eatery? Bring your cholesterol medication!) African Americans generally have higher rates of mortality and health-related issues, some of it traceable back to diet. Covid, to boot, has shortened everyone’s lifespan by a year or so, sadly. Chef Becky takes the deliciousness of Southern cuisine, and then health-ifies it. How has Southern cooking influenced Chef Becky? “I love the South,” Chef Becky says. “I especially like Nashville, its music and food culture.” Nashville chicken wings inspired one of Bex’s dishes, a cauliflower-based, Nashville sauce-inspired “wing” that vegetarians, vegans, and anyone can enjoy.
While African Americans make up “only” about 12% – 15% of the American population, a number that doesn’t fluctuate much, Black contributions to America are innumerable: in science, the arts, cooking, literature, government, sports, you name it. Perhaps we can all take a clue from Harry Crews and his childhood experiences and realize we’re all, truly, in this together.
Article contributed by Matthew Snope
