Our Sustenance: From Scraps to Soul Food, a Positive Institution
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Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
“Soul food was a response to racial caste dictates as African Americans asserted their humanity. Food was one avenue to create identity, instill pride, and underscore a triumphal narrative.”
“GOD IS GOOD.”
Regardless of your religious affiliation, in my community, the correct response here is…
“ALL THE TIME.”
The phrase is an acknowledgement that in the most difficult of times, there is something greater on the other side. We could call this hope, call this optimism, even resilience. But I’d like to call it faith.
There is arguably not a more fitting occasion for such a phrase than sitting around the table for a family meal. See, the holidays typically mark a checkpoint within culture to reconnect and reinvigorate family. In my community, it's a space for laughter, love, family, faith, and food that will cause a beautiful nap called the itis.
Food can also tell a story, which is especially important in communities that practice oral tradition.
Dr. Joseph L White (1984), father of Black psychology, discusses oral tradition as a key dimension of Black identity. He discusses how these dimensions represent a shared participatory space for the harmonious passage of information through generations.
Food therefore is a physical expression of the harmony, with recipes passed down to the studious eyes mirroring elders' unmeasured recipes within many Black kitchens. In fact, the first Black recipes weren’t published until 1827 despite centuries of recipe making leading up to their release (Tipton-Martin, 2022). In the Black community, this is especially important due to the contextual backdrop of oppression, which for centuries inhibited or fully outlawed reading and writing.
So how does a group cling to humanity in this context? Where does well-being live?
Recipes are like delicious stories passed from generation to generation with hope to continue not just the act of eating but also familial connection. They whisper during the holidays to remind us of the loved ones we’ve lost and the beautiful spaces we loved them within. In this sense, they take on spiritual forms. Elders, a revered group in the Black community, then become vessels. They connect through kitchens and comfort us around dining room tables.
I remember one Thanksgiving I managed to get all four of my sisters, five of my nieces and nephews, my dad, two aunts, a couple cousins, and friends from college around the same table. Hands down, of all the holiday celebrations we’ve had over the years, it was my favorite.
“I’ve got the apple pie,” I said.
I pulled out my phone confidently to google ingredients.
“Don’t you dare. Just watch me,” my sister interupted.
I spent the next hour mirroring the scoops, pauses, timing, and portions of my sister's apple pie recipe. I’d add an extra pinch of nutmeg to make it mine here and there. I cut and peeled. I watched.
“How many apples?”
“That looks good… wait.”
A dash of sugar and cinnamon. Don’t ask questions, just remember.
You might be wondering how my pie came out? Well, delicious, but that’s beside the point. See, it was the only time in my life everyone I loved got together in one place for something other than a funeral. As Christopher Peterson (2006) often put it, “Other people matter. Period.”
As we sat around praying, eating, and laughing, none of us knew this holiday together would be our last. Two years later, our father and my nephew died within weeks of each other, and as fate would have it, on either side of Thanksgiving.
Dr. Jacqueline Mattis (personal communication, October 6, 2023) discusses the importance of narrative regarding our personal and historical experiences. She says our power is in the stories we choose to tell or not tell. The complexity of well-being, of positive psychology, is rooted in those stories. The meaning we assign to those moments, those stories, becomes essential. Victor Frankl expresses the importance of meaning as life saving (Frankl, 1946/2006). So, food as a means to experience well-being for the Black community is a powerful positive space.
Soul food is the vine that connects the Black community through centuries and a consistent element for the positive spaces they create. It is the agricultural genetic coding for Black culture, identity, and history (Opie, 2010). Food may be the most tangible symbol of Black resilience and spirituality due to its patient and arguably artistic transformation from seed to sustenance. Additionally, due to its use in many West African spiritual traditions that honored God and familial relationships (Opie, 2010). We find remnants of this in the holidays we express today, all typically marked by food.
Food feeds the soul, and the seed fed millions within and outside of the Black community—as slaves were an essential resource for teaching agriculture, harvesting crops, and turning those crops into delicious food (Harris, 2013). The first chefs operated in the kitchens of plantations. They transformed food labeled scraps into feasts—Michelin star dishes that are the grits, gumbos, jambalaya, and cornbreads of today. Flavorful aromas of Chief Cook Hercules Posey, Chef James Heming, and culinary entrepreneurs like Abby Fisher alike scented the recipes that nourished the Black community in servitude and empowerment (Sharpless, 2010).
Civil Rights leaders across the country could be found in southern churches or in Harlem restaurants, not merely as a means of eating but of empowering connection (Miller, 2013). They transformed pulpits into political podiums and restaurants into business meeting spaces. Around pitched up community tables akin to the tribal bowls of their West African ancestors, the Black community devised plans for identity, equity, and liberation.
Within the spoken recipes lived an insulated positive institution, kernels of Black well-being. Subsequently, sustenance acted and continues to act as a synonym for flourishing in the Black community. To look more deeply, it became another vessel for the positive pillars that sustained the community through degradation. Through each chapter of history, Black food expressed truths in its spices and aromas. It quite literally is a story of scraps to sustenance. Ingredients combining with traditions, as again, the community created from nothing a common language that sustained and continues to sustain the culture’s connection to well-being. In Black cuisine becomes an institution for which the Black community can harbor its essence. Their soul as sustenance, as a pearl. There is no better term to describe the essence of the community than soul food.
I’ll leave you with this. When grasping that large spoon for a scoop of your favorite dish, ask yourself:
What story does it tell?
For me, I know it tells the story of generations of struggle. In that struggle, my ancestors created an identity that breathes through my siblings and me as we set the table for our loved ones. It's a community wrapped up in aromas. It’s the good and the bad, but beautiful nonetheless.
So let’s try this again. This time I won’t help you.
“GOD IS GOOD…”
References
Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning: An introduction to logotherapy. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946).
Harris, J. B. (2013). High on the hog: A culinary journey from Africa to America. St. Martin’s Press.
Miller, A. (2013). Soul food. UNC Press Books.
Opie, Frederick Douglass (2010). Hog and hominy: Soul food from Africa to America. Columbia University Press.
Peterson, C. (2006). A primer in positive psychology. Oxford University Press.
Sharpless, R. (2010). Cooking in other women’s kitchens: Domestic workers in the South, 1865–1960. University Of North Carolina Press.
Tipton-Martin, T. (2022). The Jemima Code. University of Texas Press.
White, J. L. (1984). The psychology of Blacks. Prentice Hall.
About the author | Frank Jackson (C’21) is an Assistant Instructor for MAPP 602/710. In addition, Frank works as a Teaching Assistant for a few undergraduate courses, Social Psychology, Intro to Positive Psychology, as well as the APOP certificate program at the University of Pennsylvania. Outside of his work with Penn, Frank goes by the name Mr. Positive as a speaker. He speaks on his research, The Pearl Effect, which looks at well-being preservation through positive spaces for marginalized groups in spite of oppressive or adverse environments. He hopes to continue his work quantitatively in a Clinical Psychology PhD program next fall. He owes his mission and ambition to bring Black well-being to the forefront of Psychology to the legacy of his parents who continue to guide and support him spiritually. Personally, Frank is a fiction writer who is seeking representation, an avid basketball player, and a lover of stories (books, TV, and conversations with friends).
