Jennifer Jensen Wallach. Every Nation Has Its Dish

In Every Nation Has Its Dish: Black Bodies and Black Food in Twentieth-Century America, Jennifer Jensen Wallach thoughtfully follows the lead of Psyche Williams-Forson to center African American food history in African American history. While this may seem the obvious place for it, too often histories of African American experiences miss the importance of food to understanding identity, while food historians of North America refer to African American food on the edges of a narrative of “mainstream” foodways. On these margins, African American food is typically portrayed as a classic cocina povera, making the best of scant resources. There is no room for plenty in such portrayals. The great chef and cookbook writer Edna Lewis attempted to correct this misrepresentation in her book The Taste of Country Cooking (1976), but not many historians were reading cookbooks at that time. These instances of historical neglect have elided the reality that producers and consumers all exist in the same marketplace of foodstuffs and ideas about food. As Rebecca Sharpless reminds us in Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens (2010), African American women who worked preparing food for white families, and thus engaging in the foodways of white employers, also had their own kitchens and their own ways of cooking. Both systems of knowledge existed in the same minds. And as Williams-Forson has taught us, African American consumption has frequently been haunted by the specter of a jeering and judging white audience (Psyche Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs [2006]). Race is always at the table.

African american · Art · Ethnology · Food studies · Foodways · Literature · Mainstream · Narrative · Political science · Psyche · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Taste · White (mutation) · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies