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Soul Food from Africa to America
Columbia University Press
September 2008
On Sale: September 15, 2008
256 pages
ISBN: 0231146388
EAN: 9780231146388
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Frederick Opie's culinary history is an insightful portrait
of the social and religious relationship between people of
African descent and their cuisine. Beginning with the
Atlantic slave trade and concluding with the Black Power
movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Opie composes a global
history of African American foodways and the concept of soul
itself, revealing soul food to be an amalgamation of West
and Central African social and cultural influences as well
as the adaptations blacks made to the conditions of slavery
and freedom in the Americas.
Soul is the style of
rural folk culture, embodying the essence of suffering,
endurance, and survival. Soul food comprises dishes made
from simple, inexpensive ingredients that remind black folk
of their rural roots. Sampling from travel accounts,
periodicals, government reports on food and diet, and
interviews with more than thirty people born before 1945,
Opie reconstructs an interrelated history of Moorish
influence on the Iberian Peninsula, the African slave trade,
slavery in the Americas, the emergence of Jim Crow, the
Great migration, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights
and Black Power movements. His grassroots approach reveals
the global origins of soul food, the forces that shaped its
development, and the distinctive cultural collaborations
that occurred among Africans, Asians, Europeans, and
Americans throughout history.
Hog and Hominy
traces the class- and race-inflected attitudes toward black
folk's food in the African diaspora as it evolved in Brazil,
the Caribbean, the American South, and such northern cities
as Chicago and New York, mapping the complex cultural
identity of African Americans as it developed through eating
habits over hundreds of years.
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