• Michael Gebert
  • Soul food cafeteria line at Morrison’s, 8127 S. Ashland

The richest food cultures come from the people with the hardest histories, in which food was always a matter of immediate concern. That’s why you can’t go wrong reading a book about Jewish food (or writing one), and you won’t regret a minute spent with Adrian Miller’s lively, eye-opening Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time, which just won a James Beard Foundation award in the reference and scholarship category.

Adrian Miller: There was kind of a racial caste system about food. African-Americans, particularly enslaved African-Americans, often got what were perceived as nonprestige foods as their day in, day out foods. The typical slave rations were five pounds of corn meal or rice or sweet potatoes, a couple of pounds of smoked meat which could be pork, beef or fish, depending on what was cheapest, and maybe a jug of molasses. To that extent African-Americans had to supplement their diet by hunting, fishing, foraging, or other things.

To break that down a little bit more, it goes mainstream in the mid-60s with the Black Power movement and strong expressions of black cultural identity. But “soul food” as a term was bouncing around at least a decade before that. It really comes from the music world, when these disgruntled African-American jazz musicians were mad because the white musicians were getting all of the money and publicity and the best gigs. So they decided to take jazz to a place where they thought white musicians could not mimic that sound. And that sound was the gospel church of the black south. And they started calling that gospel sound “soul” and “funky.”

  • Michael Gebert
  • Mac ‘n’ cheese and stuffing at Morrison’s

I found the chapter on mac ‘n’ cheese really interesting because I went into it thinking, well, it may be popular with African-Americans, but it’s a universal food, everybody has the box of Kraft mac ‘n’ cheese. But you show that that dish really has a twisted history that ping-pongs up and down the social scale over the centuries, starting as an aristocratic food introduced by Thomas Jefferson, no less, later becoming something blacks and Italian immigrants shared because they were basically socially equal at the bottom, and so on.

But I have to tell you, the creative energy in soul food right now is in the vegetarian and vegan components of it. Because people are really distancing themselves from meat and trying to make this food really healthy. And it’s interesting because nutritionists are christening traditional soul food greens as superfoods. Everybody’s going crazy for kale, and I always say welcome to the party because we’ve been eating kale for several centuries.

The other drink is hibiscus, which comes over and gets transplanted to Jamaica. And you know, if you’ve ever spent any time in the Caribbean, there’s a hibiscus drink called sorrel which is very popular. Well, that starts to spread all over Latin and South America and gets called agua de jamaica. So if you’ve ever been to a taqueria and had agua de jamaica, you were drinking a West African drink.