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Soul Food Research Paper

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Soul food is the heart and soul of American cuisine in the South. There’s nothing like biting into warm crunchy fried chicken, or scooping into thick and creamy baked mac and cheese on a Sunday afternoon surrounded by friends and family. The South is known for this traditional home cooked meal, but the people who pioneered it experienced a horrific and tragic history. Black Americans endured hardship after hardship in this country starting with slavery. Black Americans were enslaved during the 1500’s-1800’s, and in an attempt to survive, they took what scraps of meat they were thrown and fixed it up into something not only edible but delicious. Slowly but surely this struggle came to be a part of the rich culture African Americans possess. …show more content…

The certain aspects of their culture -such as soul food- derived from this time period as a binding force, and surviving together created a bond much stronger than anything seen at that time. With any hardship a community of support is the only thing to get a person through each day, and this was a hardship nobody but those involved could ever understand. This food they cooked unified them then and continues to unify them now through wonderfully seasoned food and a family atmosphere like no other. In the 2004 documentary Soul Food Junkies Byron Hurt shows the eloquence soul food has had on defining Black culture and that no matter where a person ventures in the South they’d find family and a good meal. Hurt shows family, not just through blood but through food, an element of life enjoyed by all those around whether friend or family. In Soul Food Junkies Hurt explains the importance of soul food to Black tradition and the life complications that can come with loving that food too much. Soul food is indeed an essential part of Black culture and does lead to significant amount of damage to a person's …show more content…

They never realized it was bad for them so when it started to be a problem, when their dietary needs were finally fulfilled why would they worry about their health? Soul food originated from the days of slavery and has been a driving force is keeping african american culture alive and proud. Soul food has gone from being a substance vital to existence, to a comfort food during the fight for civil rights in the sixties, to what it is now. Soul food is now a statement of African American culture. It is eaten with pride, something nobody can never take away from these driven and wonderful people. It is a reminder that when they were treated less than human and given the scraps and garbage from their abominable keepers that they rose above and turned something that was thought to be wasteful into a delicacy better than anything their keepers could ever imagined. They turned their history into a badge and continue to eat and do as they please, even with the risks it puts on their health. Soul food may cause complications, but compared to the complications it was born from, type II diabetes and pancreatic cancer cannot compare. The health complications and tremendous important role soul food plays in the Black community is seen and confirmed with any and every article, museum, and scholarly journal an individual can

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Martin Luther King once said: “We are not makers of history, we are made of history.” We all can connect with this quote to a certain degree. A lot has happened in our history and as a result of that we are who we are today, even though sometimes history is not in our own hands to chose. The book, Soul by Soul by Walter Johnson tells the readers story of slavery that's took place on nineteenth-century, before the civil war on America by going away from the cotton plantations into the slave market itself which was the heart of the domestic slave trade. The story takes place on New Orleans.

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It is what bonds a group of people together. During slavery, African Americans, were stripped of their African culture. To stay bonded and cope with their harsh new reality, African Americans began to create a new culture. The U.S. can thank African Americans for the creation of rap, hip hop, jazz, country music, and a plethora of other genres of music. They can also thank artists such as Jacob Lawerance, Kara Walker, and Jean-Michel Basquiat for thinking outside of the box and introducing new art styles to the art community that are outside of the norm.

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An uncharacteristic take on rural black politics, Steven Hahn’s A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration transports readers into a world of faith, power, and family across the rural South. Diving into a period that spans nearly one hundred years, Hahn, an author, specialist, and professor, addresses the political culture of newly freed slaves as they maneuvered through challenges of freedom, Jim Crow laws, and religion. Hahn pens, “ [A Nation under Our Feet] is a book about extraordinary people who did extraordinary things under the most difficult…” (1). The author successfully presents such book in this sequential timeline and geographical mapping from Texas to Virginia. Through his synthesis of vast primary literature on slavery, Civil War South, and the Great Migration, Hahn supports his arguments and presents readers with a new look into the past.

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Soul food is a long time culinary tradition passed down from generation to generation, is joy and proud for many black people. Some soul food, how it is prepared, can be healthy. When it's cooked with more sugar,grains and chemicals it can cause obesity and other health issues such as heart diseases and

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They believed they were getting a good meal for a cheap price without much concern for the effects the food had on their bodies. They became obese quickly and soon began to spread the word about the cheap food even going so far as to telling me I was too thin and that a growing boy needed more food. I of course rejected the food as my parents had taught me good eating habits that I still use

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One of the main arguments made in Hog and Hominy is that Soul Food wasn’t created without outside influence. Opie points out that many of the food types associated with soul were introduced to the Africans by European traders and white plantation owners. He argues “that African cookery was significantly transformed by [European influences], in large part stemming from the commerce that began as a result of, first, the

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The creation of the emancipation proclamation and reconstruction period offered hope to those who were once slaves. Essentially, the end of this treatment led to the loss of a strong capital for plantation owners. Reconstruction became a mission for white southerners to redeem the south and the beginning of a new labor force (Jelks). Post emancipation gave ‘freed’ people false hope and made them fight with strength to make their imprint on the world. James Brown, the King of Soul, went through life experiencing criminalization, labor, self-help, religion, politics and fear similar to that of his ‘freed’ counterparts.

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Though he never understood how slaves, who did not have the best of education, if any, where able to keep up with the events going on around them, though he did remember overhearing his mother and other people speaking about the matter once “I now recall the many late-at-night whispered discussions that I heard my mother and the other slaves on the plantation indulge in. These discussions showed that they understood the situation, and that they kept themselves informed of events by what was termed the "grape-vine" telegraph.” (8) He couldn’t remember a time during his childhood when his entire family sat down to the table together, and the family was able to eat together in a civilized manner. Most often, their meals were “a piece of bread here and a scrap of meat there. It was a cup of milk at one time and some potatoes at another.

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Even though economic influenced the foods that slaves ate, my family still follows the tradition of soul food created by our ancestors. Food just like, art, music, and literature is an authentic expression of a person’s culture (Bower, 2007, p. 46). Throughout the history of African Americans, soul food has provided more than a physical substenance, it has served as a vehicle to preserve blacks African heritage. Slaves had a tradition of eating a lot of cooked greens, slave master rejected turnip greens because they only wanted the turnip (Bower, 2007, p. 48).

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