Session 467: Eating While Black

If you listened to last week’s episode, we explored soul food as a living tradition. We talked about how it continues to evolve, and how we’ve used it as a tool of expression across generations. This week, we’re continuing that conversation by looking at soul food from a wider scope. I’m happy to be joined by one of the leading voices in Black food studies, Dr. Psyche A. Williams-Forson. She is an award-winning scholar and cultural historian whose work explores the connections between food, race, gender, and culture. She’s the author of ‘Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America’ and ‘Building Houses out of Chicken Legs,’ where she invites us to look beyond just the food we’re consuming and ask deeper questions about who gets to define what we eat, and what those definitions say about us and our shared experiences. In this conversation she helps us understand the many ways that food can serve as a lens into cultural memory and how Black communities have created meaning and identity through what we cook and share. Resources & Announcements Want to reflect on this conversation in community? Join us inside our Patreon https://community.therapyforblackgirls.com/ community where we’re unpacking this episode together. You can now catch episodes of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@therapyforblackgirls. Be sure to subscribe to get new episodes every week. Did you know you can leave us a voice note with your questions for the podcast? If you have a question you'd like some feedback on, topics you'd like to hear covered, or want to suggest movies or books for us to review, drop us a message at memo.fm/therapyforblackgirls https://memo.fm/therapyforblackgirls and let us know what’s on your mind. We just might share it on the podcast. Grab your copy of Sisterhood Heals. https://www.sisterhoodheals.com/ Where to Find Our Guest Instagram https://www.instagram.com/buildinghouses9 Website https://psychewilliamsforson.com/ Stay Connected​https://click.convertkit-mail.com/27uv20p9mpioh8edr34s8ug63w344hg/58hvh8ug08p6wzc6/dGhlcmFweWZvcmJsYWNrZ2lybHMuY29tb3JibGFja2dpcmxzLmNvbS9wYXRyZW9u Is there a topic you'd like covered on the podcast? Submit it at therapyforblackgirls.com/mailbox https://www.therapyforblackgirls.com/mailbox. If you're looking for a therapist in your area, check out the directory at https://www.therapyforblackgirls.com/directory. Grab your copy of our guided affirmation and other TBG Merch at therapyforblackgirls.com/shop https://therapyforblackgirls.com/shop. The hashtag for the podcast is #TBGinSession. Make sure to follow us on social media: Instagram: @therapyforblackgirls https://www.instagram.com/therapyforblackgirls Facebook: @therapyforblackgirls https://www.facebook.com/therapyforblackgirls Our Production Team Executive Producers: Dennison Bradford & Gabrielle Collins Director of Podcast & Digital Content: Ellice Ellis Producers: Tyree Rush & Ndeye Thioubou Production Assistant: Bria Mosley See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast, a weekly conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or to find a therapist in your area, visit our website at therapyforblackgirls.com. While I hope you love listening to and learning from the podcast, it is not meant to be a substitute for a relationship with a licensed mental health professional.

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  Hey, y'all. Thanks so much for joining me for session 467 of the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast. We'll get right into our conversation after a word from our sponsors.

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• 2:50Speaker 00

  If you listened to last week's episode, we explored soul food as a living tradition. We talked about how it continues to evolve, and how we've used it as a tool of expression across generations. This week, we're continuing that conversation by looking at soul food from a wider scope. I'm happy to be joined by one of the leading voices in Black food studies, Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson. She's an award-winning scholar and cultural historian, whose work explores the connections between food, race, gender, and culture. She's the author of Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America, and Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, where she invites us to look beyond just the food we're consuming and ask deeper questions about who gets to define what we eat,

• 3:35Speaker 00

  and what those definitions say about us and our shared experiences. In today's conversation, Dr. Psyche helps us understand the many ways that food can serve as a lens into cultural memory, and how Black communities have created meaning and identity through what we cook and share. If something resonates with you while enjoying our conversation, please share with us on social media using the hashtag #TBGInSession. Or, join us over in our Patreon to talk more about the episode. You can join us at community.therapyforblackgirls.com. Here's our conversation.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Psyche.

• 4:16Speaker 05

  Thank you. Thank you for having me.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  So you have spent, it feels like, your entire career really studying food beyond just sustenance? What made you realize that food really reveals something deeper about ourselves and the way we live our lives?

• 4:31Speaker 05

  Wow, that's a great question. So yes, I began studying food around 1991, 1990. When I began to really study the food itself, not so much the preparation process, but the context of all of that, right? So how food is procured or gotten, who's preparing it, when and how and in what circumstances it is consumed. When you start to look at those elements of food studies, you realize that food is about more than just consumption.

• 5:12Speaker 05

  There are so many different emotions, of course, we know around food. But also, there are a lot of symbolisms around that are often invisible or that are used to manipulate or control or challenge or, in other words, affect people's lives. So food is about more than just coming together and having a great time. Food actually does a lot of heavy lifting in causing a lot of tension, quite frankly.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Hmm, can you say more about that?

• 5:46Speaker 05

  Sure. I mean, one of the obvious examples that we might think about are the ways in which food... I'm mad at my spouse. I'm mad at my partner, so I'm not gonna cook, right?

• 6:03Speaker 05

  Withholding food, right? Certainly during enslavement, two things happen, both during the Middle Passage and certainly after. Enslaved people often refused to eat. Right? And so we're forcibly forced to eat. And for two reasons. I'll starve myself before I feed myself so that you can then subject me to the horrors of bondage. On the other hand, we need to feed these people because we have a labor supply. Each one of these humans who we are looking at as chattel costs money. In more contemporary times, the ways in which, in a workplace setting, for example,

• 6:47Speaker 05

  we're ordering coffee and there are segments of the community at your workplace who only ever drink tea. Culturally, that's their ritual. Those are the kinds of signals knowingly and unknowingly that get used around food that really do land very heavily on people. You're having a, an event and you have vegetarians and you never take into consideration the people who are vegetarian. Right? So those kinds of activities often, as I said, they may be performed unintentionally, but then there are times that they are very deliberate.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  Right. Thank you so much for that. I mean, because I think we tend to think about food as like a celebration, right? Like you mentioned earlier, but there are some very intentional and sometimes unintentional ways that it feels like food can be used to exclude or include.

• 7:37Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I just will add, after the first election of the current president, we at our university and then our department had a lot of young people who were very concerned about going home for Thanksgiving. Many of them are queer identified and had great concern for what this particular political moment meant for who they are and how they identify, right?

• 8:05Speaker 05

  And so we held a town hall to say, these are some of the things you want to think about as you are talking with your family. Because Thanksgiving dinner, the mixing and bringing together of people, of in-laws, stepparents, stepchildren, really does become one of the most, and can be one of the most explosive meal situations, even as it's supposed to be a time of coming together in family and so forth.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I remember lots of conversations then as well about just how do you talk to your families? If there are different political views and those kinds of things, yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 05

  Correct, correct. And that tends to happen over food, right? Which is why we say we don't talk about food, we don't talk about politics, religion, sexuality, and other kinds of topics over meals. Even though we tend to let our guard down when we're eating and dining, because it's a time of commonality, it's a time of coming together, it's a time, as Shanti Rees says in her new book, of gathering, right? But that time of gathering can really be fraught with other kinds of tensions as well.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  So Dr. Saki, how would you define food studies?

• 9:19Speaker 05

  Well, that's a great question. So I'm just back from the College Language Association meeting, which was held in Jackson, Mississippi over last week. And this conversation came up quite a bit because, of course, we were thinking about, on a broad level, through conversations of literature, how we talk about in foodways and the many various levels of that. Food Studies for me, their conference was around soul food, soul work, and soul legacies. So they were looking at family faith as a foundation through this notion of food. So for me, this is really important because when I entered food studies in the 90s, it was a relatively new field, right?

• 10:05Speaker 05

  It was a very new field. It had been around for maybe about 20 years. A lot of nutritionists, several humanists, some folks in the social science, a lot of anthropologists had been studying food and they were really looking at food systems and the ways in which, for example, from an African American point of view, the ways in which enslaved populations were fed, not fed what they ate and so forth. But food studies as a whole was really just evolving. The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is our industry news journal or news portal, had done an article that said food studies is scholarship lite, right? So it

• 10:45Speaker 05

  doesn't really have a lot of scholarship behind it. Well, the field responded vehemently and said quite the opposite. And so you had all of this writing that has come out saying, this is food studies, this food study, this, this, this. So now you have almost every discipline looking at food from the culinary and that is the sort of preparatory ways of engaging food, Texas barbecue, Delta barbecue, this kind of thing, to individual food stuffs, right? Tomatoes, oranges, avocados, chicken in my case. Then you've had the nutrition

• 11:24Speaker 05

  side. Now you have mental health. So everybody now is looking at food. That really is in the main how we understand food studies. It's interdisciplinary project, right? So any and every discipline can really look at how we understand the ways in which food exists in our lives and the ways in which we interact with it. Art, Brian Terry's book on black food, for example, which involves art, music, dance, the digital. So everyone has a say in how do we understand the ways in which food affects people's everyday life.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  And in your book, Eating While Black, you talk about the ways that black people and the way we eat and what we eat are often watched. Can you talk about why it felt important to write about that and what were you hoping to really convey in your book, Eating While Black?

• 12:19Speaker 05

  Sure. So when I wrote Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power, which was my doctoral thesis, I wrote that book because several cultural moments happened.

• 12:35Speaker 05

  Most familiar of which would be that Tiger Woods won the Masters Tournament for the first time. And a fellow golfer had made a remark to him because apparently when you win the Masters, you not only get the coveted green jacket, but you choose whatever meal you want. And a fellow golfer had told him not to order chicken and collard greens, right? And so a couple of other issues happened as well, which led me to think about, hmm, it was the turn of the century. And I'm like, black people are still being associated with fried chicken, chicken and watermelon, right? As a stereotype. So that's how I started down the road for building houses.

• 13:19Speaker 05

  Midway through that writing process, I decided the approach that I was taking at that time of looking primarily at the stereotype was really focusing on a deficit model of exploring black communities, black food culture, black culture in general. And I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to look at our culture and our cultural ways through the lens of other people and how they see us. I was more interested in how we see ourselves, right? Sometimes we do see ourselves through the lens of stereotypes, but that's not the whole question, way of looking. And I knew that from my own life experience, right?

• 13:58Speaker 05

  So I start with that because while I was traveling throughout the country, sharing my research on building houses and my methods and so forth, and just the overall book, the food landscape in America was changing. Dollar Tree and other dollar stores were starting to get refrigeration, right? So contrary to what people might think, Dollar Tree specifically and Dollar General and so, they didn't always have refrigeration, right? They mostly were just a sort of five and dime, Kmart, you pick up an item here or there. But they started adding things like juice and milk and bread.

• 14:42Speaker 05

  And I started thinking, hmm, who's buying food from the Dollar Tree, right? But over time, as my daughter Started to attend a birthday party every weekend and I had to be back in the Dollar Tree getting little gifts and things. I'm like, oh, this is a one-stop shop. So that started happening. The other thing that started happening is this push to grow your own food. Which was a regurgitated conversation. This isn't the first time we've talked about this, right? At cycles in our history, United States Americans have often said, oh, we need to push grow your own food for the democracy. So this started happening again. But the other thing that started happening was a lot of moralizing.

• 15:27Speaker 05

  Started. People would come up to me and say, how do we get people to stop eating at McDonald's? Or how do we get people to grow their own food? Or what should I do when I want to go into this community and build a garden? Most of these were white people. But there were a fair number of black folks who would ask me how to stop people from eating fast food. And it began to take on this sort of, again, moralistic ethical tone of you're wrong and shame on you for eating the way that you do.

• 16:01Speaker 05

  And I decided that this was a larger conversation that permeated a lot of different layers and that I felt like we needed to talk about.

• 16:14Speaker 05

  What does it mean to be black and eat in America? Because from the first time our feet hit the shore, we had been embroiled in issues of food. We were brought here because of our agricultural knowledge. And yet we were deprived of the very sustenance that we were able to provide for other people. Through 400 years of enslavement, reconstruction, the nadir of black American society, and then the Renaissance's and civil rights, food has been at the center, Woolworth's lunch counter.

• 16:52Speaker 05

  Right? Pivotal moments, right? And so I decided that it was important for us to have a larger conversation about the ways in which Black people's human bodies continue to be policed, even when we do something as mundane as eating. So that's really what was the genesis for Eating While Black.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  And Dr. Zaki, can you talk about? You mentioned that even mental health is a part of the conversation around food studies. And as a psychologist, I'm also now thinking, as you're talking, about the impact that that has on your relationship to yourself and your relationship to food, that something as mundane as eating is hyper visible, right? Can you talk a little bit about that?

• 17:42Speaker 05

  Sure. I fell into that topic, actually, Dr. Joy, because the Counseling Center at the University of Maryland asked me if I would give a talk on Black women and eating. And this was before Eating While Black. And so I did give that talk, and the title was, "You Don't Have to Give Up the Corn Pudding." Because, again, it was about Black women and the quandary of food, right? Because conversations tend to be very two-dimensional. You either do this, or you do that, right? You either eat this, you eat like this. You eat dirty, you eat clean, right?

• 18:24Speaker 05

  Because that was the other thing that started coming out of all of this, "I eat clean." What the heck? What does that even mean? And it's amazing, because so many people who have never in their lives taken a medical course have all this information about how you should eat.

• 18:41Speaker 05

  And with social media, of course, this is even more widely disseminated. Bodies, which previously rounded, and we know African bodies have always tended to be rounded, which were heralded in many cultures, are now seen as unruly, as my colleagues have said, unruly Black bodies, which is an actual manuscript. And so all of that tends to affect one psyche. I had the good fortune of being on a panel earlier this year.

• 19:20Speaker 05

  And we read the book Big Girl, right? And it was a coming of age story about a young black woman

• 19:29Speaker 05

  just trying to come to terms with her eating and her size. And it was a sad book and it was also a celebratory book. But it was really hard to read Mecca Jamila Sullivan's book, Big Girl. It's fascinating reading, but the challenges that these young black women were going through with food. So that's what led me into this conversation around them to health. Around this time, and I talk about this extensively in Eating While Black, The Washington Post did an expose called Young Lives at Risk and they were talking about obesity. And they did, they covered the entire DMV and they covered different demographics.

• 20:11Speaker 05

  But the story, of course, that stuck out most for me was the young story of Latricia, the young girl who I talk about in Eating While Black. Because as I'm trained, I study food, but I am trained as a material culturalist. Meaning I study the material world and how people connect with objects. What do things mean to us? Why do we dress the way we do? Why do we adorn ourselves the way that we do? What do our accoutrement artwork, what do those things mean and say about us? So I was fascinated by the way in which The Washington Post did this expose

• 20:54Speaker 05

  because it really victimized this young woman, right? Both the visual expose and the story essentially went like this.

• 21:08Speaker 05

  Here's Latricia and Latricia is ridiculed as being King Kong by her classmates. She doesn't fit in, she eats too much, she needs to lose weight. She's trying, but she doesn't have enough willpower. Poor Latricia, let's give her a big go, Latricia.

• 21:28Speaker 05

  That's the way the story read.

• 21:32Speaker 05

  The more I worked with that story, it just didn't sit well with me. For one, because I had a daughter around Latricia's age. And I knew what she was experiencing. And I tell this story in Eating While Black, how she and other black and brown children were asked to get on the scale. And then the teacher read their weight out loud and they were in third or fourth grade. And then made a comment like, some of you won't make it into adulthood because you're obese.

• 22:03Speaker 05

  For children, of course, I had to have choice words with the principal, but for children, what that does to their psyche, and especially girls, right? Oh, I feel like I'm the fat friend. I don't like being the fat friend. Nobody likes me. Those things carry with us into adulthood, as we know.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  Any of us on social media can see on any given day, you might see a full figure person working out. And literally, people will be coming at them.

• 22:36Speaker 05

  I mean, which, it's almost like if you're a full figure, you should be in shame until you're ready to come out and present yourself to the world, right? And so here you have this intersection of food and body and image and mental health, right? Because part of what I talk about in the story

• 22:57Speaker 05

  is the details that the story gives without going into it. You almost could read Latricia's story as being in foster care, if you know anything about the foster care system.

• 23:10Speaker 05

  Because she just all of a sudden appears in this woman's life. And this woman is her caretaker, but not her parent or her grandparent. We don't know if Latricia has been separated from her sisters. We don't know anything. What we know is she's learning these really important life skills, sewing, cooking. But it all gets whittled down to she cooks soul food and she eats like this all the time.

• 23:41Speaker 05

  And so as a people, those kinds of narratives does something to our psyche. It will, right? Because it it says you're not acceptable unless you conform to a particular standard and ideal. And then it begins to assign a very colonized mindset to what should be an experience of joy, eating a different kind of social and cultural meal on a holiday. It makes you question your own self-worth. Right? So all of that are parts of what I tease out in that story about literature.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  More from our conversation after the break.

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• 28:22Speaker 00

  You've talked about soul food a couple of times and it doesn't feel like there is any other particular food especially associated with the black community that has been more impacted by moralizing than soul food, right? And that definitely has shaped our relationship to it. Can you talk just about the ways that like our thoughts and the stereotypes around soul food has made it either something that people have really kind of wanted to embrace? Or have at some points, I think, felt ashamed of and felt like this is a bad thing? That I don't want to necessarily have this as a part of my diet?

• 28:53Speaker 05

  Right. Yeah. Yeah. Soul food is big, right? I don't think that there's any other culture who has their food demonized in such a way. So, black folks have always eaten in a variety of ways, right? Because we've lived in a variety of places. Yes, the majority of black people in the United States came through the mouth of the South by virtue of enslavement.

• 29:22Speaker 05

  But there were free blacks as well. And there were black folks who have always lived along the eastern seaboard on up to the area of New England. So, I start with that because that means we've had a variety of palates. In the 60s, when a black journalist said, "Black people, the Negro has no culture." Amiri Baraka, poet, essayist, came out and said, "Oh, contrary, we very much do. We have black music. We have a way of talking. We have a way of walking. We have our own food. All of it has soul." And he said, "And these are the foods that you might find in soul: fried chicken, fried

• 30:05Speaker 05

  fish, sweet potatoes, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, or any kind of greens, pig feet, pork chops, all of that, smothered pork chop, right?" And so, a lot of people said, "Those are southern foods." Quite true. And what Mary Baraka was saying is it's a way in which we do it. It's a way in which we put these combinations together. It's a way in which we, as Verda May Grovner said, season by vibration and don't always use measuring. So that really is soul food. So you can say it's soul food tofu. Can it be tofu? Can it be pumpkin pie?

• 30:47Speaker 05

  Can it be the way that we here in Maryland, for example, cook our crab? Can that be soul food? And I say, yes, and it's how you choose to cook it, right? It's how you choose to throw it down. Here's what the writers of soul, soul men say. It's a way of keeping on keeping when you don't have any other way of being. It's how you keep on keeping, right? So it's the way that you put some beans in a pot and you throw some smoked turkey or you smoked chicken or you smoked ham hock or neck bone. And you got one bay leaf and a spoonful of sugar or salt or pepper or what have you. And that's it.

• 31:32Speaker 05

  And that's your pot, right? It's a way of being. So when people talk about the demonization of soul food, you're rejecting a historical understanding without an understanding of the history. I'm a disassociate from that. I was on a panel at this conference I just came back from, celebrating Gino Lee, who was a multi-generational entrepreneur of a restaurant called Big Apple Inn. And Big Apple Inn is noted for two types of food, red smokes and pig ears. As I'm sitting facing the audience and Mr. Lee and I are chatting,

• 32:16Speaker 05

  when I tell you the looks on some people's faces as he's talking about these pig ears and how he makes them and cuts them in the gristle. And, and I understand that because we all have various tastes, et cetera. But it was interesting to watch, right? It's also part of our respectability politics. Black folk have it bad. We have that thing bad. And that comes out of a generation of.

• 32:45Speaker 05

  Post enslavement, but also prior to that, wanting to be accepted in a society that was never designed to accept us.

• 32:57Speaker 05

  We eat a lot of different things. We eat a lot of different things. But what I'm fascinated by

• 33:05Speaker 05

  are the ways in which we again combine seasonings to make a thing palatable to our way of tasting. Right now circulating on social media is this, all this craze around cabbage. Right? How you cook cabbage. Now, many of us grew up with it boiled or whatever. But nowadays they're like, hey, you put in there, you throw the oil and the butter and Old Bay and all of these seasonings and you roast it for a little while. And then it comes out and it's, I say to myself sometimes, it's so black. It's just so black because all of the oozing of all of those stuff. And that's the way we do things, right?

• 33:46Speaker 05

  Versus some other cultures that don't season as well or its flavor. So it would be great if we would both celebrate

• 33:56Speaker 05

  the creativity and our ingenuity in the things we do with food. And be okay to allow each other to both accept and reject various foods without feeling like we have to cast any judgment on, on one another.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  The conversation around soul food often feels like it is framed in this making something out of nothing, right? Like that's the story of how we got to soul food. Do you feel like there is something that's left out of the conversation when we frame it that way?

• 34:23Speaker 05

  Yes, and I say this all the time. I know that's a nice nostalgic point of we made do. And that is true. That is not true. But let's talk about how we made do.

• 34:38Speaker 05

  We were the original planters, along with indigenous people.

• 34:43Speaker 05

  We have always been cunning and ingenious in how we plant in plain view, so that nobody can see it. So, yeah, we had to make do sometimes with the little bit that was given to us. But we also have to remember that many of us, depending upon what type of plantation you are, or what farm you were on, because not everything is gone with the wind, right? Some people were just on the farm. Some enslaved people just lived at a house with another family. Even if you grew something in a pot, in a window, you were supplementing. And I think it's important for us to expand that conversation of making do,

• 35:25Speaker 05

  to look at the ways in which we literally did a multifaceted kind of way of survival, in the same ways that we are doing today. This is why I push the Dollar Tree and Walmart and other places where you can get your food, because we have never only relied upon one source. The making do comes from, this is what was given to us, the ol' fool, the leftovers.

• 35:52Speaker 05

  Case in point, Mr. Jean O'Leary said, "They started out only doing smokes." And then one day, a man came to his grandfather and said, "Hey, I got this thing of pig ears that I'm about to throw away. Do you want them?" His grandfather said, "Yeah, don't throw those away. I can, I'll figure out something." Next thing you know, he's making pig ear sandwiches. You can say that's making do, but it has expanded his business exponentially, because the thing that apparently is the favorite is the pig ear sandwiches down there, right? So we've always been able to be creative with food and other stuff.

• 36:29Speaker 05

  And so when we talk about making do, I'm all for it as long as we're going to talk about it not from a deficit, but from the standpoint of highlighting our ingenuity and creativity. We make it do what it do is really more of the concept, really more than just making do. We can take, I saw a Latino man yesterday, I think he was Latino online. He said, I have one dollar and I'm gonna make a meal. And he went in the store and he bought a cup of beans. He bought one pep, they gave him the pepper. He bought a tomato and onion. And he made a pot of beans, right?

• 37:11Speaker 05

  We're doing that, this is in 2026, right? So it's part of the creative process born out of a country that has never given a dag on about people who were downtrodden, people who were without, people who were impoverished. And so being able to say, we made it work, I think is celebratory way more than it is, oh, Lord, you know, we always just had the drudges of life. True. And that's part of why we got sold because we know how to keep on keeping on.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  You've referenced the food being present in like the dollar stores and family dollars and those kinds of things. And I'm from Louisiana and I feel like I remember at what point that started happening, right? But it feels like for you, that feels like a seminal, like a turning point in the ways that you're framing your work. Why does it feel like that is so important? What do you feel like that marked for you?

• 38:08Speaker 05

  Because it was. I grew up in Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, Dollar General, and none of those places. They had canned things, maybe. And I even remember when cans came into being. But to input refrigeration, I remember, again, first it started with bread, then it was eggs and milk, and then a few breakfast items and orange juice. And I said, huh, this is interesting. And this would have been around 2003 or four. Why it's so critical is because

• 38:47Speaker 05

  It suggested a way that people who were on fixed incomes and other ways of minor and minimal subsistence could actually afford to eat. I talk about this in Eating While Black. A black woman wrote a book because she was feeding her mother from the Dollar Tree. And she wrote a whole book on the Dollar Tree recipes and meals because her mother was on a fixed income. Right? And she would buy all of her sort of staples at the Dollar Tree. And then they would buy the fresh food additives at the local grocery store. What made the pivot so interesting to me is right down the street from what was then my local Dollar Tree

• 39:31Speaker 05

  was what we call Giant Supermarket here in Maryland, which was a major big box supermarket. And I went in there one time, one of the, before I just started doing online shopping. And they had all of these items for a dollar. I said, huh?

• 39:51Speaker 05

  And they were less than a mile from the Dollar Tree. So that's when I knew it was something important. Because if your local grocery store is in competition with your Dollar Tree, then that means something's going on and there's an important thing happening.

• 40:08Speaker 05

  Also, that phenomenon was critical because, again, when you have people who are on a fixed income and maybe are taking medication and have to eat to take their medication. These kinds of ways of buying food become very important to one's overall ability to survive.

• 40:29Speaker 05

  Post-COVID, now that Dollar Tree is now a dollar twenty-five and up, it's not as, it's still helpful, but not as much in the sense that the prices are unpredictable. You don't know if you're going to be getting juice for a dollar, a dollar twenty-five, a dollar fifty or more. And that makes it very difficult for people who are challenged to eat and people who are food insecure on a daily basis. And that can be from the college adjunct professor to the student, to the aging, to the construction worker, on, on down to the unemployed.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  Dr. Psyki, I want to go back to the soul food conversation a little bit because I want to know, who do you think gets to define, like, who is the authority on what soul food is?

• 41:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's a really good question. Who is the gatekeeper? Well, you know, I think that I would, to answer that question, I would go back to early cookbooks, the earliest black cookbooks in the black community that talk about soul food. How do they define it? Because they would have come up in the era in which soul food as a term was created. You know, Jessica Harris, who's a noted food historian and culinary historian, would say, these are foods that everybody ate, right? Absolutely, they are. But you cannot remove the critical

• 41:54Speaker 05

  element of the political intervention that Amary Baraka made. He was very specific to say, black people have a culture, and our culture is exemplified by the word soul, straight at the heart. It comes from the heart. It comes from deep inside of who we are. That's why I said, is tofu soul? Can you soul food tofu? Yeah, you can. You fry it up and you add some spices and some seeds. So is it a way of cooking? Is it what is cooked? What is soul food? And so to answer your question about who gets to decide, I think if you

• 42:35Speaker 05

  go back to those early cookbooks, during the time in which Amary Baraka coined that term, you will see that there was, we had at least one early black vegan soul cookbook, right? And then you had a number of other articles and so forth, in Ebony, in Jet, in places like that, they're saying, yes, we're going to have this food, that food, what have you. Sometimes they call it soul, sometimes they didn't. They just talked about the way it was cooked.

• 43:05Speaker 05

  Do I think that's a concept that stays within the Black community? Absolutely. I'm with the people on threads. We don't need to tell everything, right? Because that's part of our cultural lifeways. But in terms of what defines soul, I think if you're cooking a meal and you're cooking it using a particular technique

• 43:30Speaker 05

  or techniques, stewing it down and adding various spices and things, then you're cooking in a particular way that mirrors what was really identified as soul. And that's important. That's important therapeutically, Dr. Joy. That's important to our psyches as Black people, to be able to define something in our everyday life that defines and adds to who we see ourselves as being. The creatives, the ingenues, those who are able to pivot on a dime, those who continue to keep on keeping on, all of that is embodied by our food.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  More from our conversation after the break.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?

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• 46:23Speaker 06

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Ledge. How does music actually enter your mind?

• 46:45Speaker 07

  I'm not sure why or how the music comes to me, but I think people who love music and write music, our brains are just filled with music.

• 46:54Speaker 06

  Right.

• 46:55Speaker 07

  Like, we have listened to so much music. We've been a part of so much music. I think of the story that I want to tell, the mood that I want to create with the music, start playing chords, see where they lead me.

• 47:06Speaker 06

  Sometimes, I'm just not even thinking about music, right? And I hear this little thing, and I go, "Oh, that could be this."

• 47:16Speaker 07

  You know, you just have to be ready.

• 47:18Speaker 06

  Ready for when the inspiration hits. It comes. Yeah. Experience before the moment. The Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  Host Nora McInerney is back for an all new season of The Head Start, embracing the journey brought to you in partnership with AbbVie. In each episode, Nora has honest conversations with real people living with chronic migraine. People who are figuring out how to adapt, advocate, and stay connected to the things that bring them joy. This season, she's revisiting familiar voices and introducing new ones who will share their stories about what it means to live with this condition. From the missed moments to the strategies that help them keep going when things feel uncertain. As always, she'll be joined by headache specialist, Dr. Christopher Rhine, who offers insight into these challenges and the questions many of us have. If you're new to the podcast, check out the three previous seasons, each one offering a different perspective

• 48:14Speaker 00

  on this condition and the theme of resilience, displayed while navigating it. So don't miss season four of The Head Start, Embracing the Journey. Listen on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  If someone started with food as a way into Black American history, where do you think that would take them?

• 48:35Speaker 05

  Where do I think it would take them is undefinable. It could take them in any number of directions. It depends on where they're trying to go. And let's say if they said, I don't know where I want to go. I just want to start. Well, there's a couple of really important books that I would encourage them to take a look at. One is Toni Tipton Martin's The Jemima Code. And she goes through every single black cookbook that was published up until 2017 or something when the book came out. You're going to get a whole history lesson in that. Certainly, anything by Jessica Harris, where she talks again about different recipes and so forth.

• 49:18Speaker 05

  Because what those texts do is they give you an entry point into.

• 49:24Speaker 05

  Understanding a large part of Black America, right? Of course, High on the Hog is a documentary. It gives you a lot of different, and that's also a Harris documentary. Gives you a very wide understanding of, hey, Black folk had barbecue down in Texas and also, but it's different over here in Mississippi, it's different over in the Carolinas. Fred Opie's book on soul food is very important. He talks about migration and so forth. My work is going to take you into the ways in which food and power get manifested, right? And so there are a lot of really good spaces where you can start.

• 50:03Speaker 05

  Monica White's book on freedom farmers talks about the ways in which food and farming and the civil rights movement and other social movements were very much a part of Black experiences. Ashanti Reese and Hannah Garth have work about food justice and social justice and the ways in which we've always, from the Panthers and Hamer, but also Gloria Richardson and the tons of unknown Black women and men who did things with food in order to get us through pivotal points in time that we are now seeing being worked overtime to reverse, right? Food has always been a bedrock for us as a people,

• 50:48Speaker 05

  not only because it's why we're here, many of us, in terms of generations of ancestors and the knowledge that we had of how to work the land. George Washington Carver, right, Tuskegee Institute. So it, for us as Black people, it goes way beyond, this is what I'm eating today for lunch or dinner. It is the bedrock of who we are as a society, as a culture of people. And the many, many, many fascinating things we've done with food from historically to today. And the numerous black chefs, Michelin star or not, who are laboring.

• 51:31Speaker 05

  And I don't just want to look at the chefs, I want to look at the behind the scenes people, right? The waiters, the busboys, the dishwashers, the short order cooks. All of them deserve, the sommelier, all of them deserve the shout outs. And so often we pinpoint and we lean into one, the chefs, soul food, and the Black Families Union, if you will. Black food ways is so much bigger, starting with your own household onward, right? And I feel like we as a people are eclectic enough. And we should be willing enough to allow people to get in where they fit in.

• 52:13Speaker 05

  Right? So maybe your conversation is around short order cooks, have at it. Maybe yours is on Mr. Tenderism. Maybe yours is on, again, the Black Family Union. Maybe yours is on the Michelin star chefs, the Marcus Samuelsons. Wherever you get in, that's where you are, and it's room enough for all of us. And for God's sake, there's way more to study than just soul food. Whole lot of unsaid conversations that still need to be had around how black people have eaten and continue to eat in America.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  What would you say it means to eat with pride?

• 52:57Speaker 05

  Does it feel good for you? Does it taste good for you?

• 53:04Speaker 05

  Does it represent something for you? Then I think you're eating with pride, right?

• 53:11Speaker 05

  I think we all are at a place in our lives as a society where we maybe can eat smaller portions as a society of people. But that's part of the largesse of being in America. Interestingly, I don't think there's ever any one way of doing a thing, right? Because while we have a collective racial pride, we also have multi-level regional pride. Like, right? You're from Louisiana. I'm from Virginia. We're both from the South. But we have very different ways of defining the South. As I found out when my roommate and I, who's also from Louisiana, back when we were in grad school, and she said, you know what?

• 53:54Speaker 05

  I've never had collard greens. And I had never heard of zatterains, right? And it was so funny because she kept her zatterains and I made my collard greens. And we're still best friends to this day. And recently, she's like, I gotta learn how to make collard green. But we're both, again, eating with pride because she was very clear, don't touch that zatterain. Because back then, it wasn't in every store. She had to get it from Louisiana, from New Orleans. And so we had different ways of showing our cultures.

• 54:31Speaker 05

  But we did it in a way that allowed us to share with each other and with our larger communities. And I think that's important. That's really important. And I talk about that in Eating While Black, because I talk about how she wanted a couple of her really close friends to eat some hot sausage. And I'm sure you know, being from Louisiana, the hot sausage you're talking about. And she did this whole thing, invited us over. Her daddy sent this sausage up. And then she cooked it. And I was like, oh, my God. I said, you know what, girl? I don't eat pork.

• 55:08Speaker 00

  You don't eat pork?

• 55:10Speaker 05

  I was like, how did you not know that? I don't eat pork. So we had one friend in the group and he ate it. And he said, this tastes like kielbasa. And it was such a devastating moment for her because so much preparation and stuff had gone into it. And, and I admit this in the book and I felt like we dismissed it. And recently, that same friend who said it feels, tastes like kielbasa called her and said, what's the name of that sausage you get? Cause I'm about to make. My point is that that's pride, right? And giving each other space to be human and beautifully human and beautifully different. I think as Jill Scott talks about is so key to our engagement with food.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  It has been such a pleasure to chat with you today, Dr. Psyche. Please let us know where we can stay connected with you. What is your website and any social media channels you'd like to share?

• 55:57Speaker 05

  Great, thank you. And I appreciate it. It's been a great conversation. My website is psychewilliamsforson.com. And you can just, even if you misspell it, I'm sure Google will correct it. And then I am on threads and Facebook and Instagram at Building Houses 9. So it's pretty easy, Building Houses 9. Nowadays, they all feed into each other. So I look forward to hearing from anyone and to expand the conversations. We may agree, we may disagree, but the bottom line is we're having a good conversation about a really important topic, I think, and one that, that touches each and every one of us in our day to day life.

• 56:39Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Thank you so much. We'll be sure to include those in our show notes.

• 56:44Speaker 05

  Great. Thank you very much for having me.

• 56:46Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I'm so glad Dr. Psyche was able to join me for today's conversation. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If you want to learn more about her and her work, be sure to visit the show notes at therapyforblackgirls.com/session467. And don't forget to text this episode to two of your girls right now and tell them to check it out. Did you know that you could leave us a voicemail with your questions or suggestions for the podcast? Let us know what's on your mind by dropping us a message at memo.fm/therapyforblackgirls. We just might feature it on the podcast. If you're looking for a therapist in your area, visit our directory at therapyforblackgirls.com/directory.

• 57:30Speaker 00

  Don't forget to follow us on Instagram at @therapyforblackgirls and come on over and join us in our Patreon for exclusive updates, behind the scenes content, and much more. You can join us at community.therapyforblackgirls.com. This episode was produced by Elise Ellis, Inde Chubu, and Tyree Rush. Editing was done by Denison Bradford. Thank y'all so much for joining me again this week. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you all real soon. Take good care.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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