B I G\u00a0 M A M A\u00a0 H A D\u00a0 A\u00a0 B I G\u00a0 H E A R T\u00a0 A T T A C K\u00a0 A N D\u00a0 Y O U \u2019 R E\u00a0 S T I L L
\nI G N O R I N G\u00a0 W H Y<\/p>\n
I know that everyone has their memories of the movie, Soul Food. Yet,
\nall I can remember is the message that I got from it, which is that food
\nkills! Big Mama is a symbolic person that is too often seen in the Black
\ncommunity. The woman who knows how to cook, and is feeding her
\nwhole family a slow (or fast) death. This death is brought on by food
\nthat is so-called, \u201cgood for the soul,\u201d yet, it screws up the body with
\nhigh blood pressure or hypertension, diabetes and a host of other
\nPREVENTABLE diseases. Because Africans in North America
\nhave lost many aspects of their varied cultures during
\nenslavement, holding onto Soul Food is seen as retaining one\u2019s
\nconnection to Africa. The truth is that Soul Food, nowadays, has
\nbeen warped and it ain\u2019t the same as it was during slavery. Now
\nthat your internet-having and library-card-possessing ass has access to
\nmore information, you need to take ownership of Soul Food. You
\n63
\nneed to make this heritage cuisine work for you, instead of making
\nyour whole family diseased and sending them to an early grave.
\nWhat is Soul Food?
\nLike Jazz, Soul Food is a unique North American creation that is a
\ndirect result of the Maafa (See \u201cIn the Ghetto). Enslaved Africans in
\nNorth America combined different foods, taking a little bit of this and
\na little bit of that, resulting in some good eating. The foods involved in
\nSoul Food came from
\nthree main sources.<\/p>\n
African Sources
\nLet\u2019s be clear. Whites didn\u2019t just steal people from Africa. In fact, in
\ntheir brains, they weren\u2019t stealing people, but RESOURCES. A
\nresource isn\u2019t only a person, they also stole precious minerals, oil, etc.
\nAlong with these resources, whites took food. Africans also brought
\nover a lot of food on their own, as seeds that were braided in young
\ngirls\u2019 hair, or as seeds that were embedded in clothing. A lot of these
\nfoods could not grow in a European climate, so whites were
\ncompletely unfamiliar with how to cultivate these crops. Even in the
\nAmericas, these crops were totally tended by enslaved Africans. One
\nsuch crop was rice, which grows in a tropical environment that whites
\ncould not tolerate. Other crops that came straight from Africa were
\nindigo, okra, sorghum, kola nut, sesame seed and various melons.<\/p>\n
Indian (Native American) Sources
\nWhen enslaved Africans were brought to North America, many of
\nthem weren\u2019t down with being enslaved to white people. Some ran
\naway. Others led all-out war and revolts against white slave owners.
\nThis brought Africans in contact with the various Indian Nations who
\nwere in the Southeast, such as the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw,
\nCreek and Seminole. In many cases, formerly enslaved Africans were
\nincorporated in Indian communities. Even those Africans that
\nremained enslaved still interacted with various Indian peoples. This
\nclose connection allowed Africans and Indians a fruitful cultural
\nexchange. One thing that happened is that Southern Indian foods and
\ncooking techniques like boiling beans and curing meat over smoked
\nhickory, found their way into modern Soul Food cooking. This
\nbecame a way of preserving some of the cooking traditions found
\namong Southern Indian Nations.<\/p>\n
White Sources
\nWhites\u2019 primary contributions to Soul
\nFood were the pig and the cow. In
\nEurope, during colonial times, whites
\nbasically used every part of an animal.
\nHowever, once it was found out that corn
\ndoubles as a key source of feed for
\nlivestock, white Americans increased their
\nmeat production to a degree that was
\nsubstantially higher than the rest of the
\nworld. This led to greater consumption,
\nand the current statistic, which is that
\nAmericans eat three to five times the
\namount of animal protein than the rest of
\nthe world. Because meat was in such
\nabundance, wealthy whites in the
\nAmericas could choose to only eat
\ncertain, choice cuts of pork and beef. Only in the Americas did the
\nnotion of, \u201ceating high on the hog\u201d develop. So, while it is true that
\nBlacks were given the scraps of the pig and cow, the reality is that poor
\nwhites were already eating pig intestines, head cheeses and jowls. Poor
\nwhites actually showed Blacks how to prepare pig and cow innards.
\nWhile whites typically seasoned these dishes only with salt, Blacks also
\nused various other seasonings, including onion, garlic, bay leaf and
\nthyme.
\nIn terms of vegetables, whites forced Blacks to utilize \u201ccast-off\u201d greens
\nlike turnip, beet and dandelion leaves. Kale, cress, cabbage and
\nmustard were also introduced to Soul Food by whites. However,
\nironically, many of these fruits and vegetables didn\u2019t have a European
\norigin. These foods had found their way into Europe via the Silk Road,
\n(the trade route that stretches from Europe to the civilized world:
\nAfrica, India, Arabia and the Far East), during Grecian and Roman
\ntimes. So, although many consider turnips and beets \u201cwhite\u201d foods,
\nthey actually came from Morocco, North Africa.
\nHealth
\nThere is an emotional connection to Soul Food that links into part of
\nour own romanticism of slavery. Along with the Christian religion,
\nSoul Food is seen as one of those ways that helped Blacks make it
\nthrough slavery. So, when one speaks out against Soul Food, they are
\nseen as attacking, (what many people see as), a fundamental part of
\nbeing a Black American. Let\u2019s look now, at three major points:
\nDid You Know?
\nSoul Food classics like hominy,
\ncornbread, grits and corn meal
\ndumplings (hush puppies) are
\nactually Indian dishes. Indians
\nalso shared the meats that they
\nhunted and trapped with
\nAfricans. This is how the use of
\nvenison, rabbit, squirrel, and
\npossum and raccoon meat found
\ntheir way into the traditional Soul
\nFood menu. Because Native
\nAmericans ate very little meat to
\nbegin with, they wasted no part
\nof the animal and ate organ
\nmeats like liver, brain, and
\nintestines. This same practice
\nwas applied by Africans in their
\ndishes.<\/p>\n
1. You aren\u2019t working like a slave.
\nWhen a runner is getting ready for a marathon, he or she will eat a
\nheavy meal, the night before, of pasta. This is because pasta releases its
\nsugar\/energy slowly. So, when the runner is getting tired down the
\nline, their body can use the pasta\u2019s energy as fuel. The marathon
\nrunner eats in order to be successful at his or her profession. During
\nslavery, work was from sun up to sun down, often in humidity and
\nheat. The foods that Africans ate were heavy in fat and calories to
\naid them with this heavy labor. Nearly no one nowadays is
\nworking like a slave, so eating like they did isn\u2019t beneficial. In
\nfact, it does nothing but push us into obesity and disease.
\n2. Slaves didn\u2019t eat three big meals a day.
\nThey generally had one big meal a day that they had towards the
\nclosing of their day. They wouldn\u2019t have been able to work if they ate
\nhuge meals at breakfast and lunch. This is because the body
\nautomatically goes into digestion mode, taking energy from the rest of
\nthe body to aid in digestion in the stomach and intestines.
\n3. They didn\u2019t eat a whole bunch of deep fried meat every day.
\nAnyone who cooks knows how much time that it takes to prepare
\nmeals. Frying and barbecuing meat takes a lot of time. This is time that
\nslave masters did not give slaves. Seeing that the slaves were only
\ngetting scraps of meat from the slave master, slaves didn\u2019t have a
\nsurplus of meat to go wasting every day. The majority of meat scraps
\nwere utilized to season pots of greens, beans and other vegetables.
\nThere is evidence that the historical \u201cslave diet\u201d was heavy on
\nvegetables. Definitely heavier in vegetables than the current
\nAmerican diet. What we also know, for sure, is that slaves
\ngenerally at large portions of meat only once a week. Holidays
\nwere another time when slaves ate large portions of meat because the
\nslave masters were having feasts, leaving the slaves with the left-overs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I know that everyone has their memories of the movie, Soul Food. Yet,
\nall I can remember is the message that I got from it, which is that food
\nkills! Big Mama is a symbolic person that is too often seen in the Black
\ncommunity. The woman who knows how to cook, and is feeding her
\nwhole family a slow (or fast) death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3373,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120,127],"tags":[112,110],"class_list":["post-2980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health-wellness","category-non-fiction","tag-health-and-wellness","tag-non-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gotothebest.com\/bbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gotothebest.com\/bbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gotothebest.com\/bbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gotothebest.com\/bbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gotothebest.com\/bbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gotothebest.com\/bbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gotothebest.com\/bbb\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gotothebest.com\/bbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gotothebest.com\/bbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gotothebest.com\/bbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}