Black Culinary History Year in Review 2015

When I thought about what I wanted to contribute to this year’s Kwanzaa Culinarians collection I knew immediately that I wanted to talk about Ujima. Its a favorite principal of mine because it suggests that if we recognize the stake we each have in our collective success then collaboration, resource sharing, and fellowship become natural, and the resulting work becomes exponentially more powerful. This year we have seen phenomenal work from around the globe that has shifted the culinary zeitgeist in a game changing way. From culinary scholarship to crowd sourced culinary brands emerging, 2015 has given us so much to be proud of. The following is a year in review that highlights some of the best parts of the sea change we’ve seen in the world of black foodways. Soul Summit: A Conversation About Race, Identity, Power, and Food was a very simple idea thought up and produced by the brilliant Toni Tipton Martin as a way to create a sense of community among black food folks, and to harness the collective power of the collective. The idea was to get everyone in a room over Juneteenth weekend to symbolically mark a rebirth on the 150th anniversary of Emancipation. The resulting summit was a weekend of fellowship around food power and history. Legendary author and historian Dr. Jessica B. Harris received an icon award for her essential and brilliant contributions to the food of the African diaspora. New school talents like Charleston based BJ Dennis and SheChef founder Elle Simone gave the assemblage a taste of the power this next generation is serving and let every know that our generation is entrenched and engaged and ready to stake our claim on American cooking. The weekend also served notice that black culinary history is not only important, but is a revolutionary act! Soul Summit is now a national movement. Next years conference will be held in Charleston, SC and will focus on food as social justice and the role of the farmer, as well as the chef, in social and political activism. You can keep current with forthcoming detains here. In April I made the trip to New Orleans to attend the Dr. Rudy Joseph Lombard lecture series at Dillard University. The event was the brain child of the newly appointed director of the Ray Charles Program Professor Zella Palmer and the invitation was meant to reintroduce the program to the national culinary community. The two day event was full of New Orleans legends and Dillard Scholars making the case for the importance and richness of New Orleans Foodways. The highlights for me were numerous. Among them was Michael Twitty as keynote speaker. Side Note: If you’ve never heard him speak just take a moment and click this link and get into the fire that this brother brings. Ok!! Another highlight was the day 2 field trip to Whitney Plantation where we got to experience the powerful work Dr. Ibrahima Seck has poured into that space. The Whitney Plantation experience is about telling the truth about the lives of the enslaved and giving dignity and honor to the lives that built this country. If you visit The Whitney understand that the entire experience is about understanding the lives if the enslaved. There is no glory of the old south. There is no glamorizing or fictionalizing the realities and the horrors of slavery. The work Dr. Seck is doing is not only ground breaking, but critically necessary in this moment of contextualizing race and the after affects of slavery on our nation. The entire weekend drove home the importance of more widespread scholarship around our foodways. The event was so wonderful, from the students so engaged in the content to the hospitality of the Dillard family i left that weekend feeling proud and hopeful for the future of New Orleans foodways. Zella Palmer is a woman with a very definite plan and that conference was her serving notice that Dillard will become a hub for black foodways in the academic world. The work she is doing will no doubt shape the course of food studies around the country, and will show other institutions that black foodways matter. Among the many, very ambitious projects Zella and the program have in store for 2016 is a a documentary about New Orleans Foodways. Click here to see a trailer and check back at the Dillard Rsay Charles Program FB page for more info coming along in 2016. If for some reason you aren’t familiar with Bryant Terry you should know that he is a super dope vegan chef out of Oakland, California who is very serious about food as a catalyst for social change. His work around food justice is wide ranging and his cookbooks celebrating the spirit of the African diaspora through the vegan diet are groundbreaking in their multifaceted and artistic approach. All of these things made his appointment as Chef-in-Residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco an inspired choice. The work Bryant is doing, from his inaugural event Black Women, Food and Power with 5 of the most brilliant black women in food, to his forthcoming dinner featuring The Groundnut supper club team is what makes this appointment so powerful. Much like the work happening at Dillard, Bryant as Chef-in-Residence sets the tone for other cultural museums and spaces that focus on black culture to see the value is using food as point of focus. The food  as a tool has a unique way of clarifying focus across issues and the chef is the practitioner of that tool so hopefully the phenomenal job Bryant is doing will encourage other spaced to bring in chefs!! This year marks the 150th anniversary of emancipation and there were many beautiful celebrations around the nation, but one of the most stunning would have to be the Nat Fuller dinner hosted by Chef Kevin Mitchell and Dr. David Shields. Nat Fuller’s legacy as a chef and restaurateur long before emancipation is certainly noteworthy, but his reconciliation dinner, hosted just after word of emancipation reached Charleston, is what makes him a legend.