Eating While Black

July 1, 2022
A Black scholar describes the racial underpinnings of food shaming in America. Williams-Forson, a professor of American studies and author of Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power, makes her arguments via a combination of anecdotes from her personal life, scholarly research, portrayals in popular media and literature, and informal research she conducted on Facebook. The author's primary thesis--that reducing the diverse palette of Black cuisine to a picture of enslaved people "eating 'scraps' " is historically inaccurate and belittling--is sound. She describes how many Black families displaced by Hurricane Katrina struggled to get the specific ingredients needed for their cooking, and she recounts her decision to "engage other women" to cook for her Ghanaian partner after he shamed her for a meal she cooked that differed from his preferred fare. Throughout, the author analyzes the power dynamics at play in each situation. "So often," she writes, "our food encounters--whether trying to get, prepare, consume, or enjoy food--are under fire....Why do African Americans' food cultures and eating habits elicit so much attention, criticism, and censure? The practices of shaming and policing Black people's bodies with and around food arise from a broader history of trying to control our very states of being, and this assumed stance is rooted in privilege and power." Though Williams-Forson's subject is important, the text is disorganized, tangential, and circular, as she makes the same point repeatedly while quoting the same scholars and thinkers, most notably Chimamanda Adichie and Mourid Barghouti. Furthermore, the academic prose will appeal mostly to fellow scholars. While the author's thesis is promising, the narrative execution is lacking, at least for readers outside of academia. The book may merit a slot in the stacks but will struggle to find an audience in public libraries. A dry exploration of a fertile topic.

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