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  Posted By:
  cancan at 05/27/2008 9:06:09 PM
  Comment:
  Food is a cultural experience. Those of us who cook our food from scratch, who grew up on food cooked soulfully find reason to celebrate the various iterations of soul food getting recognized. The foods of the African diaspora are very related.
  
  Now, while I don't cook my greens with pork any more and don't use lard like my grandmothers did - they both lived to be active senior citizens until their last year on earth (one 86, the other 94) - and they ate chitlin', made biscuits with lard, etc. If you've every seen some of the ingredients in foods that French or Chinese people (to cite but two) make - you know that it's the attitude and not the ingredients that elevate food to have stature.
  If we claim our culinary traditions and make them the best that they can be, we will grab the recognition our food deserves. Being from St. Louis - buffalo fish is part of my heritage but I've never had it any place else.
  And two or three times a year, for family gatherings, I want the food cooked the way I grew up with it from my grandmothers - fresh ingredients, butter, plenty of seasonings with love in the preparation.
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  Posted By:
  rmfinn at 05/26/2008 11:58:27 PM
  Comment:
  Thanks SlideGuitarist for the compliment. You are certainly right about American regional cuisines and the "foodie" (I hate that term) movement, and barbecue! One thing I have to say here though, and this also pertains to the comment made by CATQ8o, is that I don't really consider the food of African Americans to be a regional cuisine. It is the food of an ethnic group with a very distinct culture. That gets lost in the United States because race is such a difficult topic here.
  
  For CATQ8o: There is this notion that highlighting cultural differences is being exclusive or divisive. Black Americans have a separate culture because we are more than just black, we are an ethnic group, however that is rarely recognized. So xhepera is right in that the existence of ethnic cuisines undermine the strength of your statement. Whites and blacks are different and separate groups and that's o.k., but they should be treated equally, and that is possible. That is, of course, another essay entirely... To answer your question: I would not be upset if there was a "white people program" as you say. Isn't that really what we have already?
  
  Thanks for your comments everyone.
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  Posted By:
  SlideGuitarist at 05/26/2008 10:43:03 AM
  Comment:
  I enjoyed your essay, and agree with your analysis, but American regional cuisines generally don't get a lot of respect. Visit the Inn at Little Washington, one of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country, about an hour from DC: how much of the food is really Virginian? The ingredients do--that's part of the point--but the recipes don't. Foodiness in this country is sort of a yuppie thing, not that that's bad, so maybe it's up to people like you to reclaim this cuisine. White Southerners I know have a *very* limited sense of their own culinary history, btw. It's always barbecue, barbecue, barbecue...
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  Posted By:
  xhepera at 05/22/2008 3:01:04 PM
  Comment:
  CATQ80, ummm. . .you do realize that we have German, French, Indian, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Hungarioan, Laotian etc. restaurants, yes? There are also numerous cooking schoolds and institutes dedicated to these cuisines. As an American I celebrate the profound influences that various cultures and ethnicities have had on "our" cuisine. And as an unrepentant and unabashed "foodie" I give credit and honor where credit and honor are due. due. Taste the rainbow, baby!
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  Posted By:
  CATQ80 at 05/22/2008 12:04:17 PM
  Comment:
  I THINK IT IS REALLY GREAT THAT THE FOOD WAYS OF A CULTURE ARE BEING EXPLORED AND CELEBRATED, BUT I WONDER IF YOUR FEELINGS WOULD BE VASTLY DIFFERENT IF A WHITE PEOPLE PROGRAM WAS INSTITUTED. WHY CAN'T WE AS AMERICANS CELEBRATE THE FOOD WAYS OF ALL THE CULTURES OF OUR NATION WITHOUT USING RACE TO DIFFERENTIATE.
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  Posted By:
  CATQ80 at 05/22/2008 12:03:10 PM
  Comment:
  I THINK IT IS REALLY GREAT THAT THE FOOD WAYS OF A CULTURE ARE BEING EXPLORED AND CELEBRATED, BUT I WONDER IF YOUR FEELING WOULD BE VASTLY DIFFERENT IF A WHITE PEOPLE PROGRAM WAS INSTITUTED. WHY CAN'T WE AS AMERICANS CELEBRATE THE FOOD WAYS OF ALL THE CULTURES OF OUR NATION WITHOUT USING RACE TO DIFFERENTIATE.
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  Posted By:
  UWorlds1 at 05/22/2008 10:40:41 AM
  Comment:
  to eliminrashad;
  
  How can you say this is dogfood? This is the that sustained our ancestors through slavery. We were ingenous enough to take this scraps and make them into food we could survive on. Without the so-called "garbage", we would not be alive today. We could only get pig guts at that time, we made the best of it.
  
  As a matter of fact, chitterlings are a delicatessen in the Asian world. They eat every part of the pig. As a Black person this food is definitely part of my culture. Without it I would not be alive.
  
  UWorlds1
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  Posted By:
  mcook at 05/22/2008 10:06:22 AM
  Comment:
  It is difficult to separate culinary traditions by race, and in doing so, you always risk leaving out the influence of one group or another. I'm a white southerner, whose mother enthusiastically did the cooking, even though we had african-american "help" in the house when I was young. I was surprised to learn as a young adult that the food I had grown up eating was "really" "african-american food", and surprised again recently when I learned that many of the staple foods of our diet--tomatoes, squash, corn, and beans, beans, and more beans, were all products of the agricultural genius of the pre-columbian native americans. Celebrate collaboration, rather than separate strains of influence, if you want to get the story right.
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  Posted By:
  elaminrashad at 05/22/2008 8:26:46 AM
  Comment:
  This is the worst food you can offer a human being. As a Black man I dont eat this garbage. Many sicknesses that black people have is caused by the food they eat. This is not the food of my culture.Pig feet, pork is a danger.chitlins which holds the poop and fried porkchops all dog food.
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  Posted By:
  BeTheChange at 05/21/2008 9:56:20 PM
  Comment:
  As I white Southerner, born and raised in Louisiana, with family from here and from Mississippi, I originally was surprised to find out that chitlins (which I don't eat), collard greens, and cornbread were associated with "black culture" because most of my entirely white family eats those foods. What I eventually realized, was that almost all of Southern culture, particularly Louisiana culture, grew out of the heterogeneous mix of people that settled here. The foods I grew up eating as an Anglo-Louisianian are the foods that came out of Africa and were incorporated into the emerging French/Spanish Creole cuisine, or eventually incorporated into white Southern cooking by the fact that once upon a time, lots of white women employed (or enslaved) black women to do their cooking, and when the white people became too poor to hire help, that is the food that they knew and loved. The music identified with the South, blues, Southern rock, Dixieland Jazz, all of this grew out of the black experience. This article was very correct in pointing out that white people, particularly Southerners, don't want to think about the legacy of black enslavement every time we eat Okra and Tomatoes with fried porkchops and cornbread, or listen to blues-influenced Southern rock. I'm sure it is important that we think about that now, but what I really like about these shared tastes is that today it is often that food that brings us together. Go to the local "Soul Food" establishment in a small Mississippi town after church services let out on Sunday...fried catfish and greens with pepper vinegar and cornbread...and the people eating at the tables, who went to "segregated" church are fully "integrated" for the food. When I was in college I drove up some on Sundays to go to church with my grandmother, and every week we'd eat at a different restaurant and it was always like that. The blues bar in Baton Rouge was always like that too... it is this shared culture that brings us together as people and not just white or black people, and if we ever get around as a country to making some kind of formal apology for black enslavement, someone should also speak up and say: "Oh, and thanks for the food."