Christopher Carter - The Spirit of Soul Food: Race, Faith, and Food Justice

The cover features several men, women, and children dressed in traditional clothes. They enjoy a feast together. The women wear gowns and headdresses.

2021 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carter, Christopher, 1981 author.

Title: The spirit of soul food: race, faith, and food justice / Christopher Carter.

Description: Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021015717 (print) | LCCN 2021015718 (ebook) | ISBN 9780252044120 (cloth: acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780252086175 (paperback: acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780252053061 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: FoodReligious aspectsChristianity. | Food supplyReligious aspectsChristianity. | United StatesPopulation policy. | Population policyReligious aspectsChristianity. | African American cooking.

Classification: LCC BR115.N87 C375 2021 (print) | LCC BR115.N87 (ebook) | DDC 261.8/5dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015717

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015718

This book is dedicated to my grandfather Robert Martin, whose stories of survival are woven throughout this text; my mother, Elaine Brown, who showed me how to make a way out of no way; my wife, Gabrielle, whose faith in me sustained me during periods of doubt; and my son, Isaiah, for whom I long to make this world a better place.

I did not want to write this book.

Perhaps this is an odd way to start a book that you have been working on for almost six years, odd but honest. Christianity, food justice, and food sovereignty are intertwined in my family history, and as far as I can remember, I believed there was a moral obligation to provide access to food for all people. This moral obligation is seemingly apparent to Black, Indigenous, and other people of color whose ancestors lived in the shadow of hunger and who currently live behind the veil of cheap food that is dependent upon the exploitation of our labor.

In earlier drafts of this book, I hid my ethical commitment to what I refer to as soulfull eating behind this moral obligation. I assumed (or hoped) that all I needed to do was to make a clear and logical argument that led the reader to concludeas I hadthat as the best practice of soulfull eating, black veganism (which I will define and describe in the introduction) and the pursuit of food sovereignty should become a spiritual practice among Black Christians and within Black churches and communities. I assumed that if I presented facts and data that revealed how much Black, Indigenous, other people of color, and the poor suffer from food apartheid and environmental racism and are the victims of land theft, then my prescriptions for the creation of food-sovereign communities around church land would be readily accepted, if not adopted, by some communities.

However, for Black folks, those of us descended from enslaved Africans whom European Christian men purchased in part because of their agricultural and culinary acumen, facts and data can only take us so far. And rightly so. Our foodways are an expression of our identity, a way of maintaining connections to our ancestors and our ancestral homelands; our foodways are personal and communal, emotional and habitual. In order for my community to take my work seriously I need to wrestle the culinary deity that soul food has become. I need to be transparent about my dietary conversion and the challenge of maintaining an identity that is found in our mothers pots, our grandmothers gardens, and the backbreaking labor of our enslaved ancestors if I expect this work to have any tangible impact beyond the hallways of academic institutions.

That is why I did not want to write this book.

Doing so would require me to be culturally vulnerableto yet again have my authenticity questioned. Soul food, like jazz, is a Black, American, and southern invention. For countless other Black people and myself, soul food is a source from which we derive essential character traits that remind us of who we are and inspire whom we want to become. Given this, why would anyone write a book that argues for the reimagination of what soul food ought to be?

I believe that is what our ancestors would doI believe that given the devastating impact that our current food system has on Black folk, they would have done their best to change their consumption and provision of food in order to survive and ensure the survival of future generations.

My gym membership has become my monthly reminder that change is never easy. The difficulty of change is especially true concerning the relationships we develop around food. If soul food is an indelible part of Black culture and identity, an identity that has been and continues to be under constant pressure to conform to the white racial imagination, then one must be careful and acknowledge these realities when arguing for the reimagination of Black foodways. One must take seriously the realities of what it means to live in a society that is founded upon anti-Black racism and that actively seeks to white-wash Black history and ignore or take credit for Black culinary and agricultural ingenuity. These historical traumas suggest that if one desires to examine the theoethical, racial, culinary, agricultural, and spiritual dimensions of soul food in such a way that Black folks feel heard, then ones examination should be guided by the Christian call of radical compassion.

Compassion both informs and shapes my exploration and reimagination of Black foodways; this approach too remained hidden from the reader in earlier drafts of this book. All too often compassion is misunderstood or misrepresented as sentiment, and the last thing I wanted anyone to think about my examination of food injustice, racism, and colonialism was that I was sentimental. However, my colleague Dr. Seth Schoen helped me realize that compassion informs my person so much so that my not mentioning it does not result in it being absent from the text. Rather, not being transparent to my commitment to radical compassion obscures my argument and suppresses a critical part of who I know myself to be. I was reminded that compassion, properly understood, always promotes actions that lead to the restoration and flourishing of all people, especially those who suffer under the yoke of structural evil.

The ethic of compassionto love God and neighbor, to do unto others as we would have them do unto usis the essence of how Christians are called to practice Christianity. This form of compassion is radical because it is the ground from which those of us who are Christian, following the example set by Jesus, nonviolently resist empire by cultivating relationships built on love, justice, and accountability with God, ourselves, and our neighbors. Frank Rogers suggests that Jesuss spiritual path of radical compassion has three dimensions: a deepening of our connection to the compassion of God, a restoration to a humanity fully loved and alive, and an increase to our capacity to be instruments of compassion toward others in the world. These three dimensions inform my proposal that a decolonial theological anthropologythat is, a theoethical way of being human that resists the dehumanizing logic of Enlightenment colonial thinkingshould be the basis for the reimagination of what soul food should look like.