Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama

Abstract

“For a long time it has been known that as a race we eat too much meat, especially pork,” W. E. B. Du Bois chided in the pages of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Crisis magazine in August 1918. “The deceitful Pork Chop,” he continued, “must be dethroned in the South and yield a part of its sway to vegetables, fruits and fish.” Du Bois's call to culinary action not only incited his readers to eat healthier but also pushed to decouple the stereotypical connection of African Americans with the overconsumption of hog meat. He also encouraged aiding the wartime effort to economize the American diet. “Food—reasonable food—will not only win the war,” Du Bois wrote, “but it will win health and efficiency if we learn the lesson of the present emergency” (W. E. B. Du Bois, “Food,” Crisis, Aug. 1918, p. 165). Picking up nearly one century after Du Bois, Jennifer Jensen Wallach's edited volume Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop surveys, in fifteen essays that use a scattering of methodological perspectives, the present state of African American foodways scholarship, in addition to the alimentary interests of black Americans today. “Food practices,” Wallach writes in the introduction, “have been and continue to be sites of resistance and vehicles for identity construction for African Americans” (p. xxii). Many of this volume's contributors hope to build on the pioneering work of Psyche Williams-Forson, who provides a foreword, and her Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs (2006), a book that skillfully weaved a history of black entrepreneurship and black power out of the relationship between black women and the fowl that some call a “yardbird,” and others the “Gospel bird” (p. 96).