Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food Has Shaped African American Life by Jennifer Jensen Wallach

Abstract

Reviewed by: Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food Has Shaped African American Life by Jennifer Jensen Wallach Beth Fowler Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food Has Shaped African American Life. By Jennifer Jensen Wallach. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. Pp. x, 225. $36.00, ISBN 978-1-4422-5390-2.) “We turned survival food into a delicacy,” director Byron Hurt proclaims in his 2012 documentary, Soul Food Junkies. African American chefs have indeed turned soul food, which describes African American cuisine from the [End Page 159] South and its northern urban adaptations, into a celebrated part of the epicurean world over the past thirty years after centuries of denigration. Many examinations of African American foodways have cropped up to accompany the boom in restaurants, cookbooks, and celebrity chefs devoted to remaking and popularizing soul food, but Jennifer Jensen Wallach’s Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food Has Shaped African American Life takes a different, and decidedly refreshing, approach. Using a wealth of secondary literature across fields of interest within African American studies, as well as cookbooks, dining and etiquette manuals, and the stories and oral histories of people who have shaped these foodways, she has created a unique look at African American history from the perspectives of growing, selling, cooking, and eating. The book offers a necessarily broad survey of both historical shifts and the ways that food and dining cultures are intertwined with politics, social movements, and everyday life to the extent that deep analysis of any one connection will have to be pursued elsewhere. But Wallach has provided a fascinating introduction to the examination of African American foodways by revealing how familiar stories and arguments may be understood through the lenses of agricultural processes and dining customs. The book begins with a look at West African foods, recipes, and dining traditions, and the hybrids that emerge through globalization, particularly within the context of the transatlantic slave trade. This question of what constitutes African American food and dining practices is one that is asked throughout each chapter, but Wallach mainly focuses on thematic studies that show how evolving relationships to cooking, growing, and dining reflect the consequences of, and reactions to, living within white supremacist structures in what will become the United States. The way that she traces women’s work as cooks in white kitchens during enslavement and into the post–Civil War period, for instance, allows readers to understand how wages and working conditions could be stifled even as the meals Black women created were celebrated as stylish southern cuisine by the early twentieth century. Similarly, the cooperative grocery stores and luncheonettes opened in Black neighborhoods during the Depression as a means of feeding communities ravaged by economic downfall reappear during the 1950s and 1960s. The food drive was run by members of the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther party, who saw how continuing racial injustice led many Black families to face the threat of hunger, even within a supposedly affluent society. As Wallach traces threads that detail how Black Americans used food and dining culture to both define their own identities and oppose assimilationism and white-dominated institutions, she also shows how this history cannot be neatly divided into events and time periods detached from one another, even if the brief anecdotes she provides often leave the reader wanting to learn more. The book’s penultimate chapter, which moves from diner sit-ins in the 1950s and 1960s to Black vegetarian movements in the 1970s, is most indicative of this issue, as the many intriguing subjects she tackles within a civil rights movement framework do not always comprise a clear narrative or argumentative line. But Getting What We Need Ourselves is a book that is meant to be [End Page 160] expansive, despite its short page length, and it ultimately succeeds in establishing unexpected connections among familiar events. It provides an excellent introduction to the study of foodways and addition to cultural histories of African American life. Beth Fowler Wayne State University Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association