The Intersection of Food Writing and Race: 6 Memoirs by People of Color
Food is universal. Food is the one constant when we talk about disparate cultures, religions, and regions. Rituals surrounding food, localized ingredients, and the generational sharing of food lore make up a language we all speak, even when we don’t understand each other. Food writers understand that cooking and storytelling are fundamental aspects of humanity.
As the streets and city centers fill with protestors looking for racial justice, the social media feeds are populated with resignations and stories of dicrimination at magazines and publishing houses. The architecture of racism started unraveling as the struggles of writers, editors, and chefs of color spoke out about their experiences with white privilege. We have a duty to educate ourselves on how to live an anti-racist life, but we also have a responsibility to add to the conversation in ways we are uniquely qualified. I am not a person of color, but I am a cook and a writer. I wanted this piece to be a source of knowledge for books that can teach about the unique experiences people of color have with food and writing. Imagine my sadness when I struggled to come up with a diverse collection of food memoirs written by Americans of color.
The lack of representation in the culinary field for people of color is not new news. The face of executive chefs, cookbook authors, TV chefs etc. has long been the face of a white man. P.O.C. can be found in kitchens across the country, but rarely in a place of power. The story of food and community is an important one to the fabric of our culture, but there is a noticeable absence of memoir written by P.O.C. telling their stories.
There are people out there doing the work of unearthing those stories and bringing them to the national conversation, but much of this is academic work being done by Food Historians and Cultural Scholars. I felt kinship with Anthony Bourdain when I read Kitchen Confidential. I shared many common experiences working in kitchens, and his gifted writing inspired my own aspirations in food writing. It is important for people of all ethnicities to see themselves in writing, to feel validation for their personal struggles.
This list is by no means exhaustive, but it is a representation of some of the diverse food memoirs on the shelves of bookstores today.
The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael Twitty
As heated debate rages over taking down Confederate statues and renaming military bases, Michael Twitty makes for relevant reading. Twitty, an African American Culinary Historian, cooked in plantations, picked cotton in fields, and traced his family’s roots up and down the roads of the South in an effort to understand the intersections of food and race.
His hefty volume examines the journey of African Americans from their ancestors brought to this country in chains to the fields of the white slaveholders who treated them as commodities. He looks at this all through the lens of food and seeks to understand who ultimately “owns'' southern food. The ties between slavery and food are knotted deeply. The food produced on the plantations were direct products of the slaves' hands and bodies. Even the names of various crops sprung from ancestral words half a world away. Twitty explains how enslaved Africans set about to “cocreate a language based in the English of their captors that would make the absurdity of their exile bearable.” “Okra,” he writes, originates from the Igbo word “okwuru”, and “yam” descends from “nyambi” in Wolof, a language with roots in Senegal.
"So much was lost—names, faces, ages, ethnic identities—that African Americans must do what no other ethnic group writ large must do: take a completely shattered vessel and piece it together, knowing that some pieces will never be recovered...The food is in many cases all we have, all we can go to in order to feel our way into the past."
There are recipes in this volume, and there is personal narrative, but there is also an exhaustive exploration of Southern foodways and African American history. It is an important read as we seek to unmask the decades of systemic racism that has been flourishing since slave boats first landed.
The Language of Baklava by Diana Abu-Jaber
This narrative takes readers into the world of a girl born of two identities. Her father, a boisterous Jordanian, who immigrated to America inspires the author’s love of food and storytelling. Her mother, an American book lover and woman of quiet reserve, exposes the schism of being caught between two worlds. Abu-Jaber weaves her story of growing up a child of these two worlds through the thread of food. Often wry, and sometimes irreverent, Abu-Jaber allows readers into the landscape of a multi-ethnic child’s challenges navigating the waters of foreign-sounding names, unusual dinner fare, and the desire to fit in.
The writing is sumptuous in its details. Abu-Jaber shows writers what it can be to write about the senses. The descriptions of “‘Eat It Now’ Shish Kabob” and “‘Stolen Boyfriend’ Baba Ghanouj” offer gustatory detail to tempt the palate. As a writer, I admire Abu-Jaber’s attention to detail. Each taste, sound, sight, or smell is wrung out for all of its literary power.
In a conversation with her aunt about baklava, Abu-Jaber reminds us that the immigrant story is one of assimilation, and construction of a new American identity. “Your father? He is the worst of the worst. He thinks he cooks and eats Arabic food but these walnuts were not grown from Jordanian earth and this butter was not made from Jordanian lambs. He is eating the shadow of a memory. He cooks to remember but the more he eats, the more he forgets.”
Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelsson
“A hundred years ago,” he says, “black men and women had to fight to get out of the kitchen. These days, we have to fight to get in.”
Accomplished chef, Marcus Samuelsson, brings another perspective to being a chef of color in high-end, predominantly white restaurants. Samuelsson is not your typical black chef. He lost his mother to tuberculosis as an infant in Ethiopia, and was adopted by a white Swedish couple. His star rose during his time at Aquavit in NYC when storied restaurant critic Ruth Reichl awarded him an unheard of 3 star review. He makes the point that he does not have “race wounds” like other chefs of color. What he does give voice to is the alienation chefs of mixed races experience in the fine dining world. He was not black enough for African American cuisine and not white enough for French. He also asks the question of food privilege. Who determined that French food and technique is the best when ethnic foods can be just as meticulous and tasty.
Stealing Buddha’s Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen
The immigrant story is one we are familiar with as Americans. People arrive on these shores with dreams of success and safety. Nguyen’s family was no different as they sought refuge from Vietnam as it fell to the Communists in 1975.
“I came of age in the 1980s, before diversity and multicultural awareness trickled into Western Michigan. Before ethnic was cool. Before Thai restaurants became a staple in every town.”
Nguyen recounts their unlikely landing in the midwest geography of tall blondes and her desire for assimilation. She wants Little Caesar’s pizza while her grandmother serves up stewed beef and eggs. Nguyen utilizes her stealthy kitchen heists of pringles and popsicles, and the phantom dinners of pot roast and macaroni and cheese at Jennifer’s house over Vietnamese cuisine and traditions to mirror the immigrant choice to blend in and assimilate, or isolate and become othered. There are no recipes in this slim volume, but there is Nguyen’s journey as she comes to terms with her hyphenated identity, Vietnamese-American. Especially poignant is her reflection on what books brought to her life, “I read to be alone. I read to not be alone.”
Stealing Buddha’s Dinner offers a glimpse into the struggles of refugees coming to American shores to escape persecution and violence in their home countries. Bich Minh Nguyen lays bare the struggle of young children to fit in as they face pressures from peers at school while being anchored in ancestral custom at home.
Notes From a Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi
"When I push open the kitchen doors, I want to see a dining room full of diners, but especially brown and black diners, who, looking at their plates, feel seen, celebrated, and recognized."
These words come at the end of the novel, but represent the dream of colored chefs and patrons everywhere. To be seen and celebrated for the food they create. To be welcome in roadside walk-ups, as well as Michelin-rated restaurants. To be given the freedom to cook what they want without restriction from regional stereotypes. The memoir follows his journey from gangs to drug dealing to Top Chef, and his quick fall after his much-hyped D.C. restaurant folded a few months after opening.
The recipes showcase the different worlds he grew up in with his mother’s Louisiana and Trinidadian roots, and his father’s Jamaican and Nigerian influences. It also reveals the darker side of the restaurant industry unapologetically. He names names. He lays bare his own racially-charged confrontations as he tried to find his place at Eleven Madison Park. He also makes it clear he will not be pigeon-holed into cooking stereotypical cuisine. His recipes are Igbo, Carribean, Creole, and anything else he wants to cook.
Some might say Onwuachi is too young to have a memoir, he has not lived enough yet. Does the book read a little arrogant? Yes. But, it takes a lot of confidence to plant your stake in the exclusive world of fine dining when you are black. There is a spirit of pride, and perseverance infused in the narrative. Even if the world of fine dining is not ready for a brash young black chef, he is here, and staying.
A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of food and family by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
After a devastating job loss, Tan decides to spend the next year reconnecting to her Singaporean heritage through food. She journeys from her New York apartment to Singapore to “retrace [her] grandmother's footsteps in the kitchen,” but what she finds along the way is stories of family and sustenance far beyond just recipes.
Tan explores the idea that, “...home is rooted in the kitchen and the foods of [her] Singaporean girlhood…” and how that home begins to disappear with every generation of Singaporean American who avoids cooking and other traditions associated with their ancestral culture. The knowledge of foods not deemed special enough for cookbooks or restaurants is disappearing from what she terms, “Culinary Awareness.” Tan honors these foods in the recipe section of her memoir which includes family recipes for Kaya, Bak-Zhang, and Mandoo, as well as the stories of her learning how to prepare them in her Aunties’ kitchens.
This is an important glimpse into what can be lost when we forget where we came from and don’t honor the intersectionality of culture, race, need for belonging, and connection to family.
There is more work to do in the world of food writing. People of color need more representation. We need to hear their stories of immigration, racism, racial profiling, and discrimination. But, more importantly, we need to hear their writerly voices, and provide space for them to teach us about their communities, and relationship with food.
Beyond food memoir, there are some fantastic cookbooks, books about food culture, and social media shows sharing their parts of America’s multiethnic roots.
Below are some other resources I found in my research:
“Comfort Nation” IG Stories & Snapchat Cooking Show
Lazarus Lynch shot to fame cooking his family’s Southern & Caribbean recipes live on social media. He comes by his chops honestly as the son of an Alabama chef who ran a popular soul food restaurant in Queens. Lynch is bold in his take on fashion and food which inspired an army of followers for his “...love letter to the family recipes and love of cooking [he] inherited.” The popularity of his show led to his cookbook, “Son of a Southern Chef,” released June 2019.
Anything by Edna Lewis, but especially The Taste of Country Cooking.
It opens with a forward by the revered Alice Waters and then continues to unfold a reverence for simple ingredients, and regional cuisine. Her cookbooks showcase a proud sense of place in their approach to southern cooking. She celebrated American farming culture in her treatment of proteins and celebrated gardeners with her emphasis on heirloom vegetables. She was a pioneer who wrote about food movements decades before their time. Edna Lewis helped shape Southern cooking. Lewis was a black female owner and head chef in the 1940s in a time when it was more the exception than the rule. Her four cookbooks are revered as seminal works of southern ingredients and cooking techniques.
Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking by Toni Tipton-Marie
In the introduction she writes, “The Biblical Jubilee marks restoration of a people through deliverance, rest, and land conservation ... our culinary Jubilee is also about liberation and resilience. Our cooking, our cooks, shall be free from caricature and stereotype.” The book offers a collection of recipes that don’t fit neatly into our vision of African American cookery. There is the soul food, and low country dishes, but there is also an entire section devoted to lamb, and more global dishes like gremolata. Through Jubilee, Tipton-Martin frees African Americans to cook whatever they want rather than being typecast by an industry that celebrates experimentation by any other race.
Hunger by Roxane Gay & Heavy by Kiese Laymon
Both memoirs, though not food writing per se, deal with relationships with food and body image. They are important reads that give context to the struggle of covering up violence and trauma with eating. Both add dimension to the story of food and race.
