Black Women’s Food Work as Critical Space

Abstract

Black American women have long sustained a complex relationship to food—its production, consumption, and distribution within families, communities, and the nation. Black women, often represented in American culture as “natural” good cooks on the one hand and beset by obesity on the other, straddle an uncomfortable divide that is at the heart of contemporary debate about the nature of our food system. Yet, Black women as authorities in the kitchen and elsewhere in matters of food—culturally, politically, and socially—are largely absent, made invisible by the continued salience of intersecting vectors of disempowerment: race/gender/class/sexuality. In this dialogue, we bring together a variety of agents, approaches, explorations, and examples of the spaces where Black American women have asserted their “food voices” in ways that challenge fundamentally the status quo (both progressive and conservative) and utilize the dominant discourses to create spaces of dissent and strategic acquiescence to the logics of capital ever-present in our food systems.

Unequal foodwork: Situating the sociology of feeding within diet and nutrition disparities

“…Second, a focus on public policy could subsequently allow for deeper investigations into how family foodwork is shaped by legacies of racism and colonialism. While growing work in this area has sought to understand how racism and xenophobia are embedded in nutrition discourses and practices (e.g., Elliott & Bowen, 2018;Nettles-Barcelon et al, 2015;Swan, 2020), race and ethnicity remain undertheorized in this literature compared to gender and class.…”

“…Sociologists, on the other hand, examine how unequal material resources intersect with broader ideologies and structural conditions to critically shape the meanings that food holds within families in ways that complicate food decisions. Further, they show how dominant definitions of “good” foodwork remain rooted in white, upper‐middle class ideals that stratify access to their enactment (Chen, 2016; Nettles‐Barcelon et al., 2015). This, we see, is sociology's third core contribution to family foodwork.…”

Relational Life: Lessons from Black Feminism on Whiteness and Engaging New Food Activism

“…; Bradley and Herrera 2016;Ram ırez 2015;Slocum 2006). The food movement's equation of organic, local, and healthy food to "good food", along with class-and race-based assumptions about who does/does not have it and why, has marginalising effects on communities of colour (Alkon and McCullen 2011;Guthman 2008;Jones 2019a;Minkoff-Zern 2014), often targeting women and youth of colour (Jones 2019b;Nettles-Barcel on et al 2015).…”

Envisioning radical food geographies: shared learning and praxis through the Food Justice Scholar-Activist/Activist-Scholar Community of Practice

“…However, there are important exceptions. Scholars and activists of color, especially Black and Latinx women, are reforming academic food spaces that nonetheless remain majority white, analyzing "racialized food spaces" through the lens of Black geographies (Ramírez, 2015); positioning agriculture as an act of "collective agency and community resilience" 1 within some African American communities (White, 2018: 6); theorizing borders and borderlands (Anzaldúa, 1987;Cahuas, 2019) that constrain Latinx place-making and survival (Ramírez, 2020); considering Black women's food work as spaces of dissent (Nettles-Barcelón et al, 2015); and examining the creation of place through foodways in specific urban Black and Latinx communities (Mares and Peña, 2010;Reese, 2019).…”