CNN — No matter how you slice it, Southern food is complicated. Some detractors dismiss the whole menu as an over-larded, gravy-drenched, carbed-up monolith; they clearly just haven’t been invited to the right homes for supper.
At its core, Southern food is one of the most multilayered, globally-influenced and constantly evolving cuisines on the planet. It’s inextricably and equally tied to the rhythms of the seasons and the lives of the people who cook it the way their grandmother did, and her grandmother before her, and so on.
No one cooks Southern food alone; there’s always a ghost in the corner giving guidance. For millions of people, that’s Paula Deen, a celebrity chef whose sugary, bubbly bonhomie has earned her the moniker “Queen of Southern Cooking” – as well as her share of critics.
Deen has come under fire in the past for promoting aggressively unhealthy recipes, then failing to disclose her diabetes diagnosis for three years before picking up a lucrative endorsement deal for a drug to treat it. Her more recent admission of a racial slur in the past and that she had once discussed putting on a “plantation-themed” wedding party – complete with waiters dressed in a manner reminiscent of slaves – has proven even more sickening to some.
Internet backlash was fierce and pointed, and at least four of Deen’s major sources of revenue – the Food Network, Walmart, Caesars Entertainment and Smithfield Foods – have cut ties with her and condemned her words. Although many fans have gone out of their way to express support for her online and at her flagship restaurant in Savannah, Georgia, Deen apologized in online videos and in a teary appearance on the Today Show.
But some African-American food and culture scholars find it’s what Deen didn’t say that’s the bitterest pill to swallow. They claim that she has profited off the culinary legacy of African Americans, a group she’s repeatedly failed to credit in her cookbooks or on her television shows. Their contributions to American cuisine are often marginalized in the food world, despite having introduced rice cultivation techniques to the South, along with watermelon, okra, chile peppers and other foods that were already part of the African palate. Representatives for Deen weren’t immediately available to comment on the issue.
In the wake of the controversy, pre-orders for Deen’s cookbook are red-hot, but some feel frozen out.
“We’re burned by this,” says writer and image activist Michaela Angela Davis. “Why does she get all the money and fame around the food that our ancestors created and sweated over?”
Davis argues that minimizing the role of the African-American culture’s contributions to Southern cooking isn’t unique to Deen, but fallout from a cultural system that needed to dehumanize slaves to keep the status quo. “Completely divorcing us from our history, our cuisine, our languages – that’s just all par for the course. You can’t let people have pride and then have them be your slaves.”
Culinary historian Michael Twitty agrees. “Our ancestors were not tertiary to the story of Southern food,” he says. “Whenever our role is minimized to just being passive participants or just the ‘help,’ it becomes a strike against culinary justice.”
“Paula Deen once did hoecake on her show and never once mentioned that this was the hardtack and daily bread of enslaved people,” he adds. So were, “gumbo, okra soup, red rice, fried chicken, black eyed peas, various greens, sweet potatoes, boiled peanuts, cala, jambalaya, hot sauce, barbecue, the list goes on.”
In Deen’s autobiography, “It Ain’t All About the Cookin’,” Deen touches on her dealings with the African-American community in her hometown, saying, “None of us were strangers to the black community, although they seemed to live their lives and we lived ours. I would say we lived a pretty unexamined life in terms of politics or civil rights.”
Perhaps if Deen were just “a cook” and not “the Charles Barkley of food,” as Syracuse University scholar Boyce Watkins argued in a discussion with Davis on CNN’s AC360, that lack of context around her food would be understandable and even acceptable. But as Davis pointed out, “She’s a brand.”
That brand reportedly pulled in more than $17 million dollars in 2012 alone, and Davis ascribes Deen’s lack of connection in some part to that level of success.
“We all related to her when she was at the bottom and worked her way up, ” Davis says. “When you put money in it and you’re in a different class, you get all the benefits of being white and privileged. Your sensitivity and need to know about us goes away. There’s nothing in your life that brings about the urgency of knowing about the culture you’re benefiting from.”
Twitty and Davis are both eager to have some potentially difficult and painful conversations – over a meal.
Twitty is on a mission of reclamation and healing in a project he calls The Cooking Gene. He spent much of 2012 on the “Southern Discomfort Tour,” visiting the former plantations where his ancestors were enslaved, meeting the descendents of the people who claimed ownership over his family, and sharing meals together. Through breaking bread in these haunted locales and having difficult conversations with people of all races, Twitty seeks to dispel any romantic notions of slavery, and begin to heal.
“I think the enduring myth is that slavery was a time when blacks knew their place, didn’t make trouble and served as the perfect status symbol of Western superiority and white supremacy. Nothing could be more un-American or untrue,” Twitty says.
“People who worked in the ‘big house’ didn’t have it easy. Women and men who cooked and served usually had one of three fates. They were often treated abusively and savagely punished; they could be family figures of great respect and trust or they were autocrats who used their unique role to carve out a special power niche with lines and boundaries not to be crossed.”
Cooking meant power in many cases, Twitty says, and per plantation records, good cooks were often “worth” more than a “plain” or “tolerable” cook.
There’s power in owning your culture’s narrative, Davis says, and it’s painful when a thing that should be a great source of pride and joy is instead used as a vehicle for shame. “Fried chicken is creative. Collards with smoked neckbones is creative,” Davis says.
“This generation gets to say, ‘No! Fried chicken is amazing!’ Everybody gets to participate in it, but let’s be clear about whose brilliance made this thing be popular.” It worries her that Paula Deen and Colonel Sanders are seen as “the face of fried chicken,” and sees it as a failure of an educational system that diminishes African-American contributions to history.
“We are the fried chicken makers – everybody’s grandma, Sadie, whomever, can make some fried chicken that would make your wig fall off,” she says. “African-Americans being ashamed to eat fried chicken or watermelons is heartbreaking and in complete alignment of the philosophical alignment of oppression and slavery. You’re made to turn against yourself and abandon your culture.”
Davis combats that in the kitchen, she says. While she doesn’t fry chicken every Sunday like her grandmother did, she corrals her daughter a couple times a year to show her how it’s done. Her daughter is from the lean-chicken-breast-on-the-grill generation, Davis jokes, but there’s a serious point: “We lose our food, we lose our stories.”
“I would sit in the kitchen while my grandmother told the story about her grandmother made this pound cake – as she’s making it and I’m watching,” she recalls. “I remember that she would use the notches in her fingers as measurements.
“It wasn’t precise, but there were all these stories and our history was completely folded up in telling these stories as you’re sitting in the kitchen and watching your grandmother and your mother cook. This happens with everybody. That’s why they call it ‘soul food.'”
And that’s what Davis wishes Deen would acknowledge – that she’s peddling and profiting off the food part, but leaving the soul behind.
Deen writes frequently about learning in the kitchen at her Grandma Paul’s side, and shares that story with a wider audience. African-American food traditions were often shared orally, and only within the community, Davis says. She now believes they need to take control over their own story, document it and spread the gospel. Cookbooks by African-American celebrities like Pearl Bailey and Patti LaBelle are a great start, but there needs to be more, and in cooks’ own words.
“If our stories aren’t told correctly and through a proper lens, we get cut out of the narrative,” Davis says.
“In those kitchen moments, my grandmother and grandfather’s life became real to me. We have to write it down. We’re not living in a time where people are eating fried chicken for four or five hours on Sunday, with anybody. This is the perfect time to take our oral history, film it, write it down so it’s not lost.”
Food justice activist and podcast host Nicole A. Taylor, a native Southerner, said in a recent video blog that she’s “done with Paula Deen,” but that the incident sheds a light on the food world needing more African-American representation on Food Network and in mainstream media outlets.
“We need to show that the South is just not Paula Deen,” she said. “The South is me. The South is immigrants who are moving here. We need to lift these people up so that Paula Deen does not become the poster child for what is Southern in terms of food.”
And Twitty would like to sit down and talk about it over a meal. In a much-read open letter to Deen on his website yesterday, he invited the embattled chef to a gathering at a historic plantation in September when he’s hosting a fundraiser for Historic Stagville, a North Carolina, plantation that once held 900 slaves and is now a historic tourist destination.
“I want you to walk the grounds with me, go into the cabins, and most of all I want you to help me cook,” Twitty wrote. “If you’re brave enough, let’s break bread…This isn’t publicity this is opportunity. Leave the cameras at home.”
Davis, too, believes in the power of food to soothe and stitch painful rifts. “Food and music are the foundations of African-American – and American culture. They’re a perfect way to talk about race and move forward. And they’re a thing that people love about us, and we love about us – but it’s been abused,” she says.
Davis continued, “The first thing you have to do is admit that it’s happened, talk about it, move on and forgive. Have a conversation over a meal with some music. These conversations: This is the work. This is how we heal.”
Want to know more about African American contributions to Southern cooking? Dig in:
Books (note: some are out of print, but available through used book stores):
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The African American Heritage Cookbook: Traditional Recipes & Fond Remembrances – Carolyn Quick Tillery
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Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time – Adrian Miller (Coming August 15)
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Mama Dip’s Kitchen – Mildred Council
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The Taste of Southern Cooking – Edna Lewis
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High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America – Jessica B. Harris
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Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America – Frederick Douglass Opie
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A Taste of Heritage: The New African American Cuisine – Toni Tipton-Martin and Joe Randall
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The Dooky Chase Cookbook – Leah Chase