Role of Food in American Culture

The story of American cuisine is much like the story of American music. In her deeply engaging, informative and surprisingly moving book, High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America, Jessica B. Harris explored the role that African culture and African-Americans have had in shaping what people regard as American cooking. As with jazz, a deeply African-American musical tradition that is now widely viewed as America's classical music, black cooking and culinary aesthetics have significantly influenced what most Americans eat. It is what Harris calls “the Africanizing of the American palate. It is taking place since many centuries. The cooking done in the American culture is a mongrel hodgepodge with influences from everywhere folded together and morphed. Europeans, Dutch, Spanish, French, Germans, English and loads of others brought their cultures here. On arrival, they came in contact with Native Americans, dozens and dozens of tribes from different regions, with different languages, different traditions, and different mores. The Europeans brought with them pretty much from the arrival of the first ships that enslaved Africans from up and down the western part of the continent and deeper in the interior. There were groups of people from diverse cultures from regions that are now the Congo, Nigeria, Guinea, Senegal, Benin and elsewhere. Harris teases out what she calls the “kinship” between the enslaved Africans who arrived here and their descendants and the Native Americans had two groups whose futures shaped and whose lives and cultures disrupted by Europeans in the New World (Mennell, 42).

Harris explored the mechanics of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the brutal economics of feeding the enslaved Africans and nourishing them for the middle passage. Once, in North America or the Caribbean or South America, the enslaved brought with them agricultural skills (the success of the rice crop in South Carolina depended in large part on slaves with rice-farming experience from Senegambia), a taste for certain foods (yams, okra, greens, watermelons and black-eyed peas are all tied closely to African diets), and a proficiency with open-hearth cooking and flavorful one-pot stews. Soon the enslaved were not only responsible for growing crops and tending to the plantations, but they were also cooking the meals for the white landowners who treated them like chattel. Using slave narratives, the ledgers of the founding fathers and recent archaeological discoveries, Harris shows the common influence of African-American ...