Psyche A. Williams-Forson is one of our leading thinkers about food
in America. In Eating While Black, she offers her knowledge
and experience to illuminate how anti-Black racism operates in the
practice and culture of eating. She shows how mass media, nutrition
science, economics, and public policy drive entrenched opinions among
both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right
to eat. Distorted views of how and what Black people eat are
pervasive, bolstering the belief that they must be corrected and
regulated. What is at stake is nothing less than whether Americans
can learn to embrace nonracist understandings and practices in
relation to food.
Sustainable
culture--what keeps a community alive and thriving--is essential to
Black peoples' fight for access and equity, and food is central to
this fight. Starkly exposing the rampant shaming and policing around
how Black people eat, Williams-Forson contemplates food's role in
cultural transmission, belonging, homemaking, and survival. Black
people's relationships to food have historically been connected to
extreme forms of control and scarcity--as well as to stunning
creativity and ingenuity. In advancing dialogue about eating and
race, this book urges us to think and talk about food in new ways in
order to improve American society on both personal and structural
levels.