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Those with no special allegiance to any one faction ate what they wished or whatever was placed in front of them. Their tables might groan under a meal of Southern fried chicken and Caribbean rice and peas or be set with the finest family china upon which would be placed chitterlings and a mess of greens. The gastronomically flexible developed a chameleonlike ability to change with the prevailing culinary trend and political view.

By the end of the 1970s, food, like all aspects of African American life, had become a battleground for identity. The period’s multiplicity of gastronomic and political positions and their dietary

CHAPTER 10

WE ARE THE WORLD

Making It in an Expanding Black World and Joining an Unbroken African Culinary Circle

Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York—

I have lived in this neighborhood for more than twenty years. Labeled one of the country’s African American ghettos in the turbulent 1960s, Bedford Stuyvesant benefited from an infusion of money and interest generated by Bobby Kennedy’s championing of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, which boosted African American home ownership and encouraged black enterprise in the community. I arrived a decade or so too late for the first wave of subsidized housing and the community spirit that it engendered; I was lured from my Greenwich Village apartment and my “That Girl” urban life by a brick row house. With a unique open floor plan and ample room for entertaining, the house struck me as a quirky place with loads of room for my thousands of cookbooks and my ever-growing collections. The neighborhood was in transition, but I hoped that with my “protective coloration” I’d be able to navigate the changes from Manhattan living without too much difficulty.

Little did I realize that I was spoiled. By the time I made my transition to Brooklyn life, I had written two cookbooks and was a food lover of the first order. I, like many other foodies—as we would later be called—had my culinary epiphany in France, where I’d lived for two years. In the Village, I was used to the abundant fresh produce at Balducci’s, around the corner from my apartment, and the meat counter at Jefferson Market, which was a bit beyond that, as well as the atmospheric French butcher shop on my corner that sold tiny lamb chops and beautiful packages of freshly made pâté and seemed transported from the Left Bank.

In my new neighborhood supermarket, I was confronted by less-than-pristine vegetables, and mainly the basics—greens, turnips, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, potatoes, and onions. There were no mushrooms, no fancy lettuces, no haricots verts. Salad meant iceberg lettuce, and for fruit I had a choice among apples, bananas, oranges, and the occasional pitiful-looking pear. Gone were seasonal treats like fresh raspberries in the summer and asparagus in the spring. (I knew better than to even think I’d spot a fiddlehead fern or a Jerusalem artichoke.) The meat counter was equally disappointing: There mostly were pork and chicken products and steaks that always seemed to be too thinly sliced. There was no lamb in sight, but customers were offered instead an assortment of nitrite-filled prepackaged luncheon meats. There were aisles and aisles of canned vegetables, packaged foods, sugary cereals, and fruit drinks containing little fruit juice. The real surprise was that the food cost as much or more than it did in the finest shops in Manhattan! The restaurant options were equally limited. Yes, the fish market offered delicious fried-fish sandwiches and there was a West Indian deli, but aside from Chinese takeout, there were three possibilities: McDonald’s, Burger King, or Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was my first real acquaintance with America’s culinary apartheid. Long before the term “food justice” became common currency, I rapidly learned that African Americans and indeed all who shop in ghettoized areas out of the mainstream were being offered second-rate comestibles sold at first-class prices and fast-foot joints.