y'all don't care about blackness the way you say you do
And other revelations I had during culinary school (pt. 1)
June 17, 2024
It's hard to create when you have no sustenance. I begin aimlessly scrolling through seas of emptiness, desperately searching for something that can hold the weight of my desire for something real. Thinking back on my youth, I used to believe that the media used to provide a place of inspiration for me. As I age I think it was more about exposure. It's easy to inspire a young black girl from Flint, MI. Seeing ingredients and their creative uses outside of what I saw in my own culture–outside of kool-aid, fried pork chops and jarred sauces. Watching my grandmother comb through magazines and the internet with a fascination of white folks' interpretation of the same foods brought to America on the backs and woven into the hair of slaves (cue Paula Deen).
I grew up in a home that was one of the most culinary literate places I knew. Even still, I longed for black faces that could provide me with the same awe and wonder that I had as a young girl staying up way too late to watch Iron Chef. Somewhere, I developed an unconscious belief that black food wasn't a culinary spectacle in the same way that Italian, French and Asian food was.
I rarely saw black food talked about in mainstream media unless southern food was the conversation and even then, it still didn't look like what was being served on my plate on Sundays. Because I couldn’t relate what I saw on tv to what I saw in my own home, the only logic became that the two couldn't co-exist. This was further resounded by the fact that when I did begin to see black chefs on tv, they were reduced to home cooks making southern food, not even soul food. It’s as if black food had a requirement that it still had to be palatable to white taste buds.
The truth not yet made known to me, is that I was still holding onto an unconscious belief that the culinary world was no space for blackness. It did not make room for blackness, nor did it desire blackness.
Little did I know, this was the beginning of an ongoing internal battle that would finally come to a climax nearly 20 years later while I was in culinary school. Ten years prior to graduating culinary school, my Nana tried to convince me to pursue going to culinary school. I was 18. It was a dream that she also held, but seemed even more impossible for a young black woman born in the 50’s. She, like I, felt that the weight and pressure of achievement outweighed the longing and calling on our soul. She, the daughter of lawyers and diplomats, I, the daughter of doctors and entrepreneurs, descending from lawyers and entrepreneurs who graduated from Harvard. Culinary school seemed not to have any significant weight when compared to my lineage. I told my Nana that culinary school did not seem feasible or worth the financial investment because of my allergies. I couldn’t see then how I would navigate two to four years of culinary school as someone who was allergic to so many ingredients. However, the reality was, I was allergic to the truth. The truth not yet made known to me, is that I was still holding onto an unconscious belief that the culinary world was no space for blackness. It did not make room for blackness, nor did it desire blackness. The blackness that existed was tolerated or controlled. Do I believe this to be untrue? No. However, that belief over time began to shape and mold what I believed about myself and how I allow or do not allow food to be a part of my life.
When the opportunity to go to culinary school came knocking once again—prepared to shut down and resolve all the reasons I had not to attend; it exposed all the limiting beliefs that I had surrounding myself, blackness, and food. It climaxed to the point of radicalizing my world. I became ashamed and disgusted with the lack of concern for black bodies, black food, and black history in the kitchen. I found myself continuously defending a thesis I was not aware that I had written.