Food can connect us to the earth, our community, and ourselves. But first, we need to open a space to listen to and be in exchange with the ingredients.

As a professional chef, I have spent years learning to do this with the plants I grow and cook with. This practice has profoundly changed the way I think about my work and the world around me.

Looking back, one of my most important teachers on this journey, in the kitchen and in life, was the tomato.

Growing up, I struggled with my relationship to this beautiful plant and its magic fruit, even as I found myself drawn to it. It was only after I learned how to truly listen to tomatoes and give them what they need to thrive, that I experienced the true magnificence, amazing flavors, and powerful energy they have to share with us all.

The first dish I ever learned how to make was salsa. I was 5 years old, and I can still remember picking the juicy tomatoes, serrano chilies, and fragrant cilantro from my parents’ garden in Ojai, the Southern California valley at the base of the Topatopa Mountains. I kept tasting the salsa over and over again, adding a little more chili, then a little more salt, then a little more lemon. Adjusting and experimenting with the balance of flavors until it tasted just how I wanted it: delicious.

But a tomato on its own? That grossed me out. Now I know that the culprit was store-bought tomatoes—pink, mealy, store-bought tomatoes. I still cringe when I think about their watery, bland flavor. The worst were the slices that sat goopy and soggy in my sandwich, waiting to be eaten in my lunchbox at school.

What I didn’t realize then was that these weren’t a proper reflection of the tomato family. They were the industrialized representatives. There are actually more than 10,000 types of tomatoes out there—way more than the two to three varieties you see in the average grocery store.

The revelation that there was a whole other world of tomatoes out there came to me when I went away to San Diego for college and started working at my first fine-dining restaurant, NINE-TEN. I’ll never forget the heirloom tomato salad on their menu. Who knew tomatoes came in so many colors and variations? I took my first bite, and the bright, sweet, sharp flavors of their tomatoes opened my eyes to what high-quality ingredients can do for a meal, and how limited my understanding of the plant had been up to that point.

After college, I returned to Ojai, where I got focused on growing my own food. With my mom as my mentor and advisor, I started to develop a deeper relationship with plants, and saw how they could thrive when they received the love and nutrients they needed.

The work thrilled me. Every morning, I woke up early to check on the land, inviting friends to come and garden with me. We planted all kinds of vegetables in the beautiful soil we created by composting our food and garden scraps.

Through gardening, I learned that all food needs good food and good vibes to flourish. The same can be said for humans. For years I hadn’t been taking my health as seriously as I should have, and it was around this time that I realized I needed to make some drastic changes myself if I wanted to feel strong and capable in my body and keep doing the things I loved—like surfing, playing in nature, and growing my garden.

At this point, I had been growing over 40 varieties of heirloom tomato plants. I had been so excited to see them fruit, and find out what it would be like to cook with them and how they would taste. Unfortunately, after a few weeks of chowing down on them, my chiropractor recommended that I take a break from eating plants from the nightshade family, as they can be inflammatory.

Author Evan Rilling. Photo by Natalie Karpushenko.

It was a total bummer to stop eating tomatoes after we’d come so far together, but by overindulging in them and then cutting them out of my diet, I actually became even closer to tomatoes. The experience taught me to listen to my body and find out how to develop a healthier relationship with the plant that worked for me. I can now eat tomatoes freely when it feels good for me to and know when to stop when I need to. I recommend this exact method to clients who really want to understand how food affects them. It’s true, I tell them, after you take some time away from an ingredient, try going all in if you truly want to understand how the food is affecting you. Even junk food: I dare you to eat a whole bag of Doritos and see how you feel! I bet you won’t be going back for seconds.

I am grateful to tomatoes for all of the gifts they’ve shared and the lessons they’ve taught me, and am honored to now share these teachings with you.

Here’s how anyone can connect to ingredients in a deeper way:

First, choose an ingredient that you feel called to and would like to build a stronger connection with.

Then place the ingredient in front of you. Look at it. What did you see?

Touch it. What did you feel?

Listen to it. What did you hear?

Smell it. How would you describe it?

Taste it. How would you describe the experience?

How have you worked in harmony with it?

How could you work in harmony with it?

These teachings will expand your abilities and awareness of what you eat.

Developing your own relationship with any plant or ingredient—whether you’re cooking, gardening, applying a wellness technique, or working with them for healing—can be powerful, not to mention fun.

But before you try this process, I invite you to take a moment, center yourself, and let yourself be open to the possibilities that may present themselves to you. Because by letting yourself truly connect and listen to a plant, you may find it has many lessons for you, just like the tomato has had for me.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> My Teacher, the Tomato appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Soul food is famously revered for pork and barbecue, for savory side dishes cooked in lard. I am a Black man who grew up loving my mother’s cornbread dressing and my aunt’s macaroni and cheese. I found comfort in these foods. Then I became a vegan. At first, I wondered, if I did not eat soul food as I had historically conceptualized it, what kind of Black person would I be? Where would I belong?

Cultural identities are baked into culinary identities. This is especially true for people of color: What you choose to eat, and not to eat, speaks volumes about where you belong. The culinary term “soul food” can be traced back to the 1960s, when Black people who moved north during the Great Migration began referring to their musical and culinary experiences as “soul music” and “soul food.” As “soul” became a linguistic signifier for Black culture, it became a self-empowering shorthand for being able to survive in a racist society, and to resist the dehumanization of Black and African culture. The roots of soul food are antiracist.

I know that not eating meat can be antiracist, too, and that veganism aligns with these self-empowering principles. Not consuming animal products resists factory farming’s dehumanizing forces and disproportionate impacts on Black people and on the Earth. But there have been moments when my evolving diet has compromised my ability to feel like part of my community—even part of my family.

For us, soul food consists of the classics so often associated with the term: fried chicken, collard greens, dirty rice, jambalaya, okra, cornbread dressing, and pretty much anything one can eat off a pig. Over the years, these foods have given me comfort. When the pervasive reality of racism knocks me off-center, the red beans and rice I grew up with is the ground from which I remember myself as beloved and belonging. For me, red beans and rice feels like home.

When I left Battle Creek, Michigan, to attend graduate school in the outskirts of Los Angeles, my family was concerned that the move would “change” me, or make me some kind of hippie. They may have been right. When I arrived in Claremont, I was your typical, grilled meat-loving omnivore. Three and a half years later I was a vegetarian, and not too long after that, I was a vegan. I grew dreadlocks and a beard.

I dreaded my first trip back home after I became a vegetarian. I knew my family would question my diet and challenge my cultural authenticity. Sure enough, my dad made a show of cooking meat to add to the beans and rice I had prepared for Christmas dinner—despite the fact that there were plenty of other meat dishes for him to choose from. My beans and rice were not authentic to our family, and he made sure everyone knew it.

My experience is not unique. Countless other people of color feel alienated for being vegan, even though their veganism may be rooted in a commitment to community. In America, food has long been—or been mixed up with—an engine of oppression, and the Black body serves as a constant reminder of it. Black people were enslaved because of our agricultural and culinary acumen. Economic exploitation of traditional farm and factory farm laborers, who are predominantly Black and Latinx, persists today. So does housing discrimination, which makes it hard for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color to shop for affordable fresh fruit and vegetables near their homes.

Soul food is how Black people define ourselves, and celebrate the stories of how we survived. And yet, soul food’s overwhelming cultural power presents a strong argument for reexamining it. Are the stories we tell ourselves about traditional notions of soul food still useful? Is the idea of soul food really about the food itself, or is it rooted in the wisdom of the communities that created it? How might soul food be used to tell stories about who we want to become, and not only who we once were?

I suggest that we begin by decolonizing soul food—unearthing the ways white American stereotypes around Black food and culture have shaped our understanding of the cuisine of our Black ancestors. We don’t have to look farther than Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben—stereotypes created to normalize segregation—to see the influence of white assumptions about Black cookery. De-linking these images from our ideas about soul food helps us uncover knowledges that have always existed on the margins.

For instance, there is no static definition of what it means to eat in a way that is “Black.” In his book Hog and Hominy, culinary historian Frederick Douglass Opie writes that what Americans think of as a traditional West African diet, consisting of “darker whole grains, dark green leafy vegetables, and colorful fruits and nuts” supplemented with meat, evolved because during slavery and its aftermath, Black folk had to eat what they were able to access. They had to learn how to make inexpensive cuts of meat taste wonderful.

If we think about the history of Black food as a window into surviving the racism that is foundational to our domestic food system, we tap into deeper meanings that can easily be overlooked. We might say that what animates soul food isn’t the chicken, or the hog, or any foodstuff in and of itself—but rather a spirit of preservation and promotion of the Black community. And this realization should prompt ethical reflection and response.

I suggest that veganism, particularly Black veganism as other activists and I have described it, shows one powerful way. By opting to not consume animal products, Black veganism forces us to examine how the language of animality and “animal characteristics” has been a tool used to justify the oppression of any being who deviates, by species, race, or behavior, from white cultural norms. By challenging the racist stereotypes within these norms, Black veganism invites us to learn more about the history and development of Black food and food culture beyond the terror that was slavery, tenant farming, and picking cotton. I find parts of myself in the stories of chefs such as Hercules Posey and James Hemings, and food justice activists such as Fannie Lou Hamer.

Studying the history of African and Black culinary and agricultural acumen, in conjunction with changing my diet, gave me the confidence I needed to lean into my Black as well as my vegan identity. And I think it helped my family along, too. Discussions about the way we eat provided an opportunity for my family to remember the stories of our ancestors. Over dinner, we talked more about the foods of my grandfather’s childhood in Mississippi—rice, beans, vegetables, stews, eggs, and occasionally meat. We also learned that one reason he worked on farms, despite the abuse he faced, was to decrease his own food insecurity.

These stories offered us more than any of us could have imagined. Telling and retelling these stories allows Black people to understand our food within the context of our own histories—and to continue to ensure that our dietary changes preserve and promote the communities we come from.

The post Is Black Veganism the Future of Soul Food? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“We need to forget about this so we can heal,” said an elderly white woman, as she left my lecture on the history of enslaved cooks and their influence on American cuisine.  Something I said, or perhaps everything I said, upset her.

My presentation covered 300 years of American history that started with the forced enslavement of millions of Africans, and which still echoes in our culture today, from the myth of the “happy servant” (think Aunt Jemima on the syrup bottle) to the broader marketing of black servitude (as in TV commercials for Caribbean resorts, targeted at white American travelers). I delivered the talk to an audience of 30 at the Maier Museum of Art in Lynchburg, Virginia. While I had not anticipated the woman’s displeasure, trying to forget is not an uncommon response to the unsettling tale of the complicated roots of our history, and particularly some of our beloved foods.

It is the story of people like Chef Hercules, our nation’s first White House chef; and Emmanuel Jones, who used his skills to transition out of enslavement into a successful career cooking in the food industry, evading the oppressive trappings of sharecropping. It is also the story of countless unnamed cooks across the South, the details of their existences now lost. But from its most famous to its anonymous practitioners, the story of Southern cuisine is inseparable from the story of American racism. It’s double-edged—full of pain—but also of pride. Reckoning with it can be cumbersome, but it’s also necessary. The stories of enslaved cooks teach us that we can love our country and also be critical of it, and find some peace along the way.

It’s not easy uncovering the histories of enslaved cooks, who left few records of their own and whose stories often appear in the historical record as asides—incidental details sprinkled through the stories of the people who held them in bondage. In my recent study of enslaved cooks, I relied on archaeological evidence and material culture—the rooms where they once lived, the heavy cast iron pots they lugged around, the gardens they planted—and documents such as slaveholders’ letters, cookbooks, and plantation records to learn about their experiences. These remnants, scant though they are, make it clear that enslaved cooks were central players in the birth of our nation’s cultural heritage.

In the early 17th century, tobacco farming began to spread throughout Virginia’s Tidewater region. Before long, plantations were founded by colonists, such as Shirley Plantation, constructed circa 1613; Berkeley Hundred, and Flowerdew Hundred, whose 1,000 acres extended along the James River. These large homes marked a moment of transition, when English cultural norms took hold on the Virginia landscape.

Traditions surrounding dining and maintaining a grand household were part of those norms, and the white gentry began seeking domestic help. At first, the cooks they hired on plantations were indentured servants, workers who toiled without pay for a contractually agreed-upon period of time before eventually earning their freedom. But by the late 17th century, plantation homes throughout Virginia had turned to enslaved laborers, captured from central and western Africa, to grow crops, build structures and generally remain at the beck and call of white families. Before long these enslaved cooks took the roles that had once been occupied by white indentured servants.

Black cooks were bound to the fire, 24 hours a day. They lived in the kitchen, sleeping upstairs above the hearth during the winters, and outside come summertime. Up every day before dawn, they baked bread for the mornings, cooked soups for the afternoons, and created divine feasts for the evenings. They roasted meats, made jellies, cooked puddings, and crafted desserts, preparing several meals a day for the white family. They also had to feed every free person who passed through the plantation. If a traveler showed up, day or night, bells would ring for the enslaved cook to prepare food. For a guest, this must have been delightful: biscuits, ham, and some brandy, all made on site, ready to eat at 2:30 a.m. or whenever you pleased. For the cooks, it must have been a different kind of experience.

Enslaved cooks were always under the direct gaze of white Virginians. Private moments were rare, as was rest. But cooks wielded great power: As part of the “front stage” of plantation culture, they carried the reputations of their enslavers—and of Virginia—on their shoulders. Guests wrote gushing missives about the meals in they ate while visiting these homes. While the missus may have helped design the menu, or provided some recipes, it was the enslaved cooks who created the meals that made Virginia, and eventually the South, known for its culinary fare and hospitable nature.

These cooks knew their craft. Hercules, who cooked for George Washington, and James Hemings, an enslaved cook at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, were both formally trained, albeit in different styles. Hercules was taught by the well-known New York tavern keeper and culinary giant Samuel Frances, who mentored him in Philadelphia; Hemings traveled with Jefferson to Paris, where he learned French-style cooking. Hercules and Hemings were the nation’s first celebrity chefs, famous for their talents and skills.

Folklore, archaeological evidence, and a rich oral tradition reveal that other cooks, their names now lost, also weaved their talents into the fabric of our culinary heritage, creating and normalizing the mixture of European, African, and Native American cuisines that became the staples of Southern food. Enslaved cooks brought this cuisine its unique flavors, adding ingredients such as hot peppers, peanuts, okra, and greens. They created favorites like gumbo, an adaptation of a traditional West African stew; and jambalaya, a cousin of Jolof rice, a spicy, heavily seasoned rice dish with vegetables and meat. These dishes traveled with captured West Africans on slave ships, and into the kitchens of Virginia’s elite.

You also see evidence of this multi-cultural transformation in so-called “receipt books,” handwritten cookbooks from the 18th and 19th centuries. These were compiled by slaveholding women, whose responsibilities sat firmly in the domestic sphere, and are now housed in historical societies throughout the country. Early receipt books are dominated by European dishes: puddings, pies, and roasted meats. But by the 1800s, African dishes began appearing in these books. Offerings such as pepper pot, okra stew, gumbo, and jambalaya became staples on American dining tables. Southern food—enslaved cooks’ food—had been written into the American cultural profile.

For the women who wrote and preserved the receipt books, these recipes, the products of African foodways, were something worthy of remembering, re-creating, and establishing as Americana. So why can’t we, as Americans today, look at this history for what it was? Colonial and antebellum elite Southerners understood fully that enslaved people cooked their food. During the 19th century, there were moments of widespread fear that these cooks would poison them, and we know from court records and other documents that on at least a few occasions enslaved cooks did slip poisons like hemlock into their masters’ food.

Depiction of Aunt Jemima, 1920, in the Saturday Evening Post. Courtesy of Internet Archive Book Images, via Wikimedia Commons.

But the country began recalibrating its memories of black cooking even before the Civil War, erasing the brutality and hardships of slavery from a story of Old Southern graciousness. The revisionism went full throttle during the era of Jim Crow, when new laws made segregation the norm. Post-emancipation America still relied heavily on the skills and labor of newly freed African Americans. In a highly racialized and segregated America, still grappling with its guilt over slavery, white people created a myth that these cooks were—and always had been—happy. Advertisers leaned on characters like Aunt Jemima and Rastus, stereotypical black domestics, drawn from minstrel song.

While newly free African Americans fled the plantations to find work as housekeepers, butlers, cooks, drivers, Pullman porters and waiters—the only jobs they could get—Aunt Jemima and Rastus smiled while serving white folks, enhancing the myth that black cooks had always been cheerful and satisfied, during slavery and with their current situation. You can find their faces throughout early 20th-century black Americana, and they are still on the grocery shelves today, though modified to reflect a more dignified image. 

My angry audience member was likely raised on the old enslaved-cook narrative in which these images took root, where the cook was loyal, passive, and purportedly happy—a non-threatening being whose ultimate goal was to help a white woman fulfill her own domestic vision. But to be an American is to live in a place where contradictions are the very fibers that bind a complicated heritage divided sharply by race. It is to ignore the story of Chef Hercules, or the real story of Aunt Jemima. By forgetting enslaved cooks’ pain to soothe our own, we erase the pride and the achievements of countless brilliant cooks who nourished a nation.

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