Book review: Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr, Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and Food in the American South

Abstract

Recent media attention ranging from documentaries and popular cooking competitions as well as the evolving diversity within the James Beard awards have highlighted the role of soul food, African American culinary history and traditions, and the need to preserve and uplift this knowledge for future generations. Even the newly created cooking competitions such as Soul Food that features a cast of all Black chefs and judges (the first of its kind) underscores the uniqueness and historical importance of soul food in modern foodways. Yet soul food remains a heavily critiqued scapegoat, blamed for the health ills of poor Black Southerners who are seen as unable or unwilling to leave these traditions in the past in favor of healthy food that fits in modern society. Getting Something to Eat in Jackson challenges such perspectives, and many others, by clarifying what role traditional foodways play for African Americans across class boundaries who call Jackson, Mississippi home. Ewoodzie presents four distinct class-based experiences of African American men and women around food in Jackson, Mississippi. The first one focuses on the experiences of homeless men who are forced to structure their days around the hours of local soup kitchens and homeless shelters. These men are afforded little agency around what foods appear on their plate, and the process of obtaining food whether at soup kitchens or shelters is highly structured and surveilled with harsh penalties of expulsion for those who do not conform to the rules or are perceived as causing problems. The second one focuses on the food choices of a poor Black female headed family who balance job hunting, housing, and food insecurity, with the need to feed themselves in this constantly constraining environment. In this context, the need to provide food for the family is not a singular issue of what to eat or when, instead it is the complex relationship between transportation, day care, housing, and employment all of which coalesce to make hunger and food scarcity a part of daily life for this family and its young children. Although soul food is a distinct memory within this class category, the daily reality is far removed for these children whose mothers and grandparents remember soul food as part of their foodways growing up. The third one shifts to a Black middle-class family who works together at the barbecue restaurant they own. For this family, food is an ever-present aspect of daily life as they attempt and ultimately fail to make their restaurant profitable. While at home, the teenage daughter shoulders most of the responsibility for preparing dinner and continues to educate herself on the food industry and what it means to develop a food consciousness in the modern South. It is also within this class context that we see the constraints of racial segregation that place healthy foods in upper class almost exclusively White neighborhoods, and leave restaurants and consumers in less 1184080 COS0010.1177/00207152231184080International Journal of Comparative SociologyBook reviews book-review2023