Enlarge picture i As a new documentary shows, a plate of soul foods is loaded with concerns about history, identity and health.
As a new documentary exhibits, a plate of soul food is loaded with questions about historical past, identity and wellness.
You are what you consume, the old saying goes. But if you change what you consume, are you fundamentally shifting who you are?
That question underlies considerably of the new documentary Soul Foods Junkies, premiering Monday night on PBS' Independent Lens series. Director Byron Hurt's extremely personalized, often humorous film explores how classic Southern comfort fare became entwined with African-American identity. And it asks whether or not this food, usually loaded with salt, body fat and sugar, is performing its consumers more harm than fantastic.
The film was inspired by Hurt's father, Jackie Hurt, who lost his battle with pancreatic cancer in 2007. He was overweight and in poor wellness.
What is soul meals ? Hurt asks all through the film. The answers he receives are enlightening: dinner, conversation, family, a mother's cooking, dreams, adore. View a trailer.
"When he became sick, I started off to examine his connection to meals," Hurt tells NPR's Michel Martin, "and it was soul meals he grew up with and loved so substantially."
It is a adore affair with deep roots in the African-American community. As the film recounts, soul food was survival food in the black South. Dishes had been inspired by a will need to make do with what slaves could access: greens they grew themselves, leftover meat components like pig ears and feet, and low-cost foods like rice and yams loaded with calories to fuel a field slave's get the job done. Some of these recipes had origins in Africa. (Gumbo, we find out, was the West African word for "okra.")
And during the civil rights era, it was soul food purveyors like Ms. Peaches of Peaches Restaurant in Jackson, Miss., who fed demonstrators and aided maintain the movement going at no modest risk to themselves. "Black girls have completed so much to sustain us as a local community and as a culture," Harm says. "Ms. Peaches is 1 example of a female who utilised her culinary capabilities and her courage to assist feed the civil rights movement."
But even at that time, when locations like Sylvia's in Harlem had been bringing soul meals to a wider audience, some in the African-American community have been raising questions about soul food's toll on health. Nation of Islam leaders denounced soul foods as "slave foods," even though comedian Dick Gregory, who became a vegetarian in the '60s, termed it "death foods."
Enlarge image i Filmmaker Byron Hurt's documentary was inspired in aspect by the death of his father. He's shown with his mom, Frances Hurt (center), and sister, Taundra Harm.
Filmmaker Byron Hurt's documentary was inspired in element by the death of his father. He's shown with his mother, Frances Harm (center), and sister, Taundra Harm.
Hurt himself revamped his diet following a dalliance with Nation of Islam teachings. His rejection of pork, he recalls, hit his father difficult.
" Possibly he felt like that was me rejecting him, me rejecting black culture, me rejecting the food that he loved, you know?" he says in the film.
These days, plenty of individuals from vegan chef Bryant Terry to nutrition nonprofits like Oldways are producing much more overall health - conscious interpretations of traditional soul meals recipes. The PBS site provides up its own healthy takes on seven soul foods favorites.
But as Hurt notes, it would be overly simplistic to blame soul food for the rampant charges of obesity and diabetes in the African-American local community.
"We also have to shell out attention to more substantial concerns affecting our neighborhood : rapid food and processed food," he says.
"It is true that poor and working -class households who reside in communities that do not have access to very good supermarkets don't have access to good, top quality, healthful meals," he says. "And a lot of these poor supermarkets can be very easily observed in communities of colour. And that is a challenge."
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