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Yesterday morning I woke up craving grits and catfish. Problem? I’m in Cape Town, South Africa, and have been for the past couple of months and, unlike home, where there are soul food spots on just about every corner, there are no places here that serve the traditional African American delicacy.
I set out to find a restaurant that served anything close. That turned up nada. I went to one restaurant known for their seafood and asked if they had catfish, however all the hostess heard me say was “cat” and then she subsequently frowned her face and told me I was in the wrong part of Africa for that. I went from supermarket to supermarket, but there was not a black eyed pea or blue and white Jiffy cornbread mix box to be found in the vast land. Defeated, I decided to make the next best thing: red speckled sugar beans curry and stew perch and putu pap, just like somebody’s South African grandma used to make. It was tasty. But it was just not the same. I need some collard greens, some fried chicken with tons of hot sauce, some baked macaroni and cheese and some hush puppies, dammit.
Throughout my short travels around the world, I’ve always wondered why soul food has been missing from the culinary exchange. The time I visited Brazil I remember walking down the strip near my hotel room in Salvador Bahia and being inundated with restaurant choices from Italian, to Chinese, to Mexican and even Thai. And yet there was not a single place to get a decent hoppin’ john or good gumbo.
I had the same feeling and experience in The Netherlands. And in Jamaica. And in Ghana. And now South Africa. However, there is a KFC…
I remember being in Ghana a year after it got its first franchise peddling the 11 herbs and spices. It was in Osu, which is in central Accra, and was a multi-level structure, almost three times the size of any KFC I have seen in America. A couple of my local friends told me of the excitement folks there had upon its grand opening. Not only were there lines around the block, but people wore their best Sunday outfits for the occasion. Today, the chain, which once tried to position itself as a soul food restaurant, is now on its third restaurant in Ghana and has since opened up franchises in the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Mauritius, Swaziland, Lesotho and Mozambique.
And yet, an authentic soul food restaurant has yet to make its mark in the place where most of its ingredients and cooking techniques originated.
And why not? It’s not like folks throughout the world don’t have a taste for global cuisine. Heck there isn’t a modern place in this world that doesn’t consider eating “exotic” foods a matter of showing one’s social status and how supposedly cultured we are. Surely Soul Food has a place in the fine dining global experience?
And so what if soul food is loaded with fats and high cholesterol. Mexicans are the fattest people in the world, but that hasn’t stopped us from chowing on half-priced tacos and margaritas. Italian people are pretty heavy too (According to the UK Daily Mail, 36 percent of Italian boys and 34 percent of girls are considered overweight or obese), but I don’t see the global community pushing the pasta away from their plates. So why, too, can’t soul food have a global audience appreciating it?
The thing is, it’s happening right under our noses.
In the piece titled, Like it or Not, Soul Food is Black History Too, I wrote about popular Charleston, South Carolina, “Southern food” chef Sean Brock who took a trip to West Africa a couple of years ago in an effort to trace the roots of several popular soul food dishes. He found them in Dakar, Senegal. As noted in the Food and Wine article about his trip:
“Throughout his visit, Brock was scribbling down notes in a red book and communicating with the cooks in his kitchens back home, sending them changes to menus in real time. At one point, as he watched Ly steam rice over a pot of aromatic broth to infuse it with flavor, he cried out, “Genius! Why don’t we do this?” He then promptly emailed his sous chef to tell him about it. “I would love to see what I’ve learned here not just on my menus, but on low-country menus everywhere,” he says. “Western African traditions have shaped one of the oldest cuisines in America, but as we modernized these dishes, they lost their soul. We owe it to both Southerners and Western Africans to find it back again.”
And as I noted in my previous piece, there was not one single sentence in the article that bothered to mentioned how the traditional style of West African cooking and recipes managed to end up on these shores. (Here’s a hint: it has to do with the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which not only on produced free labor out in the fields but in the kitchens as well. For more specific information, see this article by Christina Regelski on the history of cornbread, okra, greens and yes, even barbecue in the South). In fact, the term “soul food” is nowhere to be found in the article. Instead the author, as well as Chef Brock, opted to use the more racially inclusive term, “southern food.”
Food gentrification is not just happening stateside. Over the last decade or so, London, UK, has seen an explosion of sorts of “American Southern Food” restaurants serving everything from BBQ, okra, hoppin’ john and other traditional soul food recipes.The thing is, the grand majority of these restaurants are owned by white people whose roots are nowhere close to these shores, let alone the American Black community. One such example of this culinary white washing is the very popular Anna Mae’s Street Food truck, which has been profiled in not only the Guardian UK but also British GQ as a favorite among the Southern Food eatery. Only thing is that Anna Mae is not run by an older Black woman with a southern drawl as the name would suggest. Anna Mae is a petite white woman who said that she and her equally white husband Tony got the “Southern Food” truck idea from her many visits to the States, including soul food eateries in Harlem, NYC.
Now I am not a chef; I am a writer. Therefore, the chances of me opening up a soul food eatery in South Africa are close to nil. Still, for a long time we have been taught our food is bad, unhealthy and not worth the scraps from the table it was taken from. But obviously folks like it. And they like it enough that they are running with it worldwide. The problem is that we, the creators of this cuisine, are nowhere to be found in Soul Food’s globalization. And that means that not only are we not profiting off our own creation, but it also means that our history is once again being erased and washed over. So perhaps it is time that those of us who are professional chefs and restaurant proprietors to begin setting up shop in places outside of the U.S? God knows, Harlem, Philly, Chicago, and Memphis don’t need another soul food restaurant.
