Decolonise This XI: The Colonisation of Soul Food
‘School Dinners. I used to love eating in that little canteen in the basement of my primary school. Shepherd’s Pie, Bubble and Squeak, even Liver and Onions. The food that Mrs Mays used to prepare for us was always filling and nutritious. Oh, and the deserts; Apple Pie and Custard was my favourite (although I hated the rice puddings cos of the skin). The lunches meant a lot to me, and I always looked forward to them. Just as I looked forward to coming home after school and having something Caribbean for my dinner (Cowfoot soup with dumplings at the weekends, Corn beef Hash on a Thursday, Callaloo and Rice on a Sunday). Food meant a lot to me growing up.’
We eat because we have to. A relationship with food is one of the core aspects of human existence which ties us together. From those cultures who hunt and revere that which they have killed for themselves and their communities, to the groups who have chosen to only eat vegetables and grains etc, we each have our own almost unique relationship to food.
Yet, one of the most interesting things in my recent readings, is just how commercialised, and before this colonised, our relationship with food has become. From the plethora of fast-food shops to the range of celebrity chefs and their cookbooks on amazon, our relationship to food has become yet another commodity. We photograph our food and stick the pictures on social media (and yes, I have done this as well), or we food becomes a side dish (pun meant) in the business meetings of the powerful and important.
In my own history, food plays many roles. For example, custard creams are my kryptonite. My go to biscuit when I want to deaden the pain of whatever it is I am suffering through, or when I am dieting and watching myself there is a recipe for Dhal which an old friend gave to me, which I always batch cook when I choose to look after myself better.
We all have a relationship to food, and this month’s blog invites the reader to consider just how colonised, just how adapted and constrained this relationship may have become for each one of us in turn.
Every Christmas would be the same in my house growing up. A few days before, my mother would bake several Jamaican Black Cakes, having soaked the fruits in alcohol for weeks before. This was always a major moment in our house. The smell of the cakes baking in that oven, before I was allowed even the first slice of what would then become a marathon to each as little as possible before New Years Eve, savouring as much as I could. There would be trifle as well for deserts, homemade, sitting in the fridge, and a side of smoked salmon and a honey roasted ham for breakfasts. These rituals would even extend into Christmas Day, where my parents would serve up a Christmas Lunch of Roast Turkey, Roast Potatoes, Callaloo and Rice and Peas. Looking back, this was an acculturated mixture of acceptable foods for parents who were themselves colonised and who felt themselves to be English.
The Sankofa Report (2023) discussed the role of colonialism in the erasing of indigenous ways of farming, replacing them with colonial methods which were then used to feed the colonisers, often at the cost, health as well as financial, of the colonisers whose jobs them became working on the land.
Stories abound in this report of the experiences of the colonised as they adapted their normal practices to those of the colonisers. Tales which involved the learning how to cook in ways which were not their own to please their new masters/mistresses, narratives where they adapted their own eating habits so they would not be seen as too uncivilised by the colonisers. And when they could not afford to do so, there were also the stories of the foods which they adapted or created, in order to feed themselves and to find a way of enjoying themselves (Earle, 2012).
Each story of the colonised has within it the stories of the foods they created, or which were brought by the colonisers back from the colonies by the working classes (the troops) as they were the poorest and had gotten used to eating such food whilst away (Sperry, 2021).
So, given that food and culture are inextricably linked, therefore, so the experiences of colonised and their relationship with food, that intimate relationship which forms so much of who we are, would have been altered inexorably by the arrival and having to perform the cultural consumption of colonialism.
When I lived in Germany, I missed coming home for the food. So, when I was reading the Tip magazine one day (the Berlin version of Time Out), I was bowled over to see the name Carib in the restaurant section. A restaurant in Berlin which served Caribbean food (and which was actually owned by a Jamaican man with two huge dogs, who had moved to Berlin from Brixton because he was tired of living in London). I made The Carib restaurant the site of almost monthly pilgrimages, the call to eat what I missed from growing up at home being a call which set me sane again from those times where I may be felt most separate from my ‘home’.
I place ‘home’ here in quotation marks for a reason. That reason is to emphasise that I don’t mean the home back in London where I was raised. I don’t mean the home I found in my primary school when I was growing up, where I felt safe and held. I mean the home which feeds my belly to this very day. The cultural culinary home which when it calls, we need to answer, and which those of us who have been acculturated into the norms and culture of the Global North can feel a struggle to reconnect with as we have been told that to fit in, we need to adapt our eating habit to those of the Global North. The capitalistic, non-culinary, colonised constructs of a McDonalds or a Colonel Sanders KFC that jostle against the internal, intersectional and deep-seated soul food desires for Jerk Chicken, Jollof Rice, or Saltfish Fritters.
When we recognise our relationship to food been as much colonised by Western values as so many other parts of our intersectional identities, then we can start to reconnect with our healthier selves. Healthy of body, as well as of mind (Turner, 2022).
I make it an essential part of any trip alone abroad to sit and eat in local places. Not just for the culture, but because these are the spots where I can sit and breathe in a culinary authenticity beyond Global Northern values. For example, when I used to visit Brazil, one of the things I most admired (and took plenty of advantage of) was the fact that very few people went to fast food restaurants. Instead, people, locals, would go to have lunch in local places, you paid for what you ate by the kilo, and where the food was more plentiful, varied (and I will add delicious). Sitting with locals, eating rice and beans with a bit of chicken, for less than a fiver, would fill me up for the rest of the day, in a way that anything fast food and fried just would not.
My belly felt full.
My belly felt free.
References
Earle, R. (2012). Food and the colonial experience: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America. 68, 1492–1700. www.cambridge.org
Food Matters. (2023). The Sankofa Report: British Colonialism and the UK food system (Issue February).
Sperry, A. J. (2021). Eating Jamaica: How Food is Used as a Tool to Create and Reinforce Cultural Identity. World History Connected, 18(1), 1–12.
Turner, D. D. L. (2022). #DecoloniseThis I: Clothing and Colonialism. Dwight Turner Counselling. https://www.dwightturnercounselling.co.uk/2022/04/28/decolonisethis-i-clothing-and-colonialism/