Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and Food in the American South

Getting Something to Eat in Jackson challenges the misconceptions that freeze Black Southern folklife in the past. Emerging from centuries of creative responses to highly oppressive structures, African American foodways are alive and ever-evolving. In Jackson, Mississippi, the book argues, Black people choose how to get food, what food to get, and how to consume that food in response to the socioeconomic challenges of the contemporary urban South. The book comprises four parts, each analyzing a different economic stratum of Black Jackson. The chapters profile Jacksonians whom the author came to know through embedding himself in their daily lives.Part I examines the food lives of people experiencing chronic homelessness. The more chronic one's homelessness in Jackson, the more adept one becomes at squeezing one's daily schedule and one's sense of self into the rigid routine of procuring food from the city's service providers. While this squeezing results in a level of food security, it is highly incompatible with efforts to escape homelessness. The section shines in its narration of “identity talk,” or the stories people tell to explain their current situation and help themselves “accept that they [are] indeed down-and-out” (p. 40). This mental feat of acceptance, Joseph C. Ewoodzie argues, is a prerequisite for successfully navigating the city's food distribution network.Part I also explores the “social ties that helped ease [the] challenges” (p. 38) of homelessness, detailing how those with more experience orient newcomers and describing the places where “they learn about the routine for survival” (p. 56). Armed with information, the study's subjects make choices that align with their personal health goals (rejecting sweets), adhere to custom (avoiding sites that serve dinner dishes for breakfast), and resist institutional constraints (sneaking cookies into a shelter's sleeping area). These chapters provide some analysis of service providers—the volunteers, nonprofit employees, and proselytizers who deliver food to people experiencing homelessness. Ewoodzie's portrayal of faith and fear among this population deftly maps the power dynamics that the underclass must navigate to get something to eat in Jackson.Part II dissects the food choices of Jackson's working class. Ewoodzie complicates celebrations of soul food—a culinary tradition created to survive racial capitalism—that eject today's poor Black Southerners from the Black food tradition and elide their ongoing food access challenges. He also rebukes scholars who foreground a soul food past as the primary driver of contemporary Black food choices (and contemporary rates of diabetes and heart disease). In conversation with Zandria Robinson's concept of the “post-soul South,” he convincingly demonstrates that most poor Black urban Southerners today are not preparing or consuming much soul food at all. This is particularly true for younger generations, but working-class elders find their food choices circumscribed as well. With limited money and energy, they select foods that are most convenient and affordable. In the Southern city, this often looks like buying and preparing fast food, instant foods, and convenience-store fare. “Soul food,” the chapters show, “is no longer survival food; it is ceremonial food” (p. 125).Part III analyzes how middle-class Jacksonians’ socioeconomic in-betweenness shapes their relationships to food. Financial stability allows this group the psychological space to act on health considerations that are “projections of their future desires” (p. 162). But racial segregation and food apartheid also calibrate their everyday decisions. “For lower-middle-class black folks,” Ewoodzie concludes, “what was close to them did not always allow them to be as health-conscious as they would like to be” (p. 176). Particularly relevant for folklorists in the era of “trad wives” is chapter 10’s portrait of a young woman's path to finding home in the kitchen. The chapter provides a clear example of how the division of household labor socially reproduces gendered expectations.What does soul food mean to the Black middle class today? This is a central question Ewoodzie poses in the beginning of Part III, and at its end, the answer remains unclear. For his subjects, soul food often seems to be something from which they want to move forward. Caught between the comforting taste of tradition and the different taste of their expanding palettes, they espouse contradictory beliefs and engage in contradictory behaviors. But perhaps the meaning of soul food for this group is fundamentally incoherent; perhaps dissonance is the point. Food choices, the author reminds us, are never purely rational.Part IV argues that elite Black Jacksonians use food to “nurture their racial identities” (p. 213). Maintaining Black identity as a Southerner with class privilege seems to “require a continuous connection with the struggles of blackness,” Ewoodzie observes (p. 251). Consuming foods born of that struggle is one way to maintain that connection. The section also examines Black elites who use the pleasures of fine dining as a release valve for the pressures of professional life, and a performance of resistance in the midst of ongoing segregation in the South.Ewoodzie's chronicle of the 2013 election of Mayor Chokwe Lumumba sets the stage for future examinations of how and when more formal political and spiritual commitments shape Black food choices. Membership in both The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (cofounded by Lumumba) and Cooperation Jackson (which seeks to build on the legacy of Lumumba), for example, entail a commitment to the ideal of local food sovereignty and the practice of materially supporting Black farmers. Since Ewoodzie completed his field research, Southern cities like Jackson, Atlanta, and Durham have only grown as epicenters of organized countercultural Black food politics.This book would make a valuable contribution to social work, urban planning, Black studies, and food studies classrooms. Ewoodzie has issued a call for more careful examinations of intraracial class dynamics. He has also provided intriguing case studies of the ethical considerations that arise in the course of qualitative research and how one might navigate them; these would make for challenging discussion in the graduate classroom. For those working in food policy, this text is a strong entry point for better understanding the factors that shape Black Americans’ engagements with urban food systems. Getting Something to Eat in Jackson is a fresh and captivating look at Black life in the urban South today.