Friday 5: 5 Reasons Soul Food Didn’t Make You Fat

Finally…the time for vindication has come.

“Go back to the past to build the future.”

Last year, I had this entire epic essay series prepared, delving into the history of African American foodways and contrasting it with what we have and what we see today. Looking at the way our eating, as a culture, has evolved in this country – how our food migrated, how our treatments of food (the way we cooked, the way we stored, the way we preserved, the way we prepared) migrated from Africa, and the way our recipes really transformed food in America was just… it was something I was legitimately excited to do in this space.

But then…my ding dang laptop exploded. Like, literally…exploded. Crashed, motherboard muttering at me… everything. It was crazy. And painful. But after a few months, with the great assistance of a lovely twitter friend (thank you, Krissy!), I was able to retrieve most of my hard work… but then I had to wait until February to get it back going.

It’s February, baby.

It’s for the better that I do this in 2013, because now I’m actually certified in nutrition (among other things, now.) I’m equipped to understand the way the body nourishes itself, and the way it uses vitamins and minerals to its advantage. I’m capable of understanding the effects that food has on the body, and considering everything I’ve found, it’ll be important to explain why so much of what we believe about our cultural foodways is pure crap.

That’s right, I said it. Crap. Starting with the belief that soul food made us fat. That somehow, the reason the Black community is suffering so heavily from “the obesity epidemic” is because “they eat the fried chicken, and all that pork, and that macaroni and cheese and all those collard greens with all the vitamins boiled out of ’em…” and, I have to be honest. Every time I hear someone blame soul food for their obesity, I wonder what kind of self-hating dogmatist they got that from. Want to know why?

Here are five reasons why soul food didn’t make you fat:

1) Were you eating soul food 3 meals a day, 7 days a week? Or were you eating it once a week, Sunday night at the big meal because everybody had jobs and couldn’t spend all day slaving over a stove? Tell the truth: you weren’t eating chicken and waffles or grits every day for breakfast, you weren’t eating soul food leftovers every day for lunch, and you certainly weren’t cleaning collard greens for hours in the kitchen, boiling them for hours on the stove, and eating them at 11PM every night for dinner. You were eating sugary, cereal and fatty milk for breakfast, fast food for lunch, and a pot pie – made for two, by the way – for dinner. Keep it real.

The biggest complaint among most people nowadays is that they don’t have time to cook. That’s why they struggle with converting to healthy eating, and can’t give up processed food. It takes too long to cook a meal. So, it stands to reason that if it takes too long to cook a healthy meal, then it takes eons to cook soul food, which is – by all accounts – labor-intensive. So, really. Either you’re erroneously blaming soul food for your bad choices, or you’re lying about it taking too long to cook since you’re legitimately cooking soul food all day every day. Pick one.

2) Even when you do cook soul food… how “from scratch” is your cooking? I’m looking at you people who haven’t cooked a biscuit from scratch since scratch created you; you people who, when asked if you make your cornbread from scratch, you say “Does Jiffy count?”; you people who haven’t made a cake from scratch since you “lost your measuring cups”; and you people who stay making that dreadful “7 layer cake” with whipped cream full of trans-fatty whipped cream instead of making your own whipped cream from scratch. All of you. That’s not “from scratch.”It just… it doesn’t count. It doesn’t count. Let me learn you something.

When you buy boxed ingredients, they come full of extra sugar. They come with the important stuff – the vitamins, the minerals, the actual nutrients – stripped from the box as a means of protecting the shelf life of the ingredient. Whipped cream, believe it or not, has nutritive qualities. It – when made from scratch – has very little sugar, amazing vanilla flavor, and has practically the same nutrient profile as milk because… it is milk. Like, that’s it. It gets trans-fats added so that manufacturers can get away with using very little milk and still get that airy, whipped texture to it when you taste it. Taste processed whipped cream after you’ve experienced the homemade thing well-made… and the processed stuff tastes like…metal. Straight up.

Your cake mixes, cornbread mixes, biscuit mixes… all contain unnecessary sugar. Your seasonings even have excess sugar in ’em – don’t believe me? If you’ve got a bottle of Lawry’s seasoning salt in your pantry right now… take a look. No nutrients. Just…carbs. And crap. And, if you don’t believe me… take a long, hard look at the ingredients label on your regular go-to recipe. Jiffy, Betty Crocker, Bisquick… you can’t blame any of that on soul food. If you’re using velveeta in your mac and cheese… processed food. That ain’t cheese – that’s torture. Soul food…was from scratch. Flour, butter, water, salt, oil. Biscuits. Your little batter in a yellow bottle… you pretty much just let someone else tell you what you’re putting into your system.

3) The meat isn’t the same as it used to be. In an industry clamoring for a larger portion of the American “share of wallet” – meaning, “If an average American family only has, say, $50 to spend each week on groceries, how can I get them to spend $15 on our industry instead of $10?” – the goal was to get the average American family to eat more than the reported 146lbs per year of meat they were originally eating. And, if you want that number to grow, you have to ramp up the supply so that it can meet the demand.

So…what do you do? You start breeding four times as many cows… but then, you realize they’re not growing fast enough. So, now what? You feed them something that’ll help fatten them up quicker… you feed them corn.

Uh…this should all sound familiar:

We, here at BGG2WL, know what happens when you feed someone a lot of something they shouldn’t be eating… and prevent them from being able to move. They’re unable to healthily develop muscle, and equally unable to burn any fat they gain. Since they’re having a hard time developing muscle… the industry doesn’t say “Let’s give ‘em room to play and grow healthily.” They say “Give ‘em growth hormones.”

Take it a step further, though. Because the cows aren’t eating what they’re supposed to be eating, they’re unable to fight off infection (sound familiar?) and illness. So, instead of saying “Ohhh, we’re making the cows sick, let’s go back to giving them what they’re supposed to have,” the industry says “Give ‘em antibiotics.” The anti-biotics can’t take care of everything, so the cows have to have a hole created so that a “ranch hand” (literally) can reach their hand inside the cow and pull out the infectious and indigestible product. Any antibiotics may help with illness, but not infection… so the meat is thereafter cleaned with ammonia.

Excerpted from The Case Against Eating [So Much] Beef | A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss

So. Not only are you eating poorly raised meat, you’re eating hormones and excessive antibiotics, too… and wondering why your own hormones are untrustworthy and why your own medications are unreliable at normal doses.

The meat is also fattier per 4oz cut, which means that even if you’ve been eating the same palm-sized portion of meat your entire life, over the course of the past 20 years or so, you’ve gradually been eating more and more animal fat.

Again: it’s not soul food’s fault your cuts of meat are of poor quality, and who would’ve told you to check the increasing amounts of fat you were putting into your body? If we all knew, would we all be here?

4) Your “sweet” isn’t even the same as the “sweet” of the past. The actual refining process of sugar results in three things – actual powdered sugar, molasses, and rum (fermented molasses). Sugar was the stuff that Britain imported/exported from its Caribbean colonies. Molasses is what was left for the slaves, which eventually found its way into the US as sweetener in cakes, pies and traditional fare.

Let me say that again: the sugar was for the slave owners in the house; the molasses – rich in antioxidants, gentle on the blood sugar – was what slaves used. If the slaves got a bit of sugar, rest assured it wasn’t a regular occurrence and was treated like a spice, not an everyday thing.

In other words, your taste for actual white sugar… wasn’t borne of soul food. That had much more to do with the push for processed foods to contain more sugar, in the hopes that you’d consume the product quicker, faster, and be compelled to rush out and buy more of it.

Again: not soul food’s fault.

5) Soul food was actually, at its core, centered around vegetables. Okra, tomatoes, collard greens, peppers, sweet potatoes, corn, mushrooms, peas, spinach, cabbage, eggplant, onions, and more. Meanwhile, the number of people coming to me daily talking about how they “can’t stand veggies” and it’s “something about the texture” reminds me that if, in fact, these people were actually still eating soul food – and a variety of it, at that – they wouldn’t be telling me that they “don’t like veggies… any veggies.”

I’m even going to throw in a 6th point, just for general purpose: if you genuinely believe that your “big Sunday dinner” with soul food with the family is to blame for your obesity, then you must not believe in “cheat meals,” right? I mean, the idea behind a “cheat meal” is that you take once a day to go HAM on a whole pizza or whatever foolishness people do, right? So, if that logic holds up – that one meal each week can cause such major damage that it can cause an entire culture’s worth of people to become obese – then that’s reason enough to stop the cheat meals, right?

Didn’t think so.

Listen. If you call into one of these categories, I’m not trying to make you feel bad. I used to be so bad at cooking, that I went a year in an apartment and the only time I turned on the stove was to overcook some cheap spaghetti. We all have to start somewhere. That’s not what I’m getting at, here.

What I am getting at is that it’s annoying to watch people who smell like McDonalds blame a culture of scratch cooking for obesity in a day and age where nobody “has time to scratch cook.” Even in passing, in a joking manner, blaming soul food for things caused by a food environment where the quality as well as the ingredients are unquantifiable… is cruel and unfair. I’m no longer willing to scapegoat the dishes my grandmother made me, with love, that she took with her straight out of Selma, Alabama. Not gonna do it. Not gonna let anyone do it in my presence.

The same thing that could be said for Blacks and soul food, could be said for Mexicans and their cultural staples, could be said for Italians and their cultural staples. The ingredients that make up those staples have changed in this country, and has resulted in not only appropriation of their culture, but their foodways as well. And, when corporate interests take hold of the mass production of those cultural components – pasta and tortillas, anyone? – and obesity develops, who’s scapegoated? Someone’s cultural foods.

Lots of things are to blame for the sharp rises obesity and its sister symptoms – lack of knowledge of cooking, lack of access to fresh food, lack of awareness of how to prepare and store fresh food, lack of money, lack of time to cook, lack, lack, lack… but admitting that makes us feel like we’re still, collectively poor, and it feels easier to just smile and say “it’s the soul food.” Don’t do it anymore.

Honor your Meemaw’s old pot of okra – no matter how much it reminds you of boogers – and stop buying into it. But when you figure out her peach cobbler recipe – how much clove did she put in it? – then you need to e-mail that to me. Because… its peach cobbler. That’s why.