Eating While Black

“Unpacking the ugly history of racist stereotypes, exclusionary agricultural policies, and the cultural assumption that Black people’s lives need monitoring, this is a book that celebrates the diversity of Black American food culture across the United States. . . . Eating While Black is a thoughtful text with insights into how much unwelcome extra tension and 'heaviness' lands on Black Americans' plates.”—Foreword Reviews

“From cooking lessons that urge 'healthier' ways to prepare a pot of collard greens to policies that suggest Black people have the worst health records because of what they eat, in her latest examination of food and culture, Williams-Forson says such food shaming is anti-Black racism. Denigrating Blacks for enjoying foods that represent their cultural and spiritual roots deprives Black Americans their identity. Combining personal experience with insights from popular culture, Williams-Forson describes how even in their consumption of food, Black people are often perceived as transgressing, misbehaving, and in need of 'gastronomic' surveillance.”—Civil Eats

“Everybody eats, so what’s political about eating? After reading Eating While Black, the answer is clear: everything.”—LIBER: A Feminist Review

“Eating While Black looks at Black food culture along the broader tablecloth of structural and systemic racism, violence, degradation, socioeconomics, and exploitation. . . . The stories, anecdotes, and analyses are illuminating . . . insightful.”—INDY Week

“Eating While Black invites us all to examine how racial, class, and other anxieties often drive institutions and individuals to consciously or unconsciously inflict harm on Black people (and everyone else). Psyche Williams-Forson’s analysis calls for a deeper understanding of the ways in which expressions of 'concern' over how we grow food, cook, and eat are often more about policing our behavior and patrolling the boundaries of race and class.”—Bryant Terry, James Beard Award– and NAACP Image Award–winning author of Black Food and editor in chief of 4 Color Books

“Psyche Williams-Forson has gifted us a profoundly personal new work that beautifully troubles our ideas around the efficacy of the food justice movement in communities of color while engaging us in developing a delicately nuanced praxis for reframing Black food culture as a site for liberation. I’m going to be sitting with this book for a while.”—Thérèse Nelson, founder of BlackCulinaryHistory.com

“Psyche Williams-Forson adds a major building block to the developing canon of food scholarship. In this well-considered work, she deftly shepherds readers through the minefields of culinary practices, racial assumptions, and more, revealing the tangled complexity of the relationships that African Americans are presumed to have, now and in the past, with food in the United States.”—Jessica B. Harris, author of High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America

“In this sobering yet enticing book, Psyche Williams-Forson offers a road map for moving forward from the racially biased ways in which African American food choices are commonly ridiculed and judged, to a landscape unsullied by stereotype and ignorance. I respect the enormity of what she has revealed, and I loved this book.”—Patricia A. Turner, author of Trash Talk: Anti-Obama Lore and Racism in the Twenty-First Century

“Unearthing places of real power, agency, and resilience, Psyche A. Williams-Forson spares no one in her demand that we understand the complex history of Black foodways. Eating While Black has a message for us all: when we fail to address the reality that this food system, by design, has been and is a failure, we prevent ourselves from doing what needs to be done for the health and well-being of us all.”—Monica M. White, author of Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement

“Provocative and incisively argued, sometimes humorous and always deeply engaging, Eating While Black is Psyche Williams-Forson’s meditation on how and why narratives of misrepresentation about Black culinary lives find purchase and pervasively circulate in the media, society, and American households of all types. It reveals how confusions (willful and otherwise) about how Black people eat have produced a profoundly distorted image of Black people—a reality that permeates so much of what it is to be Black in this country.”—Naa Oyo A. Kwate, author of Burgers in Blackface: Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now