Soul food is an important staple of the Black community and one of the most recognizable types of cooking coming out of the U.S.. Most African Americans have grown up knowing, loving, or modifying this style to still enjoy its flavors, but live a healthier lifestyle. However, there’s not one straightforward origin story that would describe where this cuisine came from. Sure, the term “soul food” was popularized in the 1960s amid the Black Power movement, but some of the earliest mentions of this type of food date back to the days of slavery and perhaps even beyond that.
Soul food takes its origins most from Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, a collection of states that are commonly known as the Deep South. Not only was this region the southernmost part of the American South, but it was also the heart of the antebellum plantation economy, which heavily relied on enslaved African American labor to produce cash crops such as cotton and tobacco. In fact, slavery in the Deep South was far more deeply entrenched in rigid social, economic, and racial hierarchies compared to the other parts of the South or the U.S. as a whole.
Why does that matter? Well, while the term Deep South refers to a geographic area, it’s also deeply intertwined with the history of slavery and its long-term impacts on African-American communities and American society. Soul food as a cuisine originated in the Deep South, and it’s safe to say that all soul food is Southern food. But not all Southern food is soul food, which actually originated from the ethnic cuisines of enslaved Africans trafficked to the North American colonies through the Atlantic slave trade during the Antebellum period.
During the period of slavery in the US from 1619 to 1865, most of what trafficked Africans and African Americans ate was regulated by the plantation owner. That usually amounted to a bag of rice, sweet potatoes, or cornmeal, about ¾ of a pound of meat, and a small amount of molasses, which were distributed to each slave once a week. However, the meat wasn’t really muscle meat. Instead, it was offal; the enslaved were given the leftovers and the undesirable parts of the animal, such as liver, kidneys, heart, tongue, but also pig feet, ears, skin, and intestines.
Most enslaved African-Americans needed to consume a high-calorie diet to replenish the calories they had spent working long days in the fields or performing some other physically strenuous tasks. Fortunately, offal — particularly organs — are very high in nutritional value, vitamins, minerals, and protein. However, that’s not all that Black slaves of the 17th through 19th centuries ate. Other ingredients were often foraged, collected, or even grown by the slaves themselves, and the trafficked Africans brought vegetables like Okra, peppers, and black-eyed peas from West Africa, too.
The previously mentioned rations the enslaved received from the white plantation owners, along with the food that was foraged, grown, or carried over from Central and West Africa, formed the basis of African American Soul food. But here’s where things get interesting. Slaves were also the primary kitchen staff in plantation households, which often used what was readily available daily from their agricultural holdings, and under their influence, soul food was introduced and adopted into larger Southern cuisine and culture.
As a result, many impoverished whites and African Americans in the South often cooked and readied many of the same dishes, even after slavery was abolished. Sure, there was some variation in the preparation methods, but soul food and Southern cuisine still remain popular for their fried meats and head-to-tail eating. It soon evolved from being a simple diet made of ingredients that were readily available to a cultural phenomenon. Following the abolishment, African American churches became places where food became an integral part of various gatherings.
Unfortunately, the legacy of slavery continued to influence the Deep South through Jim Crow laws, segregation, and the economic and social disenfranchisement of African Americans. This was one of the substantial causes of the Great Northward Migrations that happened in 1910 and 1940. African Americans who migrated north to cities such as Baltimore and Washington D.C. during the Great Northward Migration, as well as Los Angeles, Oakland, Phoenix, Portland, and Seattle during the Second Great Migration, also brought their culture with them.
Soon, the Harlem Renaissance and Chicago Black Renaissance took place, and soul food became heavily influenced by other immigrant cultures who often lived in larger communities in segregated parts of the city. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the term “soul food” began to emerge as a reference to a more traditional African American cuisine that originated in the South. The civil rights movement highlighted the immense influence traditional African American cuisine had on Southern culinary traditions, making soul food a staple of regional cuisine that has since become nearly synonymous with southern “down home” cooking.
Nowadays, soul food has evolved to encompass everything, from traditional recipes to vegan varieties and healthy dishes, but the versatility of the ingredients on the plate represents the many cultures, languages, and origins that make soul food what it is. It’s really hard to imagine that a cuisine, now associated with comfort and borderline self-indulgence, was actually born of struggle and survival. In celebrating its diverse roots and ongoing evolution, soul food exemplifies the resilience of a people and the transformative power of culinary heritage.