Session 467: Eating While Black

Summary

Therapy for Black Girls Podcast
Session 467: "Eating While Black"
Host: Dr. Joy Harden Bradford
Guest: Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson
Date: June 10, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the intersection of food, race, culture, and identity in Black communities, featuring a conversation between Dr. Joy Harden Bradford and Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson, author of Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America and Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs. The discussion explores how food operates beyond sustenance—functioning as a site of memory, power, pride, tension, and creativity, specifically for Black Americans. The episode unpacks narratives around soul food, food shaming, the moralizing of eating habits, and the role food plays in constructing and expressing Black identity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Why Study Food?

[05:19–06:45]

• Dr. Psyche describes her entry into food studies in the early 1990s, shifting attention from culinary technique to the deeper contexts: procurement, preparation, social circumstances, and emotional and symbolic meanings.
  • “There are a lot of symbolisms around food that are often invisible or that are used to manipulate or control or challenge or… affect people's lives. So food is about more than just coming together and having a great time. Food actually does a lot of heavy lifting in causing a lot of tension, quite frankly.” — Dr. Psyche [06:00]

Food as Exclusion/Control

[06:45–09:45]

• Food can be weaponized, both intentionally and unintentionally, from familial disputes (withholding food) to major historical traumas (enslaved people refusing or being forced to eat).
• Modern examples: lack of inclusivity at workplace events, indirect signaling and marginalization via food choices at gatherings.
• Family gatherings (e.g., Thanksgiving) can be tension-filled, especially when identity, sexuality, and politics intersect around the dinner table.

Defining Food Studies

[10:16–13:05]

• Food studies is an interdisciplinary field encompassing nutrition, social sciences, anthropology, arts, and now mental health.
• The field has fought for and established academic legitimacy, moving far beyond “scholarship light”.

Being Watched While Eating & Food Shaming

[13:05–18:19]

• Dr. Psyche’s research shifted from focusing on stereotypes to exploring the lived and self-defined experiences of Black people.
• Black eating habits are hypervisible and often judged, entangled with both racist perceptions and classist/moralistic discourses.
  • “I decided that it was important for us to have a larger conversation about the ways in which Black people’s human bodies continue to be policed even when we do something as mundane as eating.” — Dr. Psyche [17:45]

Mental Health, Body Image, and Food

[18:39–25:23]

• The conversation details how food shaming—from childhood weigh-ins to adult social media scrutiny—impacts Black mental health, body image, and self-worth.
  • “It’s almost like if you're full figure, you should be in shame until you're ready to come out and present yourself to the world.” — Dr. Psyche [23:27]
• Narratives restricting Black girls’ food choices or policing their bodies can have lifelong psychological consequences.

Soul Food: History, Stereotypes, and Pride

[28:21–34:07]

• Soul food is often demonized and moralized in ways unlike any other American cuisine.
• The roots of soul food lie in resilience, creativity, and diasporic survival, not just deprivation.
  • “It’s a way of keeping on keeping. When you don’t have any other way of being, it’s how you keep on keeping.” — Dr. Psyche [31:50]
• Modern conversations about soul food must move beyond deficit models toward a celebration of ingenuity and collective perseverance.

Rethinking “Making Do”

[34:07–37:46]

• The narrative of “making something out of nothing” is both true and incomplete; Black ingenuity included gardening, supplementing, and strategic use of resources.
  • “I’m all for it, as long as we’re going to talk about it, not from a deficit, but from the standpoint of highlighting our ingenuity and creativity.” — Dr. Psyche [36:52]

Food Access & The Rise of Dollar Stores

[37:46–41:01]

• The arrival of refrigeration and fresh staples in dollar stores was a critical shift in food access for low-income families.
• Dollar stores’ food offerings became essential for survival for many, especially post-COVID as prices fluctuated.

Who Gets to Define Soul Food?

[41:01–44:11]

• The definition is deeply rooted in Black cultural, historical, and familial experience; soulfulness is more about preparation, technique, and intention than fixed recipes.
  • “That’s important therapeutically, Dr. Joy… to our psyches as Black people to define something in our everyday life that… adds to who we see ourselves as being.” — Dr. Psyche [43:17]

Food as a Window to Black History

[47:06–51:26]

• Food is a powerful entry point into Black American history, culture, migration, and social justice movements.
• Recommended texts for further exploration: Tony Tipton Martin’s The Jemima Code, Jessica Harris’s works, High on the Hog documentary, Fred Opie’s books, Monica White’s Freedom Farmers, plus work by Ashanti Reese and Hannah Garth.

Eating with Pride

[51:26–54:25]

• Eating with pride is personal and communal; it’s about what feels and tastes good, and what represents one’s identity and heritage.
  • Shared stories highlight the importance of honoring personal and regional differences, collective pride, and the joy of sharing food traditions.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “[Food] actually does a lot of heavy lifting in causing a lot of tension, quite frankly.” — Dr. Psyche [06:25]
• “You’re not acceptable unless you conform to a particular standard and ideal. And then it begins to assign a very colonized mindset to what should be an experience of joy…” — Dr. Psyche [24:55]
• “No other culture has their food demonized in such a way… but what I’m fascinated by are the ways in which we again combine seasonings to make a thing palatable to our way of tasting.” — Dr. Psyche [31:10]
• “We make it do what it do is really more of the concept, really more than just making do.” — Dr. Psyche [36:44]
• “Soul food and Black family reunion, Black foodways is so much bigger. Starting with your own household onward… there’s room enough for all of us.” — Dr. Psyche [50:15]
• “Does it feel good for you? Does it taste good for you? Does it represent something for you? Then I think you’re eating with pride.” — Dr. Psyche [51:33]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Start of Guest Interview: [05:14]
• Food as Power & Tension: [06:45–09:45]
• Defining Food Studies: [10:16–13:05]
• Monitoring Black Eating and Shame: [13:05–18:19]
• Mental Health & Food: [18:39–25:23]
• Soul Food & Its Demonization: [28:21–34:07]
• Challenging "Making Do": [34:07–37:46]
• Food Access and Dollar Stores: [37:46–41:01]
• Who Defines Soul Food?: [41:01–44:11]
• Food as History, What to Read: [47:06–51:26]
• Eating with Pride: [51:26–54:25]
• Where to Find Dr. Psyche: [54:34]

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Conclusion

This episode affirms the richness and complexity of Black foodways, urging listeners to approach food, culture, and even personal eating habits with nuance, pride, and historical awareness. Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson’s insights stress the importance of self-definition, communal ingenuity, and reclaiming food as a source of joy and strength—rather than allowing it to be diminished by stereotypes or moralizing.

For further exploration, listeners are encouraged to check the episode’s show notes for resources and follow Dr. Psyche on social media at @buildinghouses9 or her website psychewilliamsforson.com.

Transcript

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast, a weekly conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or to find a therapist in your area, visit our [e-mail] while I hope you love listening to and learning from the podcast, it is not meant to be a substitute for a relationship with a licensed mental health professional.

Hey y', all, thanks so much for joining me for session 467 of the therapy for Black Girls Podcast. We'll get right into our conversation after a word from our sponsors.

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

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[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

a rare autoimmune condition brings uncertainty, but it can also create community. In season six of Untold Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, they go beyond MG and cidp as host Martine Hackett welcomes stories from other conditions like myositis and Eyegan into the conversation. Untold Stories is produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenics. Listen to Untold Stories Life with a Severe Autoimmune condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast if you listened to last week's episode we explored soul food as a living tradition. We talked about how it continues to evolve and how we've used it as a tool of expression across generations. This week we're continuing that conversation by looking at soul food from a wider scope. I'm happy to be joined by one of the leading voices in Black Food Studies, Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson. She's an award winning scholar and cultural historian whose work explores the connections between food, race, gender and culture. She's the author of Eating While Black Food, Shaming and Race in America and Building Houses out of Chicken Legs, where she invites us to look beyond just the food we're consuming and ask deeper questions about who gets to define what we eat and what those definitions say about us and our shared experiences. In today's conversation, Dr. Psyche helps us understand the many ways that food can serve as a lens into cultural memory and how Black communities have created meaning and identity through what we cook and share. If something resonates with you while enjoying our conversation, please share with us on social media using the hashtag tbginsession or join us over in our Patreon to

[Interviewer]

talk more about the episode.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

You can join us at community.therapy for black girls.com here's our conversation.

[Interviewer]

Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Psyche.

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[Interviewer]

So you have spent, it feels like your entire career really studying food beyond just sustenance. What made you realize that food really revealed something deeper about ourselves and the way we live our lives?

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Wow, that's a great question. So yes, I began studying food around 1991. 1990, when I began to really study the food itself. Not so much the preparation process, but the context of all of that. Right. So how food is procured or gotten, who's preparing it, when and how and in what circumstances it is consumed. When you start to look at those elements of food studies, you realize that food is about more than just consumption. There are so many different emotions. Of course we know rail food. But also there are a lot of symbolisms around food that are often invisible or that are used to manipulate or control or challenge or in other words, affect people's lives. So food is about more than just coming together and having a great time. Food actually does a lot of heavy lifting in causing a lot of tension, quite frankly.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

Can you say more about that?

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Sure. I mean, one of the obvious examples that we might think about are the ways in which

[Interviewer]

food.

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

I'm mad at my spouse, I'm mad at my partner, so I'm not going to cook.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

Right.

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Withholding food.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

Right.

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Certainly during enslavement, two things happen, both during the middle passage and certainly after. Enslaved people often refuse to eat.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

Right.

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

And so we're forcibly forced to eat, and for two reasons. I'll starve myself before I feed myself so that you can then subject me to the horrors of bondage. On the other hand, we need to feed these people because we have a labor supply. Each one of these humans, who we are looking at as chattel, costs money. In more contemporary times, the ways in which, in a workplace setting, for example, we're ordering coffee, and there are segments of the community at your workplace who only ever drink tea. Culturally, that's their ritual. Those are the kinds of signals, knowingly and unknowingly, that get used around food that really do land very heavily on people. You're having a. An event and you have vegetarians, and you never take into consideration the people who are vegetarian. Right. So those kinds of activities often, as I said, they may be performed unintentionally, but then there are times that they are very deliberate. Right.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

Thank you so much for that.

[Interviewer]

I mean, because I think we tend to think about food as like a celebration. Right. Like you mentioned earlier. But there are some very intentional and sometimes unintentional ways that it feels like food can be used to exclude or include.

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Absolutely. I just will add, after the first election of the current president, we at our university and then our department had a lot of young people who were very concerned about going home for Thanksgiving. Many of them are queer identified and had great concern for what this particular political moment meant for who they are and how they identify. Right. And so we held a town hall to say, these are some of the things you want to think about as you are talking with your family. Because Thanksgiving dinner, the mixing and bringing together of people of in laws, step parents, stepchildren, really does become one of the most and can be one of the most explosive meal situations, even as it's supposed to be a time of coming together and family and so forth.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah. I remember lots of conversation then as well, about just how do you talk to your families if there are different political views and those kinds of things.

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Yeah, correct, correct. And that tends to happen over food.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

Right.

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Which is why we say we don't talk about food. We don't talk about politics, religion, sexuality, and other kinds of topics over meals, Even though we tend to let our guard down when we're eating and dining. Because it's a time of commensality. It's a time of coming together. It's a time, as Ashanti Reese says in her new book of Gathering. Right. But that time of gathering can really be fraught with other kinds of tensions as well.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

So, Dr. Psiachi, how would you define food studies?

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Well, that's a great question. So I'm just back from the College Language association meeting which was held in Jackson, Mississippi over last week. And this conversation came up quite a bit because, of course, we were thinking about on a broad level through conversations of literature, how we talk about food ways and the many various levels of that food studies. For me, their conference was around soul food, soul work and soul legacies. So they were looking at family faith as a foundation through this notion of food. So for me, this is really important because when I entered food studies in the 90s, it was a relatively new field, right? It was a very new field. It had been around for maybe about 20 years. A lot of nutritionists, several humanists, some folks in the social science, a lot of anthropologists have been studying food, and they were really looking at food systems and the ways in which, for example, from an African American point of view, the ways in which enslaved populations were fed, not fed, what they ate and so forth. But food studies as a whole was really just evolving. The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is our industry news journal or news portal, had done an article that said food studies is scholarship light.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

Right.

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

So it doesn't really have a lot of scholarship behind it. Well, the field responded vehemently and said quite the opposite. And so you had all of this writing that has come out saying, this is food studies, this food study, this, this, this. So now you have almost every discipline looking at food from the culinary, and that is the sort of preparatory ways of engaging food. Texas barbecue, delta barbecue, this kind of thing to individual food stuffs, right? Tomatoes, oranges, avocados, chicken. In my case, then you've had the nutrition side. Now you have mental health. Everybody now is looking at food that really is in the main how we Understand Food studies, it's interdisciplinary project, right. So any and every discipline can really look at how we understand the ways in which food exists in our lives and the ways in which we interact with the art. Brian Terry's book on black food, for example, which involves art, music, dance, the digital. So everyone has a say in how do we understand the ways in which food affects people's everyday life.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

And in your book Eating While Black,

[Interviewer]

you talk about the ways that black people and the way we eat and what we eat are often watched. Can you talk about why it felt important to write about that? And what were you hoping to really convey in your book Eating While Black?

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Sure. So when I wrote Building Houses out of Chicken Legs, Black Women, Food and Power, which was my doctoral thesis, I wrote that book because several cultural moments happened, most familiar of which would be that Tiger woods won the Masters tournament for the first time, and a fellow golfer had made a remark to him because apparently when you win the Masters, you not only get the coveted green jacket, but you choose whatever meal you want. And a fellow golfer had told him not to order chicken and collard greens. Right. And so a couple of other issues happened as well, which led me to think about. It was the turn of the century, and I'm like, black people are still being associated with fried chicken, chicken and watermelon, right. As a stereotype. So that's how I started down the road for Building Houses. Midway through that writing process, I decided the approach that I was taking at that time of looking primarily at the stereotypes was really focusing on the deficit model of exploring black communities, Black food culture, Black culture in general. And I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to look at our culture and our cultural ways through the lens of other people and how they see us. I was more interested in how we see ourselves. Right. Sometimes we do see ourselves through the lens of stereotypes, but that's not the whole question way of looking. And I knew that from my own life experience. Right. So I start with that because while I was traveling throughout the country sharing my research on Building Houses and my methods and so forth, and just the overall book, the food landscape in America was changing. Dollar Tree and other dollar stores were starting to get refrigeration, Right. So contrary to what people might think, Dollar Tree specifically and Dollar General. And so they didn't always have refrigeration, Right. They mostly were just a sort of five and Dine Kmart. You pick up an item here or there, but they started adding things like Juice and milk and bread. And I started thinking, who's buying food from the dollar tree? Right? But over time, as my daughter started to attend a birthday party every weekend and I had to be back in the dollar tree getting little gifts and things, I'm like, oh, this is a one stop shop. So that started happening. The other thing that started happening is this push to grow your own food, which was a regurgitated conversation. This isn't the first time we've talked about this, right? At cycles in our history, United States Americans have often said, oh, we need to push grow your own food for the democracy. So this started happening again. But the other thing that started happening was a lot of moralizing started. People would come up to me and say, how do we get people to stop eating at McDonald's? Or how do we get people to grow their own food? Or what should I do when I want to go into this community and build a garden? Most of these were white people, but there were a fair number of black folks who would ask me how to stop people from eating fast food. And it began to take on this sort of, again, moralistic, ethical tone of, you're wrong and shame on you for eating the way that you do. And I decided that this was a larger conversation that permeated a lot of different layers and that I felt like we needed to talk about what does it mean to be black and eat in America? Because from the first time our feet hit this shore, we have been embroiled in issues of food. We were brought here because of our agricultural knowledge, and yet we were deprived of the very sustenance that we were able to provide for other people through 400 years of enslavement, reconstruction, the nadir of black American society, and then the renaissances and civil rights. Food has been at the center, Woolworth's lunch counter. Right. Pivotal moments. Right. And so I decided that it was important for us to have a larger conversation about the ways in which black people's human bodies continue to be policed even when we do something as mundane as eating. So that's really what was the genesis for eating wild black.

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And Dr. Psyche, can you talk about.

[Interviewer]

You mentioned that, like, even mental health is a part of the conversation around food studies. And as a psychologist, I'm also now thinking, as you're talking about the impact that that has on your relationship to yourself and your relationship to food, that, like, something as mundane as eating is like hypervisible.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

Right. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Sure. I fell into that topic, actually. Dr. Joy, because the counseling center at the University of Maryland asked me if I would give a talk on black women in eating. And this was before eating while black. And so I did give that talk and the title was you don't have to give up the Corn pudding, because again, it was. It was about black women. Than the quandary of food, right? Because it was. Conversations tend to be very two dimensional. You either do this or you do that, right? You either eat this or you eat like this. You eat dirty, you eat clean, right? Because that was the other thing that started coming out. All of this. I eat clean. The heck? What does that even mean? And it's amazing because so many people who have never in their lives taken a medical course have all this information about how you should eat. And with social media, of course, this is even more widely disseminated. Bodies which previously around it, and we know African bodies have always tended to be rounded, which were heralded in many cultures, are now seen as unruly, as my colleagues have said, unruly black bodies, which is an actual manuscript. And so all of that tends to affect one psyche. I had the good fortune of being on a panel earlier this year and we read the book Big Girl, right? And it was a coming of age story about a young black woman just trying to come to terms with her eating and her size. And it was a sad book and it was also a celebratory book, but it was really hard to read. Mecca Jamila Sullivan's book Big Girl, it's fascinating read, but the challenges that these young black women were going through with food. So that's what led me into this conversation around mental health around this time. And I talk about this extensively in Eating While Black. The Washington Post did an expose called Young Lives at Risk and they were talking about obesity. And they did. They covered the entire DMV and they covered different demographics. But the story, of course, that stuck out most for me was the young story of Latricia, the young girl who I talk about in eating while black. Because as I'm trained, I study food, but I am trained as a material culturalist, meaning I study the material world and how people connect with objects. What do things mean to us? Why do we dress the way we do? Why do we adorn ourselves the way that we do? What do our accoutrements, artwork? What do those things mean and say about us? So I was fascinated by the way in which the Washington Post did this expose because it really victimized this young woman, right? Both the visual expose and the Story essentially went like this. Here's Latricia. And Latricia is ridiculed as being King Kong by her classmates. She doesn't fit in. She eats too much. She needs to lose weight. She's trying, but she doesn't have enough willpower. Poor Latricia. Let's give her a big go, Latricia. That's the way the story read. The more I worked with that story, it just didn't sit well with me for one, because I had a daughter around Latricia's age and I knew what she was experiencing. And I tell this story in Eating While Black, how she and other black and brown children were asked to get on the scale. And then the teacher read their weight out loud and they were in third or fourth grade and then made a comment like, some of you won't make it into adulthood because you're obese. For children, of course, I had to have choice words with the principal. But for children, what that does to their psyche, and especially girls, right? Oh, I feel like I'm the fat friend. I don't like being a fat friend. Nobody likes me. Those things carry with us into adulthood, as we know any of us on social media can see. On any given day, you might see a full figure person working out. And literally people will be coming at them. I mean, which it's almost like if you're full figure, you should be in shame until you're ready to come out and present yourself to the world. Right? And so here you have this intersection of food and body and image and mental health. Right? Because part of what I talk about in story is the details that the story gives. Without going into it, you almost could read Latricia's story as being in foster care, if you know anything about the foster care system. Because she just all of a sudden appears in this woman's life. And this woman is her caretaker, but not her parent or her grandparents. We don't know if Latricia has been separated from her sisters. We don't know any. Anything. What we know is she's learning these really important life skills, sewing, cooking. So. But it all gets whittled down to she cooks soul food and she eats like this all the time. And so as a people, those kinds of narratives does something to our psyche. Well, right, because says you're not acceptable unless you conform to a particular standard and ideal. And then it begins to assign a very colonized mindset to what should be an experience of joy eating, a different kind of social and cultural meal on a holiday. It makes you question your own self worth, right? So all of that are parts of what I tease out in that story about Latricia.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

More from our conversation after the break.

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living with a rare autoimmune condition can bring a lot of uncertainty, but it can also bring people together in powerful ways. Tune in for Season six of Untold Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with argenyx. This season, host Martine Hackett brings you fresh stories from people living with MG and cidp and expands the conversation to people living with other rare conditions like Myositis and igan. Through their stories, you'll learn what it's like to participate in clinical trials seeking New treatments, how connection fuels hope, and how people can support one another along the way. Because living with a rare disease isn't about getting through it. It's about moving forward together. Listen to untold stories Life with a severe autoimmune condition on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcast. You've talked about soul food a couple

[Interviewer]

of times, and it doesn't feel like there is any other particular food, especially associated with the black community, that has been more impacted by moralizing than soul food. Right. And that definitely has shape our relationship to it. Can you talk just about the ways that, like, our thoughts and the stereotypes around soul food has made it either something that people have really kind of wanted to embrace or have at some points, I think, felt ashamed of and felt like, this is a bad thing, that I don't want to necessarily have this as a part of my diet.

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Right? Yeah, yeah. Soul food is big. Right. I don't think that there's any other culture who has their food demonized in such a way. So black folks have always eaten in a variety of ways, right? Because we've lived in a variety of places. Yes, the majority of black people in the United States came through the mouth of the south by virtue of enslavement, but there were free blacks as well, and there were black folks who have always lived along the eastern seaboard on up to the area of New England. So I start with that because that means we've had a variety of palettes. In the 60s, when a black journalist said, black people, the Negro has no culture, Amiri Baraka, poet, essayist, came out and said, oh, contrary, we very much do. We have black music. We have a way of talking, we have a way of walking. We have our own food. All of it has soul. And he said, and these are the foods that you might find in soul Fried chicken, fried fish, sweet potatoes, macaroni and cheese, collard greens or any kind of greens, Pig feet, pork chops, all of that. Smothered pork chop. Right. And so a lot of people said those are. Those are Southern foods. Quite true. And what Amiri Baraka was saying is it's a way in which we do it. It's a way in which we put these combinations together. It's a way in which we, as Verda Mae Grosvenor said, season by vibration and don't always use measuring. So that really is soul food. So you can say, is soul food tofu? Can it be tofu? Can it be pumpkin pie? Can it be the Way that we here in Maryland, for example, cook our crab. Can that be soul food? And I say yes. And it's how you choose to cook it, right? It's how you choose to throw it down. Here's what the writers of Soul Soul man say. It's a way of keeping on keeping. When you don't have any other way of being, it's how you keep on keeping, right? So it's the way that you put some beans in a pot and you throw some smoked turkey, or you smoke chicken, or you smoke ham hock or neck bone, and you got one bay leaf and a spoonful of sugar or salt or pepper or what have you, and that's it. And that's your pot, right? It's a way of being. So when people talk about the demonization of soul food, you're rejecting a historical understanding without an understanding of the history. I'm a disassociate from that. I was on a panel at this conference. I just came back from celebrating Gino Lee, who was a multi generational entrepreneur of a restaurant called Big Apple Inn. And Big Apple Inn is noted for two types of food. Red smokes and pig ears. As I'm sitting facing the audience and Mr. Lee and I chatting, when I tell you the looks on some people's faces as he's talking about these pig ears and how he makes them and cuts them in the gristle and. And I understand that because we all have various tastes, etc. But it was interesting to watch, right? It's also part of our respectability politics. Black folk have it bad. We have that thing bad. And that comes out of a generation of post enslavement. But also prior to that, wanting to be accepted in a society that was never designed to accept us. We eat a lot of different things with a lot of different things. But what I'm fascinated by are the ways in which we again, combine seasonings to make a thing palatable to our way of tasting. Right now circulating on social media is this all this craze around cabbage, right? How you cook cabbage now, many of us grew up with it boiled or whatever, but nowadays they're like, hey, you put in there, you throw the oil in the butter and obey and all of these seasonings, and you roast it for a little while and then it comes out and it's. I say to myself, sometimes so black is just so black, because all of the oozing of all of those. And that's the way we do things, right? Versus some other cultures that don't season as well or its flavor. So. So it would be great if we would both celebrate the creativity and our ingenuity in the things we do with food and be okay to allow each other to both accept and reject various foods without feeling like we have to cast any judgment on on one another.

[Interviewer]

The conversation around soul food often feels like it is framed in this making something out of nothing. Right? Like that's the story of how we got to soul food. Do you feel like there's something that's left out of the conversation when we

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

frame it that way?

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Yes. And I say this all the time. I know that's a nice nostalgic point of we may do. And that is true. That is not true. But let's talk about how we made do. We were the original planters along with indigenous people. We have always been cunning and ingenious in how we plant in plain view so that nobody can see it. So, yeah, we had to make do sometimes with the little bit that was given to us. But we also have to remember that many of us depending upon what type of plantation you are or what farm you on, because not everything is gone with the wind, right? Some people were just on the farm. Some enslaved people just lived at a house with another family. Even if you grew something in a pot in a window, you were supplementing. And I think it's important for us to expand that conversation of making do to look at the ways in which we literally did a multifaceted kind of way of survival in the same ways that we are doing today. This is why I push the dollar tree and Walmart and other places where you can get your food. Because we have never only relied upon one source. The making do comes from. This is what was given to us, the offal, the leftovers. Case in point, Mr. Gino Lee said they started out only doing smokes. And then one day, a man came to his grandfather and said, hey, I got this thing of pig ears that I'm about to throw away. Do you want them? His grandfather said, yeah, don't throw those away. I'll figure out something. Next thing you know, he's making pig ear sandwiches. You can say that's making do, but it has expanded his business exponentially because the thing that apparently is the favorite is the pig ear sandwiches down there, right? So we've always been able to be creative with food and other stuff. And so when we talk about making do, I'm all for it, as long as we're going to talk about it, not from a deficit, but from the standpoint of highlighting our ingenuity and creativity, we make it do what it do is really more of the concept, really more than just making do. We can take. I saw a Latino man yesterday. I think he was Latino online. He said, I have $1 and I'm gonna make a meal. And he went in the store and he bought a cup of beans. He bought one pep. They gave him the pepper. He bought a tomato and an onion, and he made a pot of beans. Right. We're doing that. This is in 2026. Right. So it's part of the creative process. Born out of a country that has never given a dag on about people who were downtrodden, people who were without, people who were impoverished. And so being able to say, we made it work, I think is celebratory way more than it is. Oh, Lord. You know, we always just had the drudges of life. True. And that's part of why we got sold, because we know how to keep on keeping on.

[Interviewer]

You've referenced the food being present in, like, the dollar stores and family dollars and those kinds of things. And I'm from Louisiana, and I feel like I remember at what point that started happening.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

Right.

[Interviewer]

But it feels like for you, that feels. Feels like a seminal. Like a turning point in the ways that you're framing your work. Why does it feel like that is so important? What do you feel like that marked for you?

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Because it was. I grew up in Dollar Tree Family Dollar Dollar General, and none of those places they had canned things maybe. And I even remember when cans came into being, but to input refrigeration. I remember again, first it started with bread, then it was eggs and milk, and then a few breakfast items and orange juice. And I said, huh, this is interesting. And this would have been around 2003 or 4. Why it's so critical is because it suggested a way that people who were on fixed incomes and other ways of minor and minimal subsistence could actually afford to eat. I talk about this in Eating While Black, and Black Woman wrote a book because she was feeding her mother from the dollar tree, and she wrote a whole book on the dollar tree recipes and meals because her mother was on a fixed income, right? And she would buy all of her sort of staples at the Dollar Tree, and then they would buy the fresh food additives at the local grocery store. What made the pivot so interesting to me is right down the street from what was then my local dollar tree was what we call Giant Supermarket here in Maryland, which was a major big box Supermarket. And I went in there one time, one of the. Before I just started doing online shopping, and they had all of these items for a dollar. I said, huh? And they were less than a mile from the dollar tree. So that's when I knew it was something important. Because if your local grocery store is in competition with your dollar tree, then that means something's going on, and there's an important thing happening here also. That phenomenon was critical because, again, when you have people who are on a fixed income and maybe are taking medication and have to eat to take their medication, these kinds of ways of buying food become very important to one's overall ability to survive. Post Covid, now, that dollar tree is now a $25 and up is not as. It's still helpful, but not as much in the sense that the prices are unpredictable. You don't know if you're going to be getting juice for a $1 25, $50 or more. And that makes it very difficult for people who are challenged to eat and people who are food insecure on a daily basis. And that can be from the college adjunct professor to the student, to the aging, to the construction worker, on down to the unemployed.

[Interviewer]

Dr. Psyche, I want to go back to the soul food conversation a little bit because I want to know, who do you think gets to define who is the authority on what soul food is?

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Yeah, that's a really good question. Who is the gatekeeper? Well, you know, I think that I would. To answer that question, I will go back to early cookbooks, the earliest black cookbooks in the black community that talk about soul food. How do they define it? Because they would have come up in the era in which soul food as a term was created. You know, Jessica Harris, who's a noted food historian and culinary historian, would say, these are foods that everybody ate, right? Absolutely, they are. But you cannot remove the critical element of the political intervention that Amiri Baraka made. He was very specific to say black people have a culture, and our culture is exemplified by the word soul. Straight at the heart. It comes from the heart. It comes from deep inside of who we are. That's why I said, is tofu soul? Can you soul food? Tofu? Yeah, you can. You fry it up and you add some spices and some seeds. So is it a way of cooking? Is it what is cooked? What is soul food? And so to answer your question about who gets to decide, I think if you go back to those early cookbooks during the time in which Mary Baraka coined that term, you will see that there Was we had at least one early black vegan soul cookbook, right? And then you had a number of other articles and so forth in Ebony, in Jet in, in places like that, they're saying, yes, we're going to have this food, that food, what have you. Sometimes they call this soul, sometimes they didn't. They just talked about the way it was cooked. Do I think that's a concept that stays within the black community? Absolutely. I'm with the people on threads. You will need to tell everything, right? Because that's part of our cultural life ways. But in terms of what defines. So I think if you're cooking

[Interviewer]

a

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

meal and you're cooking it using a particular technique or techniques, stowing it down and adding various spices and things, then you put you're cooking in a particular way that mirrors what was really identified as salt. And that's important. That's important therapeutically, Dr. Joy. That's important to our psyches as black people to be able to define something in our everyday life that defines and adds to who we see ourselves as being. The creatives, the engineers, those who are able to pivot on a dime, those who continue to keep on keeping on. All of that gets embodied by our food.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

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[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

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[Interviewer]

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[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

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[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

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[Interviewer]

If someone started with food as a way into Black American history, where do you think that would take them?

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

What do I think it would take them is undefinable. It could take them in any number of directions. It depends on where they're trying to go. And let's say, if they said, I don't know where I want to go, I just want to start. Well, there's a couple of really important books that I would encourage them to take a look at. One is Tony Tipton Martin's the Jemima Code, and she goes through every single black cookbook that was published up until 20, 2017 or something when the book came out. You're going to get a whole history lesson in that, certainly anything by Jessica Harris where she talks again about different recipes and so forth. Because what those texts do is they give you an entry point into understanding a large portion of part of black America. Right. Of course, High on the Hog as a documentary gives you a lot of different and that's also a Harris documentary, gives you a very wide understanding of, hey, black folk had barbecue down in Texas. And also. But it's different over here in Mississippi, is different over in the Carolinas. Fred Opie's book on soul food is very important. He talks about migration. And so my work is going to take you into the ways in which food and power get manifested.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

Right?

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

And so there are a lot of really good spaces where you can start. Monica White's book on Freedom Farmers talks about the ways in which food and farming and the civil rights movement and other social movements were very much a part of black experiences. Ashanti Reese and Hannah Garth have work about food justice and social justice and the ways in which we've always, from the Panthers and Hamer, but also Gloria Richardson and the tons of unknown black women and men who did things with food in order to get us through pivotal points in time that we are now seeing being worked over time to reverse.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

Right?

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Food has always been a bedrock for us as a people, not only because it's why we're here. Many of us, in terms of generations of ancestors and the knowledge that we had of how to work the land. George Washington Carver, right. Tuskegee Institute. So it for us as black people, it goes way beyond. This is what I'm eating today for lunch or dinner. It is the bedrock of who we are as a society, as a culture of people, people and the many, many, many fascinating things we've done with food from historically to today. And the numerous black chefs, Michelin star or not, who are laboring. And I don't just want to look at the chefs. I want to look at the behind the scenes people, right? The waiters, the busboys, the dishwashers, the short order cooks. All of them deserve the Somalia. All of them deserve the shout outs. And so often we pinpoint and we lean into one. The chefs, soul food and the black family reunion, if you will. Black Food ways is so much bigger. Starting with your own household onward, right? And I feel like we as a people are eclectic enough and we should be willing enough to allow people to get in where they fit in, right? So maybe your conversation is around short order code. Have at it. Maybe yours is on Mr. Tenderism. Maybe yours is on again, the Black family Union. Maybe yours is on the Michelin star chefs, the Marcus Samuelson. Wherever you get in, that's where you are. And it's room enough for all of us. And for God's sake, there's way more to study than just soul food. Whole lot of unsaid conversations that still need to be had around how black people have eaten and continue to eat in America.

[Interviewer]

What would you say it means to eat with pride?

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Does it feel good for You. Does it taste good for you? Does it represent something for you? Then I think you're eating with pride, right? I think we all are at a place in our lives as a society where we maybe can eat smaller portions as a society of people. But that's part of the largesse of being in America. Interestingly, I don't think there's ever any one way of doing a thing right, because while we have a collective racial pride, we also have multi level regional pride, like right here from Louisiana, I'm from Virginia, we both from the south, but we have very different ways of defining the south. As I found out when my roommate and I, who's also from Louisiana, back when we were in grad school, and she said, you know what? I've never had collard greens. And I had never heard of zatarains, right? And it was so funny because she kept her zatarains and I made my collard greens, and we're still best friends to this day. And recently she's like, I gotta learn how to make collard green. But we're both, again, eating with pride. Because she was very clear, don't touch that zatarain. Because back then, it wasn't in every store. She had to get it from Louisiana, from New Orleans. And so we had different ways of showing our cultures, but we did it in a way that allowed us to share with each other and with our larger communities. And I think that's important. That's really important. And I talk about that in eating while black. Black, because I talk about how she wanted a couple of her really close friends to eat some hot sausage. And I'm sure, you know, being from Louisiana, the hot sausage are talking about. And she did this whole thing, invited us over, and her daddy sent this sausage up and then she cooked it. And I was like, oh, my God. I said, you know what, girl? I don't eat pork.

[Child 1]

Julia, you only pork.

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

I was like, how did you not

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

know that I don't eat pork?

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

So we had one friend in the group and he ate it and he said, this tastes like kielbasa. And it was such a devastating moment for her because so much preparation and stuff had gone into it. And. And I admit this in the book, and I felt like we dismissed it. And recently that same friend who said it feels tastes like kielbasa called her and said, what's the name of that sausage again? Because I'm about to make my point is that that's pride, right? And giving each other space to be human and beautifully human and beautifully different. I think as Joe Scott talks about about is so key to our engagement with flu.

[Interviewer]

It has been such a pleasure to chat with you today Dr. Psyche. Please let us know where we can

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

stay connected with you.

[Interviewer]

What is your website and any social

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

media channels you'd like to share.

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Great. Thank you and I appreciate it. It's been a great conversation. My website is psychewilliamsforson.com and you can just even if you misspell it, I'm sure Google will correct it. And then I am on threads and Facebook and Instagram @building houses9 so it's pretty easy building houses9 nowadays they all feed into each other. So I look forward to hearing from anyone and to expand the conversations. We may agree, we may disagree, but the bottom line is we're having good conversation about a really important topic I think and one that that touches each and every one of us in our day to day lives.

[Interviewer]

Absolutely. Thank you so much. We'll be sure to include those in our show notes.

[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

Great. Thank you very much for having me.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

Absolutely. I'm so glad Dr. Psyche was able to join me for today's conversation.

[Interviewer]

I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

If you want to learn more about her and her work, be sure to visit the show notes at therapy for black girls.com session467 and don't forget to text this episode to two of your girls right now and tell them to check it out. Did you know that you could leave us a voicemail with your questions or suggestions for the podcast? Let us know what's on your mind by dropping us a message at Memo FM Therapy for Black Girls. We just might feature it on the podcast. If you're looking for a therapist in your area, visit our directory at therapyforblackgirls.com directory don't forget to follow us on Instagram at Therapy for Black Girls and come on over and join us in our Patreon for exclusive updates, behind the scenes content and much more. You can join us at community.therapy for black girls.com this episode was produced by Elise Ellis, Inde Chubu and Tyree Rush. Editing was done by Dennison Bradford. Thank y' all so much for joining me again this week. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you all real soon. Take good care. Ladies. If you're in that phase where your body is just doing new things, sleep's weird, energy's weird, cravings also weird. You're not alone.

[Interviewer]

It's totally normal.

[Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford]

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[Dr. Psyche A. Williams Forson]

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