Geri Spratlin
26 November 2002

Food, Culture, and Literature

J.K. Rowlings introduces her young readers to the imaginary culture of wizards and witches when her characters indulge in a snack of Bernie Botts Every Flavor Beans.  The ninth century biographer Einard lends insight into the character of Charlemagne by alluding to the monarch’s preference for roasted meats. Across time and genre writers use food imagery—what is eaten and  how it is eaten— to define cultural groups, to develop characterization, and to invite the reader to become a participant in the story the writer tells.

            An objective in the study of the literature of the American minority, is “to observe  images of the individual, the family, and alternative families. . .”  In addition, the writings of the American minority reflect  both the role of traditions in the lives of minority groups and the eroding of those traditions as the members of the minority group assimilate into the dominant culture (White).  In the stories Black Girl Lost by  Donald Goines, and Baby of the Family by Tina McElroy Ansa, the reader sees two different portrayals of African American life. By comparing and contrasting the various allusions to eating habits and food, the reader is led to share unique life experiences—to get a taste of what it is to live as an American minority.

            The term foodways has been coined by anthropologists who study how food is linked to culture. In Ethnic andRegional Foodways in the United States, writers Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell, to establish the basis for their study, explain how American categorize themselves and others by foods eaten, foods not eaten, ingredients used, how food is prepared, and what is needed to prepare food.  The authors also emphasize that foodways is a dynamic element of culture, especially in the United States as ethnic groups adapt to American lifestyles, as the availability of recipe ingredients changes, and as technology affects preparation methods (3-15).  Eating is a universal experience. If a fiction writer’s objective is for the reader to identify his characters’ race or ethnicity, there are few methods more effective then describing what they are eating. If a writer desires to convey understanding of the characters’ social status, personality, or predicament, a portrayal of how food is obtained and consumed paints a clear picture.

            The picture Donald Goines paints in Black Girl Lost is of the brutality of American urban ghetto life for an African American child. In the opening scenes, Goines describes his character Sandra’s hunger: “What drove her on was the hunger pangs that kept flashing across her stomach. She bent over double as a cramp hit her in the stomach.” (9).  That in the early 1970s setting of this story, a child is neither fed nor cared for illustrates a picture of the African American condition. This child has been excluded from the “American Dream-Land of Plenty” image of United States culture.

            The era in which Goines writes this story was a time in which women in America asserted their right to equal access to the job market and parody in salaries. As citizens became disenchanted with their government’s handling of the conflict in Vietnam, other cultural conventions came into question. The stigmas associated with divorce and out-of-wedlock pregnancies abates and, consequently, the single parent household becomes a respectable alternative to the traditional nuclear family. As a result of single women holding jobs while raising children, eating habits in the United States change. Time consuming cooking procedures are no longer practical in many homes. Marketed in grocery stores are food products that can be prepared quickly. “Fast food” franchises feed the children of American’s dominant culture (McFeely 2). 

It is as a perversion of this trend that Goines relates, through Sandra’s story, the experience of life in the ghetto. Sandra’s mother works as a prostitute, not to support her child, but to support her alcoholism. It is Sandra who works in a grocery store, accepting food as payment. Although the narrative tells of her dream of a dinner table laden with foods of every description, the dietary staple of her life is cheap lunch meat and crackers—food that is filling—more laden with fat than nutrition. In one scene, Sandra brings home her meager meal. In addition to her usual lunch meat and crackers, the grocer has treated her to soda pop and cake. Before Sandra can finish eating, her mother comes home invoking a scene not of a mother’s concern that her daughter has had to provide for herself, but of a drunken rage in which Sandra is assaulted with her mother’s accusations and epithets—a scene which ends with a mother snatching food from her daughter and eating it herself (21-23).

From this relatively short vignette of  mealtime, the reader extrapolates the story of what life is for an African American child of  a 1970s ghetto. One measurement of where an individual is placed on America’s socioeconomic scale is the length of time the offspring of that individual live as dependent children. The lower the income level, the lower the age at which the children must take on adult responsibilities. The mother in Goines’ story is not stopping on the way home from work to pick up a pizza or something-fast-from-the-store. Sandra’s mother comes home to eat what her child has procured.  In Sandra’s America, adulthood starts at age nine.

In contrast to the life of the character Sandra in Black Girl Lost is the life of Lena in Tina McElroy Ansa’s Baby of the Family.  Ansa tells the story of an African American child in the 1950s South. While Goines’ account of mealtime is a story of Black children living in poverty—a  minority group without the choice to assimilate into the dominant culture—mealtime that Ansa describes tells the story of African Americans partaking of the “American Dream.”

At the McPherson family home in Ansa’s story mealtime emulates a scene from Father Knows Best and other situation comedies dominating the television schedule of the 1950s. In this 1950s American image, the entire family gathers around a table to eat a nutritional meal prepared by the women of the household.  As a concession to their roots, Lena’s  family sits to dine at a table in a room with a fireplace, the mantle of which holds the ashes of her grandfather’s remains. Through the voice of Lena, Ansa expresses what it means to dine together as a family:

There was something right and prodigious about the family eating their big meals in the room that had become a mausoleum for a dead patriarch.  It seemed to show the family’s knack for making things important and inconsequential at the same tie.  Food, after all, was just sustenance, but it was also something glorious and rapturous for the family (106).

The chapter continues with a description of Lena’s father offering grace and, during the course of the meal, eliciting table conversation from each family member.

Just as Lena describes meals as important and inconsequential, so are the allusions to mealtime in literature. On one level the author tells simply what the characters eat, appealing to the readers’ sense of taste to involve them in the characters’ lives.  However, returning to Brown and Mussell, the American readers’ understanding of foodways lends a higher meaning to eating customs.  In contrast to the image of Sandra trying to finish her food before her mother gets home, giving the reader a sense of the desolation of her situation, is the picture of Lena’s family eating together. In mainstream American culture, Lena’s foodway evokes a picture of comfort and convention—of the African American family assimilated into the dominant culture’s way of life (5).

As one element of food imagery is mealtime customs, even more telling are descriptions of what is eaten.  The experience of African Americans is to move back and forth across the boundaries of what is identified as their culture and what is identified as the dominant culture. Goines and Ansa illustrate this point when they write respectively about what Sandra and Lena eat. While at the onset of Sandra’s story, her food choice is whatever the child can acquire to stave off starvation, as the story progresses, food takes on new meaning. In another perversion of the dominant culture’s lifestyle, Sandra and the character Chink set up for themselves a household and live together as a family. As she takes on the role of “woman of the house,” Sandra learns how to prepare Chink’s favorite foods: “Once she found out what he liked, she’d spend hours in the kitchen getting it right for him.”(57). 

Of all the activities Goines relates, it is this image of Sandra cooking that most exemplifies this quasi-domestic situation. At this point in the story, even though they are teenagers living primarily by what Chink earns as a drug dealer, Chink and Sandra carry out the lifestyle of a married couple in the dominant culture. Critic Greg Goode refers to such passages in Goines’ writing as portrayals of “family devotion or lovers enjoying a moment of serenity in the eye of the ghetto storm” In this fast paced story, the activities  of the characters sometimes replace detailed descriptions. As Goode informs the reader, in these brief passages “We learn a character’s greatest hopes, assets, and fears, even if Goines has not told us so much as what the character is wearing.”  (902).

Yet another example of this involution between the minority and dominant culture is the picnic meal Sandra prepares to take to Chink in prison. She packs the stereotypical Black American meal of fried chicken and lemon pie. She cares enough to put effort into this meal preparation in spite of the fact she has just been brutally beaten, raped and sodomized. Moreover the site for the picnic is the prison grounds on visiting day—again a picture of calm in the eye of Goines’ storm. The reader savors the taste of Sandra’s well cooked meal as the couple pleasantly shares the food with another prison family—as  Chink plots his escape to avenge Sandra’s injuries. In the midst of the hell wrought by her life in the ghetto, Sandra takes temporary respite crossing to a Black America bearing striking similarities to that of Lena McPherson.

Another reference to food from Baby of the Family offers still another aspect of confusing ethnic identity. Even though Lena’s family owns a business earning sufficient income to afford for them a comfortable life, because of the segregated housing policies of the 1950s South, there are in the shadow of Lena’s family home, shanties housing the African American poor. Lena becomes friends with  Sarah, a child of the shanties.  Sarah who, unlike Lena, has been unable to experience the economic benefits of assimilation into the dominant culture, comes to breakfast at Lena’s. As Sarah enters the house, the reader comes in with her through the imagery of  both taste and smell through the naming of  foods  and drinks of her American Dream—coffee brewing, buttery grits, sausage grease, cinnamon and sugar dusted toast, vegetable soup, chocolate cake, and orange juice (86-87). Also worthy of mention is the McPherson family’s hospitality toward this impoverished child. It is obvious to the reader the hard earned affluence the family has achieved has not removed them from the plight of those who share their race. Sarah is welcomed along with others in need, to the warmth of their table.

When Lena encounters mealtime at Sarah’s home, the reader sees again the intermingling of cultures. Sarah’s mother is preparing neckbones—a food indicative of the slavery of African American history—a meal made of that which is cast off from the master’s kitchen. Ironically, this is Lena’s favorite food. Her family cooks it two different ways—her mother’s with  tomatoes and spaghetti, the foods of assimilation, and her grandmother’s traditional way, with potatoes and thick brown gravy. As an indication of Lena’s cultural ambivalence, she is careful not to show a preference for either recipe because she want assurance that she will continue to be served both (89-90).  In spite of their apparent ability to purchase whatever foods they want, Lena’s family continues to prepare the foods of their roots—what Americans now refer to as “soul food.”

As do children of every time and place, Lena and her friend Sarah play games of make-believe that simulate the world they experience. Lena cooks a meal of stick bread, rock meat, mounds of dirt rice, mashed potatoes and grits, and tree leaf greens.  In her play she gives her meal preparations the same “reverence” she observes in her household. Across time and place, her game is not unlike Sandra’s. As Sandra and Clink live together, they pretend  apart from the violent ghetto. As Sandra prepares meals for her make-believe husband, the reader, for a time, forgets the couple’s income is generated from criminal activity and their happiness cannot last.  As Lena returns to the reality of her comfortable childhood life, Sandra and Chink return to the violent adulthood of theirs.

On the opening page of Foodways, the authors admonish their readers, when analyzing eating habits, not to make false assumptions about the cause and effect relationships between cultural groups and food. The study of food habits, while not showing a complete picture, serves as a clue to the understanding of the “power sustaining the continuity of ethnicity” (3). Literature serves the same purpose. Through characters developed by description and actions, including what is eaten, the reader experiences vicariously  a condition unlike his or her own. Each detail in minority literature leads the dominant culture reader to a deeper appreciation for the diversity encountered as part of being an American.

Works Cited

Ansa, Tina McElroy. Baby of the Family. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.

Brown, Linda Keller and Kay Mussell. Ethic and Regional Foodways in the United States. Knoxville:University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

Goines, Donald. Black Girl Lost. Los Angeles: Holloway House Publishing Company,1973.

Goode, Greg. “Donald Goines.” Black Literature Criticism. Ed. James P. Draper. 3 Vols. Detroit: GAL Research Inc., 1992.

McFeely, Mary Drake. Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?American: Women in the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.

White, Craig. “Course Syllabus, Literature 4332:American Minority Literature.” Houston: University of Houston Clear Lake, 2002.