How To Love: 28 Days of Black Food, Memory and Practice
soul food
If January is an open landscape, full of possibility, then February is a map. Already plotted. Already planned. The borders of its days drawn clearly, the time it will take to reach each destination already accounted for. It is a compressed month. There is Winterim. Valentines Day. Presidents Day and its long weekend. Our participation in the Lahaina Food and Wine Festival. My birthday. There is so much to hold and so much to execute in a short span of time.
It is also Black History Month. A kind of quiet, often solitary observance for me each year here in Hawai’i. I tend to mark it through food, the most reliable and satisying archive I know. I return to old recipes not as strict instruction, but as prompts for memory. My sources may be imperfect. I don’t always know the names, places or records of the lives that came before me. What I have instead is taste. I have my chef granddaddy from Virgina’s reverence for a perfectly seared pork chop. I have his deep connections to land, his fascination with food. Like many men of his time, he was a rolling stone. But food is the thing that stays, no matter who comes or who goes.
This series is inspired by a consideration of Black food as practice, not performance. It is not a list of greatest hits. It is not an exercise in nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. Instead, it is an exploration of Black food as repetition, labor, ingeniuty, survivial and pleasure. Black food is the lens through which we will examine love.
Setting aside overused ideas of romance this month, we will look at love as what is repeated. What pulls us back. What is tended. What is passed on. We will explore love as a practice through Black foodways. And by Black foodways, I mean the diaspora in its fullness- but filtered through my own lived experience. I grew up in Brooklyn, surrounded b secondhand, passed-down versions of our cultural touchstones. What I call celebration food comes to mind: fried chicken, collard greens, sweet potatoes. The big plates that marked holidays and milestones. And the everyday meals: baked chicken with rice and a side of broccoli. “Black” spaghetti with meat sauce. There were never steaks on the table but those homemade burgers on ketchup-soaked Wonder Bread come to mind too. Outside of the house, there was Jamaican jerk and beef patties. Jollof rice. Mofongo. Roti. This is the food landscape that shaped me.
So here, we will move through the month in love, one food at a time. Each day will be motivated by memory, a question or a practice. Like the best comfort foods, these reflections will be short, intentional and easy to absorb. And they will invite you to look at your own table a little differently. This month is about paying attention. This month is about love.
