Chittlin’s Are Good For the Soul
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Three times a year, I wake up before the sun, put pots of various sizes on the stove to boil, spend hours dicing, chopping, cleaning, tearing, baking, frying, broiling and carving up a feast. Collard greens slow cooked for hours with hamhocks, until the meat is falling off the hock and the greens are smooth as silk and melt on your tongue. Macaroni and cheese that is akin to one of Pele’s sacred mountains, cheese bubbling and percolating throughout layers and layers of macaroni masking as sediment, top golden brown and crisp with occassional butter, mozarella, and cheddar magma breaking through the surface. Turkey, slow roasted in the oven, garlic cloves slipped beneath the skin, the skin rubbed with olive oil, seasoning salt, garlic salt, pepper, and pats of butter snuck inside to make sure it stays so moist that the juices bead on the surface and sweat down the sides when you pull it from the oven. Mash potatoes and homemade turkey gravy. Stuffing. Pies. Glorified rice. Gizzards and neckbones. These are the blessings that I lay on the people I love, these are the spells and incantations I work to bring health and strength to my family, these are a holy inheritance that has sustained my people and my family for more than three centuries. This is soul food.
For those that did not grow up in a black family or a Southern family, soul food is viewed as a quaint regional cuisine. Perhaps you have had chicken and waffles at Amy Ruth’s or sampled the greens and mac and cheese at Gladys Knight’s Chicken and Waffles. Perhaps you have tried chitterlings on a dare or ate jambalaya while on vacation in New Orleans. For those of us that know better, we know that soul food is the way that our family keeps our history alive. Standing around the kitchen on Easter, watching my Great Aunt Sis cleaning chittlin’s and telling me how putting a potato and an onion in the pot kills the smell was always the signal that a story was on its way. She would then turn to me and, in the same breath, tell me how the black community burned down the Negro school when the Supreme Court orderd the end of segregation so the white folks could never make them go back. With a chuckle, she would stir the greens, wink, and say, “But I don’t know nothin’ ’bout that.”
In my time, I have had to confront rabid vege-naziis that rail at me for eating meat. Having no understanding of what it means to take what was once thrown at you….trash given to trash…and making living, delicious, sustenance out of it. Pigs feet and chitterlings, neck bones and hog maws, tails and tongue. These were the things doled out to the least and from which we made the most. These are the foods that fed Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X (minus the pork). These are the foods that fed Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. These are the foods that fed Assata Shakur and Marcus Garvey and Maya Angelou and all of those black folks that laid the bricks of the road we now travel so much more easily because of their sacrifice and the celebration they made of scraps and ends.
On Thanksgiving morning, Christmas morning, and Easter morning, I wake up with joy in my heart. I turn on the stove, and I look at the bountiful blessing of histoy laid out in front of me. I lose all sense of time as I pour my love, joy, affection, sorrow, pain, and hope into every dish, into every cut and slice, into every pot. This is soul food. Food that sustains the soul, that is a gift, that is to be cherished and treasured and eaten as a way to celebrate family, history, the ones we love, and ourselves.
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Okay, I can get with every thing but the chitterlings (chitlins). Call me an uppity negro or whatever; but, I just can’t seem to bring myself to sample that particular delicacy. Yeah- they weren’t even considered as such until the “white folks” started eating them. Then again I know quite a few “white folks” that have been eating them since they were old enough to crawl underneath the family trailer. But maybe I’m speaking a little prejudicially; then again, I know po’ black trailer trash as well as white. The defining factor is that they -let’s be honest- we were all po’ and these we the the food items we could afford to eat. Sadly enough, now that the mainstream has picked up on some these down home southern “delicacies”; those that considered these foods “scraps” and “trash parts” are now making mad profit off of them. Like Janet and Michael said it makes me wanna SCREAM!
> James A. Means
Hahahahah Mr. Means you are right on. RIGHT on. That is why I also pointed out Southerners eat these foods…cuz plenty of Southern whites can get behind some chittlins let me tell you.
> Brandon Lacy Campos
I try to eat healthy like the rest of the country but believe me! Every now and then, I can get with some “Chittlin’s”. I may eat the stuff once or twice a year, usually on New Years. As far as the collards and the mac-cheese, I’m still addicted.
> Carl Elliott
speak, baby, speak. Aché.
> Kim Ford
Sounds like a heart attack! with mis-leading propaganda like this there’s no wonder why our ppl suffer from heart dis-ease. and just because MLK Malcolm X Harriet Tubman ate this slave slop doesn’t make it right. Str8 foolishness.
P.S. the pig wasn’t put on this earth to be eaten!
> Street Scholar
Love to you Carl and Kim.
And Street Scholar…eating these foods as a celebration three times a year…isn’t giving anyone a heart attack. Heart disease is a terrible affliction in our communities…and we need to cut out the Crisco and stop using the fat back as part of our daily caloric intake. Hell, I work out six to seven times a week. But honoring and celebrating the power and role of food in our culture is str8 respect and str8 joyous. I invite you to make your own choices and to celebrate your history in your way. Sweeping indictments with no analysis, little thought, and purely subjective application dilute the validity that you had around the need of black folks to eat better foods in their daily lives.
And the pig was put on this earth to be eaten. And it is delicious from the tail to the knuckle. Religious objection to the consumption of swine had to do with a lack of understanding around proper preparation and not because the pig is inherently spiritually evil. Fool please, chickens shit in their nests and cows are not the cleanest animals in the world. Spend some time on a farm.
> Brandon Lacy Campos
You go Brandon! Tell that fool(street scholar) a thing or two.
> Michelle
Interesting discusssion! Brandon, you are absolutely right — additionally, it is not the food that kills, but often the stressful lifestyles which accompany the hog mahs, chitlins, and “fry ups”. BTW: Have you ever seen a traditional English breakfast? It would make you RUN to plate of chitlins! Enjoying African-American, Southern, and global traditions are often worth the risk…
> Shantella
Thank you Michelle and Shantella for your thoughtful comments
> Brandon Lacy Campos
Mr. Brandon & others,
The pig are spiritually unclean to the soul and spirit and your philosophy on cleaning of this beast does not make this animal clean for the spirit. this animal is inherently unclean NEVER INTENDED TO BE EATEN BY HUE-MAN BEINGS….With you knowing that a chicken wallow in his own filth why would you still eat? i don’t and matter of a fact i’m vegetarian and very rarely consuming any animal products (milk, cheese, etc). So does this makes me being uncultural to you “african american blacks?” if it does i don’t want to be part of your culture.
Sweep indictments? we (people of color) need to embed healthier lifestyles and not give into this sweeping {propaganda} indictments of soul food! you can even look @ that movie “soul food” and see what this slave slop does to the body when the grandma died of diabeties and then 3weeks later they all back eating the same crap that killed her, foolish! We as a people are in no position to sit around act dumb as if heart disease, diabeties, stroke, & etc doesn’t exist. we need to acknowledge this problem and eliminate it, and wanting to hold on such redundant and mundane vain traditions is str8 foolishness…ever wonder why we can’t prospere as a people? stupid ignorant minded people like yourselves are holding us back from greatness because all you see is your own heart and understanding. gone head and continue to spiritually assassinate soul but leave your evasive heart felt feelings out off the internet.
Let the real scholars disclose real knowledge and wisdome.
“it is not good to have zeal without knowledge, nor to be hasty and the miss way” Proverbs 19:2
Shalom!
> Street Scholar
You are welcome, sir, to your beliefs. I am no gatekeeper of black culture, and I do not deny anyone their membership in the black family. But I do invite you to keep your religious dogma to yourself.
And, please read what I wrote. I wholeheartedly support black folks eating well. I support black folks exercising and cutting out the foods that eaten in abundance is causing massive death and disease in our community. As I stated before, eating these foods as a part of ritual celebration is beautiful. And, three times a year or even four or five will not kill anyone.
Peace to you indeed.
> Brandon Lacy Campos
Wow, such indignation Street Scholar- I wonder how PETA people and others survived the dark ages??? Did you not wear suede and fur to keep you warm. Now let me be clear, I believe that most of what we call “Soul Food” was Slave Food- and we ain’t got to eat that shit no more. But it was how we survived, thank you ancestors for makin’ a way outta no way!
If you are Vegan or Vegitarian that wonderful and that’s your choice- no need to denigrate those who still partake in such culinary experiences whether it is to nurture their souls or their bodies.
Interesting piece Brandon- It doesn’t make us any more or less Black if what you’ve suggested was the our dietary staples, however these types of meals to serve to bring Black families together if for nothing more than the three to four times a year. And in my opinion is very necessary.
> Andrea
Word Andrea. And in my response just before yours I tried to make clear that chosing to eat or not eat soul food is in no way a reflection of how “black” or not “black” one is. Hell, I am a proud child of more than a dozen nationalities.
> Brandon Lacy Campos
I’ll keep my so called religious dogma to myself when you keep your cultural propaganda to yourself!
…I don’t consider eating pig guts a culinary expertise!
lol
like i said, keep you sophist arguments to your self. it’s not just hurting you it’s hurting to the people who don’t know any better.
“The wise speak when they have something to say, the foolish just says something”
Shalom!
> Street_Scholar
“Better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubt.” -Abraham Lincoln
I thought since you enjoyed quotations you would enjoy that one.
Around the world folks eat everything from beetles to cow testicles. How grand you must be that you have the power to determine what is a culinary treat and what is not. Though I can say with great certainty thÃ¥t I will never slide the belly plate off a beetle and slurp out the meat….let me not stand in the way, or judge, people that do.
Be well
> Brandon Lacy Campos
A cow testicle sounds a lot tastier then a body system used to hold bacteria infested in defecation/excrement, in plus, a cow is a clean animal to consume versus the unclean swine.
If judging is telling people whats right and whats wrong, what would it be if i couldn’t inform people whats wrong or right?
> Street Scholar
You don’t have to be black to enjoy “good food”……….that description alone is enough to make my White Mouth WATER ! Ummmmm-hmmmmm !
> Peter
Thanks Peter
> Brandon Lacy Campos
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