How can food heritage be identified and safeguarded when the powerful and winners in history have conspired to erase it, or at least to discount its prominence? What’s the value of cuisine when it becomes a tangible symbol or resistance and ingenuity?
These are some of the questions a new batch of food documentaries engages with. This post is about Netflix’s series High on the Hog. I will continue with Food:Generations, a film about intergenerational transmission of culinary knowledge in Poland, produced as a prelude to Kultursymposium Weimar 2021, and with chef Adán Medrano’s Truly Texas Mexican on Amazon Prime, a reflection on home cooking in non-white communities in Texas. Three different stories, three different points of view, all dealing with a strikingly similar set of issues that invite us to consider the meaning and function of food heritage. While the three films partly build on the genre of the celebratory food documentary, with its abundance of appetizing images, close ups on dishes and ingredients, and inviting cooking sounds, they use these tropes to reflect on broader historical and social dynamics, which are the real centers of their narratives.
High on the Hog, inspired by the eponymous book by Jessica Harris, follows host Stephen Satterfield while he retraces the development of African American cuisines from their origins in Africa to their contemporary expressions. The four episodes move across locations to highlight core moments in this century-long history. Benin symbolizes the beginning, the roots; the Low Country and the Gullah of the Sea Islands allow viewers to focus on the Middle Passage and the exploitation of the plantation economy; Philadelphia and New York highlight ingenuity, perseverance, creativity, and entrepreneurship against all odds; Eastern Texas celebrates Juneteenth and emancipation, while reclaiming the cow boy as a symbol of freedom, independence and the American spirit through its often ignored connections with black workers in the cattle industry.
Jessica Harris and Stephen Satterfield
The central thesis of the four-part documentary is that African American food is not just as aspect of American culinary culture, but actually contributed to its very development and, in many ways, transformed it, as the subtitle of the series points out. While celebrating the shared heritage of African American cuisine, the series inevitably uncovers its variety and its complexity, emerging from different traditions and places. These are distinctive cuisines, rather than a simple unified corpus, and it would be detrimental to their revaluation to smush them all under a single umbrella, as strong and politically relevant it may be.
The rhythm is relatively slow for the genre, almost meditative. Satterfield is a thoughtful host, who at times unravels his thoughts and his reaction unhurriedly, allowing his interlocutors to express themselves. And he has good reasons for it: the series is likely to introduce a lot of unknown information that its foodie audience may not have been necessarily exposed to. And such exposure comes with uncomfortable moments, as received ideas about what America is and means are constantly challenged. In some way, within mass pop culture High on the Hog does for black food what Beyonce’s Lemonade film and her Coachella concerts did for black music.
Politics and power struggles are front and center. More than once, appropriation of black culture is criticized, as well as how it has been monetized, whitewashed, and spread all over the world as pop culture. The series does not shy from thorny topics: the opening titles include sumptuous cooking shots interspersed with expressions of both black culture, like dance or brass bands, and intolerance, from a cartoon where a big lipped black man devours watermelon to images of the KKK and the civil rights movement suppression.
By looking at legacy also in terms of land, the series stresses how freedom and resistance have been dependent on control over certain locations, property, means of production, and institutions that can allow black communities to thrive. The fight against economic dispossession, of which we have been reminded this year because of the centenary of the Tulsa massacre, continues. In the second episode, we hear the pain of those whose land is being taken away to expand a highway, using the tool of eminent domain that throughout American history has quite often used against those whose voices could not be heard or did not have political clout.
The documentary suggests that African American food cannot simply be studied and examined intellectually: to really know it, it needs to be experienced as a form of community sharing. In fact, recipes and traditions are uncovered through conversations with chefs, experts, and everyday people. Each episode ends in a celebratory dinner. Bodies, their movements and their sensuality are also central in this exploration. In the second episode, Satterfield and food writer and educator Michael Twitty taste food on the back of their hands, as they have seen it done in their families: a gesture that Michael observed in Africa as well. What is transmitted is not only know-how, culinary techniques, and collective practices. Traces of the past are inscribed in the flesh and the senses, in flavors and actions, in the tone of voices and the sounds of approval or displeasure. They are learned through kin, to the point that at times they are almost presented as innate, hatched in the DNA.
Overall, heritage is composed of elements from the past that are reactivated in the present to respond to current needs and priorities. African American food heritage is both lived and constructed (at times reconstructed), dug out from oblivion and fiercely safeguarded. Material and narrative fragments are woven together to create a story that speaks to contemporary America. Features that are relevant in today’s African American life are projected into the past as part of a unique heritage. However, those same values and practices may be present in other societies, although with different origins and functions. As an Italian I recognize the centrality of shared preparation and consumption of food, the relevance of traditions and their transmission in the family and in the community, the significance of pleasure and sensuality around the table, the legacy of poverty reflected in the use of organ meats and other humble ingredients to cook scrumptious meals. However, due to America’s specific history and the marks it left on today’s society, those same elements acquire very different meanings in black culture, and they definitely stand out in the context of the American mainstream.
As the focus of the series of the series was the United States, interesting aspects of the African diaspora have been left out. Maybe the next series will focus on another of Jessica Harris’s books, Beyond Gumbo: Creole Fusion Food from the Atlantic Rim, which examines the commonalities between black cuisines in the US south (especially in Louisiana and New Orleans) with those in the Caribbean islands and the north-east of Brazil. Just a suggestion…