Soul Food That’s Good for the Soul

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The burden of cardiovascular disease in the African American community remains high and is a primary cause of disparities in life expectancy between African Americans and whites. Why is there such an excess burden? Because of an excess burden of risk factors––for example, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, and high cholesterol. And what’s underlying those risk factors? Much can be traced back to diet. Among the ethnic groups, the proportions of people meeting healthy diet recommendations were generally lowest among Blacks. In this national survey, most Black Americans were found to be eating a particularly poor diet, as defined by the American Heart Association.

African Americans may face unique challenges to adherence to dietary recommendations, and one such challenge is an alignment with a cultural tradition of “soul food.” Now some soul food components are fantastic. You can’t get much healthier than collard greens and sweet potatoes, tomatoes, legumes (dried beans and peas like black-eyed peas), watermelon, blackberries, corn, and okra. It’s all making me hungry. But conversely, soul food can also be high in added fats, sugars, and salt, with prominent use of high-fat meats, not to mention the use of deep frying, So, like fried chicken and chitlins, which are pig intestines, foods that can be high in sodium and saturated fat—dietary factors linked to chronic disease.

Where did the pig intestines custom come from? You have to trace the roots. Soul food is what the enslaved Africans were forced to come up with in the Deep South to survive during slavery. That’s in stark contrast to traditional West African diets where they come from, which were predominantly plant-based, centered on a foundation of greens and fruits and legumes and nuts and vegetables, whole grains, and even more vegetables. However, these traditions have been westernized, bastardized into a diet high in fried foods, sweetened beverages, and red and processed meats. 

But the good news is more and more African Americans are adopting plant-based diets to combat their health problems, helped by a growing movement of vegan soul food restaurants that serve healthier, plant-based meals. Soul food scholar Adrian Miller even wrote that after eating his way across the country, it was clear to him that soul food’s creative energy burns brightest in restaurants that are targeting upscale, vegetarian, or vegan clientele. Are they reaching the people who need it most, though? Well, they do tend to be located in higher African American, higher poverty areas. A significant number of restaurants were classified in food desert zones, where there’s a dearth of supermarkets, implying their potential to provide healthier meals to residents in the surrounding neighborhoods. Therefore, having more vegan soul food restaurants and growing movements centered on Black veganism may provide opportunities to influence the nutrition habits in the African American community, especially since some are even able to offer cooking classes. So, establishing public health partnerships with vegan soul food restaurants to get more African American adults to eat plant-based foods could be a promising first step in reducing some of the Black/white health disparities.

“We’re not meat shamers,” said owners of vegan soul food restaurants promoting healthy eating in the African American community. “We’re plant pushers,” trying to tie the best of soul food’s origins to a fourteenth century plant-centric West African diet, in hopes of making people feel that being vegan is in fact a legitimate part of Black culture and Black identity. Even potentially be tied into the concept of social justice, in an attempt to reverse the effects of targeted marketing efforts by fast food companies to children in communities of color.

This movement has been helped by a plant-positive who’s who of Black culture. It’s not just luminaries like Coretta Scott King and Cory Booker, but the likes of NBA stars, Samuel L. Jackson, and Beyoncé, and influentially the late activist Dick Gregory. Gregory is known in popular culture as a comedian, but he was also an outspoken vegan health activist influenced by Alvenia Fulton, who imagined soul food that was actually good for the soul. Instead of celebrating the fact that slaveholders denied slaves access to quality foods, she persuaded Black communities to view food as an agent of health and healing, advocating fresh, whole foods as the path to alleviating or reversing the crippling burden of chronic disease.

Black vegetarians and vegans are showing a plant-based diet isn’t just for white people—and never was. In fact, you can go back centuries to The Liberator back in the 1800s, the abolitionist publication where William Lloyd Garrison wrote in his famous essay: I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. Well, in an 1853 issue, it was written: “A man whose stomach is crammed with animal abominations…can no more appreciate lofty moral and intellectual teachings, than a swine can appreciate pearl necklaces. Logic, humor, and eloquence are wasted on such persons.” If only the American people took more thought what they should eat and drink, obeying the rules impressed upon them by experience and science, (by which they meant a vegetarian diet), America would be half-converted to Anti-Slavery, Peace, Temperance, Land Reform, Women’s Rights, etc., in a single year.

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Motion graphics by Avo Media

• Africa
• African Americans
• American Heart Association
• beans
• Black Americans
• blackberries
• blood pressure
• chicken
• cholesterol
• chronic diseases
• collard greens
• corn
• diabetes
• fruit
• grains
• greens
• high blood pressure
• hypertension
• legumes
• nuts
• obesity
• okra
• Plant-Based Diets
• processed meat
• salt
• saturated fat
• sodium
• sugar
• sweet potatoes
• vegans
• vegetables
• vegetarians
• watermelon