num_pages: 272
description: Psyche A. Williams-Forson is one of our leading thinkers about food in America. In Eating While Black she offers her knowledge and experience to illuminate how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. She shows how mass media nutrition science economics and public policy drive entrenched opinions among both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right to eat. Distorted views of how and what Black people eat are pervasive bolstering the belief that they must be corrected and regulated. What is at stake is nothing less than whether Americans can learn to embrace nonracist understandings and practices in relation to food.Sustainable culturewhat keeps a community alive and thrivingis essential to Black peoples fight for access and equity and food is central to this fight. Starkly exposing the rampant shaming and policing around how Black people eat Williams-Forson contemplates foods role in cultural transmission belonging homemaking and survival. Black peoples relationships to food have historically been connected to extreme forms of control and scarcityas well as to stunning creativity and ingenuity. In advancing dialogue about eating and race this book urges us to think and talk about food in new ways in order to improve American society on both personal and structural levels.Psyche A. Williams-Forson the author of Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women Food and Power is a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland College Park.
language: English
title: Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America
publisher: University of North Carolina Press