Bryant Terry's Black Food and the Politics of the Plate

What the book is

Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora (4 Color Books, 2021), edited by Bryant Terry, gathers more than 100 contributors — chefs, scholars, poets, artists, growers — and puts them in conversation. The premise is that Black food is not one cuisine. It's a constellation: West African, East African, Caribbean, Afro-Brazilian, Black British, African American, Afro-Latin, and on.

Terry refuses the move that mainstream food media keeps making, which is to collapse all of this into "soul food" or "African cuisine" or some other tidy box. The book is structured to keep the variety legible.

Who's in it

A short list, not exhaustive:

• Yewande Komolafe on Nigerian home cooking.
• Kayla Stewart on Black food media.
• Adrian Miller on barbecue (drawing on his book Black Smoke).
• Klancy Miller on Black women in pastry.
• Nicole Taylor on Juneteenth as a culinary holiday.
• Stephen Satterfield as a recurring voice across the book.
• Visual contributions from artists like Kerry James Marshall and Lorna Simpson.

The recipes range from BJ Dennis's Gullah Geechee shrimp to Pierre Thiam's Senegalese thieboudienne. The essays are short and dense.

What it does to the way you read other cookbooks

Once you've read Black Food, the standard American cookbook starts to look incomplete. Not because it's wrong, but because the lineage it's drawing from is being credited two steps removed. Black Food puts the source on the same page as the recipe.

How to read it

Don't read it front to back. Read the essay introductions to each section, then pick one recipe per section to cook over the next two months. Terry's editorial design rewards a slow read.

Related works

• Pierre Thiam, Senegal (2015) — the modern Senegalese reference in English.
• Marcus Samuelsson, The Rise (2020) — Black chefs in contemporary American food, profiled in depth.
• Adrian Miller, Soul Food (2013) and Black Smoke (2021) — historian-of-record on Black American food.

The 4 Color Books imprint

Black Food was published by 4 Color Books, an imprint of Ten Speed
Press launched specifically to publish books by people of color.
The imprint's catalog includes Yewande Komolafe's My Everyday
Lagos (2023) and several other contemporary Black-food titles.
The decision to launch a dedicated imprint reflects the same
problem Tipton-Martin documents in The Jemima Code: mainstream
food publishing's track record with Black authors has been
intermittent at best.

Terry himself has been a chef-in-residence at the Museum of the
African Diaspora in San Francisco and is the author of several
earlier books including Vegan Soul Kitchen (2009) and Afro-Vegan
(2014). His career-long argument has been for a vegetable-forward
Black cuisine that traces back through the actual Black food
tradition (which has always included vegetable-forward
preparations) rather than through the meat-heavy "soul food"
marketing category.

Why this book matters now

The book is one of the more concrete attempts to map the
contemporary Black food world without flattening it. Three
features distinguish it from earlier Black-food anthologies:

1. Diaspora breadth. West African, Caribbean, Afro-Brazilian,
   African American, Black British, Afro-Latin foodways all
   included.
2. Multi-disciplinary contributions. Chefs, scholars, poets,
   artists, growers — the food is treated as part of a wider
   cultural conversation, not as recipe-and-headnote.
3. Visual program. Kerry James Marshall, Lorna Simpson, and
   other major Black visual artists contributed. The book is as
   much an art object as a cookbook.

What is missing from the book

A few honest critiques of the book worth naming:

• The diaspora coverage is uneven. West African and African American
  material is dense; the Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Latin material is
  comparatively thin. The next anthology in the line should fill
  this.
• The voice of growers and farmers is present but lighter than the
  voice of chefs. A companion volume more focused on the
  agricultural diaspora — seed-savers, growers, foodways farmers —
  would be a valuable next step.
• The recipes themselves are sometimes more aspirational than
  practical. The book reads better as anthology than as working
  cookbook.

None of these are fatal. They mark where future work in the
genre should focus.

How to read it

Do not read this book front-to-back like a novel. Do not skim it
like a magazine. Read it the way you read a literary anthology:
the essay first, then one or two recipes per section, then move
on. Two months of slow reading covers the book; the cumulative
effect is worth the patience.

What to cook from it

The recipes that work well as entry points:

• Pierre Thiam's Senegalese thieboudienne (the rice and fish dish
  that is the national plate of Senegal).
• BJ Dennis's Lowcountry preparations — the Gullah shrimp, the
  red rice variations.
• Yewande Komolafe's Nigerian home-cooking entries.

Avoid starting with the more elaborate restaurant preparations —
they require ingredient lists that take work to source.

Further reading

• Bryant Terry, Vegan Soul Kitchen (2009) and Afro-Vegan (2014).
• Pierre Thiam, Senegal (2015) and Yolele! (2008).
• Marcus Samuelsson, The Rise (2020) — contemporary Black chefs
  in American kitchens.
• BJ Dennis's published essays — no book yet but a forthcoming one
  anticipated.
• Adrian Miller, Soul Food (2013) and Black Smoke (2021).
• Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene (2017).

The book is the contemporary Black-food anthology that the genre
has been waiting for. Read it slowly. Cook from it. Cite the
contributors when you do.