Fear of New 'Collard' People
As one of the few African-American reporters in the newsroom, I found myself assigned occasionally to report, review and essentially explain soul food restaurants to our predominately white audience. I grew to love greens. My taste buds had matured. Besides, this time I was getting paid for it.
Now, decades later, greens are coming back as a thoroughly mainstream "Southern dish." But not everybody's pleased. For example, on Columbus Day, writer Diamond Sharp at the black-oriented website The Root listed collard greens among "8 Things That Have Been 'Columbused' This Year" -- meaning, fixtures of black America that suddenly have been "discovered" by mainstream America.
Other examples from Sharp included "bae" as a term of endearment, Timberland boots as a fashion statement and twerking, the dance craze that Mylie Cyrus may have pretty much destroyed with her notorious MTV Awards appearance.
But Mikki Kendall, a black feminist writer who tweets as Karnythia, is concerned about more than mere cultural hijacking. Credited with creating the hashtag #FoodGentrification, she has raised alarm bells about a trend that, as she writes in The Grio website, "may well put traditional meals out of reach for those who created the recipes."
She has a point. Cuts in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food stamp benefits, even as wages have stagnated for lower-income workers, put low-income families in an ever-tightening squeeze as they try to buy nutritious food.
But Ryan Cooper, who writes for The Week, argues with charts and graphs that other factors, such as drought, crop failures, increased worldwide demand and deregulation of Wall Street speculators in commodities futures have a much bigger impact.
No doubt. I think history shows the appropriation of various ethnic cultural creations into mainstream to as old as the American melting pot, which I prefer to call a Mulligan stew. Every community's culture eventually borrows from everybody else's. That's how we got rock 'n' roll, among other potboilers.
But the notion of "food gentrification" highlights a much larger problem for low-income families that deserves more attention in Washington's budget debates, whether their food is in fashion or not.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
(c) 2014 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
