Oh hey, it's your coworker who has an umbrella in a trunk, but remembers it halfway between

the car and the office store, Alieward, back with a bunch of tasty facts in a broth of history.

Let's dig in to this episode about Black American cuisine from origin stories to pop cultural

critiques with this guest who completed undergrad at the University of Virginia, got an MA and a

PhD in American studies from the University of Maryland College Park where they are now

a professor and the department chair and the department of American studies. They've authored several books, including the new eating

well black food, shaming and race in America and 2006's Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, black women, food and power.

And we're so lucky she made time to chat, but before we get into it, quick thanks to everyone who submitted questions via patreon.com-aligies and everyone who supports a show just by telling others about it and by

rating and leaving reviews, which truly helps so much. They mean so much and as proof I read them all so they can grads to okay this is me who wrote in that the field trip colonoscopy right along saved their

butt and said thank you for sharing your journey and probably saved my life. So I read all the reviews. Thank you so much really onto the

episode so black American man, biology comes from the Greek migrero for cooking and it means the art science or study of cooking and this guest is an expert in mass media meets nutrition science, the

culture of food, how we talk about it, especially distorted and race based racist notions, we chatted about the writing that inspired her southern cooking versus soul food tropes of black women in

cinema, historical origins of some foods, if there's a correct type of mac and cheese and why someone would make chicken without seasoning it on national television with scholar cultural historian, author of eating while black and for the sake of this

episode black American mega neurologist Dr. Syke Williams-Forson.

Dr. Syke Williams-Forson. She heard. You've got a great name by the way. Thank you very much. When you set out to start studying this field, did you always have your site set on a PhD or did it start just unraveling and your interest got deeper deeper? Yeah, you know, I actually did not want to go into education.

At all. I resisted it with it for the first time. I come from a family of educators and before I went off to college, my mom was like, oh, make sure you take some education courses and I was like, yeah, no, I won't be doing that. I don't want to be a teacher because in my mind, though my dad had been an adjunct for many years at the University of Buffalo, I wasn't fully immersed in the college professor, professor, or any of that. So I went to University of Virginia and studied English because that was my first time in college.

I was really not really able to talk about reading and that's my passion that's reading. So I came to graduate school really to study black women's literature but within context.

I felt like what I had studied in undergrad did not provide enough context to the reading. We just studied the mechanics of books and all that kind of stuff.

But there was actually a field dedicated to it. I was like, oh, yeah, I'm really interested in that. So I came to graduate school as a master student to the University of Maryland.

Interested in reading black women's literature and at that time a series had just been published by Oxford University Press with the New York Public Library and Henry Louis Gates.

And it was the reclamation, if you will, of a number of 19th century black women's texts.

Wow. Yeah, they had been recovered and rewritten and republished some in the original text font and all of that. So they were amazing. Yeah, amazing books.

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