In 1963, America's Georgia, 15 black girls joined a protest.

One for the matinee, please.

Negroes, hit your tickets in the back.

We just want tickets to see the show. Here comes a whole mess of tickets for each. in the Based on the true story, Push Black presents The Stolen Girls of America's.

Listen and follow on the Odyssey app, or wherever you find your podcast.

Culinary historian Michael Twitty says our food was never just food.

It was medicine and a gateway to good fortune and a mystical lubricant between the living and the dead.

Our cuisine has always been worthy of praise.

This is two minute black history. what you didn't learn in school.

Our food belongs to a culinary legacy encompassing centuries of creativity, resourcefulness, and community.

There wasn't freedom to choose what we consumed during enslavement.

According to soul food scholar Adrian Miller, enslaved people received a five-pound starch allotment,

small portions of salted or smoked meat,

and a jug of molasses each week.

They supplemented their diets by fishing, foraging, hunting, and raising livestock.

They grew transplanted vegetables like okra and leaned on ancestral West African farming knowledge. With the reconstruction era came sharecropping.

Then soul food became part of fellowshipping at church where food was as much prayer

as sustenance.

Special occasion foods like fried fish or sweet potato pie were for Sundays,

while weekday diets mirrored enslavement ones, including seasonal vegetables, small amounts of meat and cornbread.

Food patterns change with the great migration. Miller writes, just like any other immigrant group arriving in a new place.

The people who move try to recreate home and build community and food was a critical factor to achieving both.

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