The stories soul food tells

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, News, Politics, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.6 • 10.8K Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2021

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Vox's Jamil Smith talks with Caroline Randall Williams, academic, poet, and co-author (with her mother, Alice Randall) of Soul Food Love. They discuss the ways in which the African American culinary tradition is interpreted, how to tell stories through cooking, and why what we cook and eat is inextricably bound up with who we are. Host: Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith), Senior Correspondent, Vox Guest: Caroline Randall Williams (@caroranwill), author; writer-in-residence of Medicine, Health, and Society, Vanderbilt University References: "You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument" by Caroline Randall Williams (New York Times; June 26, 2020) Soul Food Love: Healthy Recipes Inspired by One Hundred Years of Cooking in a Black Family by Alice Randall and Caroline Randall Williams (Clarkson Potter; 2015) High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America, dir. by Roger Ross Williams, Yoruba Richen, and Jonathan Clasberry (Netflix; 2021) "Race, Ethnicity, Expressive Authenticity: Can White People Sing the Blues?" by Joel Rudinow (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52 (1); 1994) Enjoyed this episode? Rate Vox Conversations ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear the next episode of Vox Conversations by subscribing in your favorite podcast app. Support Vox Conversations by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts This episode was made by: Producer: Erikk Geannikis Editor: Amy Drozdowska Engineer: Paul Robert Mounsey Vox Audio Fellow: Victoria Dominguez Deputy Editorial Director, Vox Talk: Amber Hall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:25.2	age, loading, use, and maintenance.
0:27.4	2023 Lyric orders our full CDLR for 2024 availability details.
0:33.7	What can we learn about our history and ourselves just by making a meal?
0:40.2	I'm Jamil Smith and I'm your host for Vox Conversations.
0:52.0	You often hear me on this show or read in my writing, how I believe identity is in everything.
0:57.4	Nowhere is this more evident than with food.
1:03.0	We associate our favorite cuisines with the people who originally cooked them.
1:08.7	Ethnicities and nationalities are part of our daily vocabularies because of what we eat.
1:22.3	Because food and identity are intertwined in this nation and in every other one, things
1:27.9	inevitably get complicated.
1:33.1	It's about to be Thanksgiving, one of the most widely celebrated American holidays, and
1:37.3	one who's commonly told origin story is a Eurocentric fairy tale.
1:42.9	It's uncomfortable to think about war and genocide as you bite into your grandmother's
1:46.9	sweet potato pie, or as you savor that salty, smoky skin falling off your turkey drumstick
1:52.1	and onto your taste buds.
1:54.8	Thinking about all this though, that's what encouraged me to reach out to poet, scholar,
1:59.2	and author, Caroline Randall Williams.
	...

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