“A History of Natural Remedies” is another addition to our series on African American Food Writers. It’s based on a September 13, 1930 edition of the Baltimore based newspaper Afro-American. On a Saturday in September 1930, a fifteen-year-old in West Baltimore brings the paper in off the step and her mother turns straight past the news to page sixteen. The food page carries a standing order in bold type at the top of the column: save these clippings week to week and you will own a cookbook and a set of household remedies that money cannot buy anywhere else. [1] That instruction is worth sitting with, because it tells you what a food page meant to readers who could not take their questions anywhere else. The Depression had already closed the small margin these households lived on. A doctor's visit cost money that went to rent. Downtown clinics sorted patients by caste before they sorted them by symptom. So the question the food column answered week after week was not simply what is for supper. It was closer to this: when the medical system is priced and policed against you, what can you fix with what is already in the kitchen?
Arjun Appadurai gives us the vocabulary for the exchange. Gastro-politics asks who holds agency over what you grow, distribute, cook, sell, and eat, and it reads the everyday transactions around food as messages about power. Isabel Wilkerson supplies the ranking those messages travel along. Caste operates as a subconscious code of instructions that assigns people their place by ancestry and appearance, and the dominant caste has used food and health care alike to keep the assignment in force. Put the two together and a newspaper column about digestion stops looking like filler. It looks like a lower-caste household reclaiming a decision the dominant caste had taken over.
The people who take that decision back are food rebels. They break the unwritten rule that lower-caste people labor inside the food and medical systems without owning any part of them, and they keep breaking it in the plainest possible ways: growing the remedy, cooking the remedy, selling the remedy, and then teaching the next household how to do the same. Some of them run restaurants. Some of them run a pair of scissors down the edge of a newspaper column.
Afro-American (Baltimore), September 13, 1930