Part 1 of 3: The Afro-American builds a cookbook, one week at a time
On September 13, 1930, readers who turned to page sixteen of the Baltimore Afro-American found a bold banner promising recipes that were both economical and easy to prepare. Beneath it, the editors made an offer that doubled as a strategy. Clip the recipes each week, they urged, and in time you would own a cookbook full of recipes and household advice that, in the paper’s words, “cannot be otherwise obtained.”1
In 1930 the nation’s leading dailies, among them the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, rarely hired food writers from the communities the Afro-American served, and they seldom wrote about those readers’ kitchens, budgets, or bodies. John H. Murphy Sr., born enslaved in Maryland and a veteran of the Union Army, founded the Afro-American in 1892. After his death in 1922, his son Carl Murphy took over, and by 1930 the weekly ranked among the most widely read papers of its kind in the country. The Murphys ran a family business whose chief product was information the dominant press ignored.1
The paper asked its readers to become archivists, gathering columns week after week and assembling their own reference book to pass on to daughters, sons, and neighbors. That practice turned private reading into shared intellectual capital, which is exactly what a community needs when outside institutions refuse to invest in it. Readers built their own library one clipping at a time, and they did it together.
The lesson for anyone building a food business or cooperative today is plain. Knowledge compounds when people gather it consistently and share it freely. So here is a question worth sitting with: if you had to build a cookbook for your community from sources the mainstream ignored, where would you look, and whom would you hand it to?
Notes
1. Hayward Farrar, The Baltimore Afro-American, 1892–1950 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998)