Part 2 of 3: A 1930 prescription written from the kitchen
The Afro-American’s “Food Talk” columnist opened with a blunt diagnosis. Constipation, the writer declared, ranked among the recognized ills of the day, and it produced dizzy spells, headaches, fatigue, bad breath, and poor complexions. Many sufferers blamed those troubles on something else entirely. What they needed, the column argued, was a thorough daily “internal renovation.”1
The cure began with the grocery list. The columnist sorted helpful foods into four working groups. Bulky foods rich in cellulose, the woody fiber that holds water, included cabbage, celery, spinach, lettuce, onions, asparagus, dried beans and peas, figs, prunes, raisins, fruit eaten with the skin, and cereals such as rolled oats and whole wheat that kept their bran. Mild acids came from oranges, lemons, rhubarb, apples, and tomatoes, though the writer steered sensitive stomachs toward figs and prunes and warned that blackberries worked in the opposite direction. A third group, including honey, molasses, onions, cabbage, dried beans, and cauliflower, produced gas that helped move things along, while fats such as olive oil and butter served as lubricants. Eight glasses of water a day completed the plan.2
What strikes me most about this list is how closely it follows the pantry that enslaved Africans and their descendants built across the Americas. Dried beans and peas, leafy greens, onions, and molasses were not exotic health foods to readers in Baltimore. They were the everyday foods of Southern kitchens, carried north by families who left the South in search of work and dignity. Eugene Genovese argued that enslaved people in the American South raised the fiber and nutrient content of poor whites’ meals more than poor whites changed theirs.3
Economy and health pointed in the same direction. A pound of dried beans cost less than a cut of meat, and a pot of greens could come straight from a backyard garden. For families entering the first full year of the Depression, a diet built on these staples offered what food rebels have always pursued: better health that depended less on stores and institutions owned by others. Healthy people, free of the ailments that drain strength and wages, resist oppression better.
Consider this: which foods in your kitchen today carry a history of survival, and what would it take to treat them as a source of strength rather than a sign of hardship?
[Side Bar]
The page carrying this column ran under the banner “Recipes—Economical and Easy to Prepare,” yet the surviving page from September 13, 1930, holds only the unsigned “Food Talk” column and no individual recipe. Rather than invent one, this sidebar organizes the columnist’s recommendations into the kind of pantry list a Baltimore reader might have pinned inside a kitchen cabinet during the first year of the Great Depression. Its principal ingredient, dried beans, links the column to the rice-and-bean traditions that enslaved Africans carried from West Africa to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the American South. Source: Afro-American (Baltimore), September 13, 1930, 16.
The Food Talk Pantry, 1930
Pantry List
Bulk and fiber: dried beans, dried peas, cabbage, celery, spinach, lettuce, onions, asparagus, figs, prunes, raisins, rolled oats, whole wheat cereal, and fruit eaten with the skin
Mild acids: oranges, lemons, rhubarb, apples, tomatoes (figs and prunes for sensitive stomachs)
Gas-producing foods: honey, molasses, onions, cabbage, dried beans, cauliflower
Lubricants: olive oil and butter
Water: at least eight glasses daily
Directions
Build each day’s meals around bulky foods, fruits, and whole grains. Go easy on blackberries, which the columnist considered binding. Drink water steadily through the day. If trouble persists, see a physician, because the column itself warned that diet cannot fix every cause and that no layperson’s advice should be treated as safe.
Notes
1. “Food Talk,” in “Recipes—Economical and Easy to Prepare,” Afro-American (Baltimore), September 13, 1930, 16.
2. Ibid.
3. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1972; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 548–549.