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Symbolizing back-to-back whips, motto short for I'm lovin' slavery?
Film explores African-Americans' unhealthy "soul food" habit
Harriet McLeod, Reuters, 12/27/2012
(Reuters) - After interviewing food historians, scholars, cooks, doctors, activists and consumers for his new film "Soul Food Junkies," filmmaker Byron Hurt concluded that an addiction to soul food is killing African-Americans at an alarming rate. ...
The movie, which will premiere on January 14 on U.S. public broadcasting television, examines how black cultural identity is linked to high-calorie, high-fat food such as fried chicken and barbecued ribs
... The origins of the diet lie in the history of American slavery, according to food historian Jessica B. Harris, who appears in the film. Slaves ate a high-fat, high-calorie diet that would allow them to burn 3,000 calories a day working, she explained.Southern food began to be called soul food during the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s, according to Hurt.
"There's an emotional connection and cultural pride in what they see as the food their population survived on in difficult times," he said.
But Hurt said African-Americans are being devastated by nutrition-related diseases.
Black adults have the highest rates of obesity and a higher prevalence of diabetes than whites, and are twice as likely to die of stroke before age 75 than other population groups, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Besides tradition and habit, poverty and neighborhoods without good supermarkets also contribute to an unhealthy diet, Hurt said.Black adults have the highest rates of obesity and a higher prevalence of diabetes than whites, and are twice as likely to die of stroke before age 75 than other population groups, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Low-income communities of color lack access to vegetables and have an overabundance of fast food and highly processed foods that are high in calories and fats. I always know when I'm in a community of color because I see ... very, very few supermarkets and health food stores," he added.
In her book, "High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America," Harris said the prevalence of over processed foods, low-quality meats, and second- or third-rate produce in minority neighborhoods amounts to "culinary apartheid."
In the film, Marc Lamont Hill, an associate professor of English education at Columbia University in New York, described minority health problems related to poor diet as "21st-century genocide. ..."
Apparently soul food black genocide perfectly dovetailed with the CIA's overwhelmingly successful plot, earlier exposed, to get young blacks in inner cites hooked on heroin, as well as the conspiracy involving architects and city planners, also earlier revealed, to build high-rise public housing specifically designed to virtually force tenants to urinate in elevators and throw bricks through windows.
Also helpful to find out that there being "few supermarkets"in black neighborhoods has been carried out by a genocidal supermarket industry cabal, especially since I had thought it was because so many sane chain businesses are afraid to venture forth in these no-mans-land danger-scapes, where customer and employee crime rates run rampant, and where dedicated just-hanging-on businesses tend to finally get rewarded for their efforts by being looted and burned to the ground by festive angry mobs.
In any case, you just can't get more PBS than this.
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