Soul Food Scholar honors, celebrates Black culinary traditions
Colorado native Adrian Miller, who spoke at the inaugural Newtopia Now in August, shares the history of Black food and its current importance. Read more.
October 23, 2024
At a Glance
- Innovation and wellness, through the use of vegan and nutritious ingredients, will shape the future of soul food.
- Instead of believing soul food is a throwback to slavery, Adrian Miller focuses on its community-building legacy.
- Black culinary history tells the story of African migration across continents; Miller explains how it shaped America.
Adrian Miller is on a mission.
The former political advisor and analyst has turned his life’s work into something literally more meaty: Educating swaths of people about how Black food helped shape America, how it continues to do so—and why that’s vital to the country’s social discourse. (Oh, and serving as a certified barbecue judge along the way).
“My whole thing is to bring us together,” Miller says.
Trained as an attorney, Miller spent three years serving as a special assistant to former President Bill Clinton. He subsequently worked for Colorado Governor Bill Ritter Jr. as an analyst. Indeed, Miller expected to stay in politics for the long term. But, as it turned out, he was instead being guided toward becoming the Soul Food Scholar—he just didn’t know it yet.
The mundane paves the way to inspiration
After his stint in the White House, Miller returned to his home state of Colorado with hopes of kicking off his own political career. He was met with a slow job market.
“I was watching a lot of daytime television, I’m embarrassed to tell you,” he says. Yet, often, inspiration arises from the mundane. After too much “Jerry Springer,” which Miller calls “the depth of my depravity,” Miller made his way to a bookstore. A longtime fan of cooking, Miller found himself in the cookbook section. And there, Miller’s life took the wholly unexpected turn that led to his role as the Soul Food Scholar.
“I found this book on the history of southern food,” he says. “It was called Southern Food at Home, On the Road, In History, by a guy named John Egerton. He wrote that the tribute to Black achievement in American cooking had yet to be written.” Egerton’s book was published in 1987. Miller found it in 2001. And he tracked down Egerton.
“I said, ‘Mr. Egerton, I loved your book. You wrote this one sentence. Do you still think this is true?’ And he said, ‘You know what? For the most part, nobody's taken on the full story. There's always room for another voice, so why not yours?’ That's what launched the journey.”
With no qualifications “except for eating a lot of soul food” and making his own, Miller set off on his new mission: to learn as much as he could about the history and impact of Black food in a country still grappling with racism and inequality. He eventually landed a political role, and it was one that afforded him the freedom to spend weeknights and weekends at the Denver Public Library.
“I just grabbed everything I could on Black food traditions,” Miller says. “I read 3,500 oral histories of formerly enslaved people, and I indexed every reference to food. I read 500 cookbooks, half authored by African Americans, because I wanted to put Black food traditions in a larger culinary context. I read thousands of newspaper and magazine articles. I talked to hundreds of people. And then, because I care about my subject so much, I decided to eat my way through the country. I went to 150 soul food restaurants in 35 cities and 15 states.”
The Soul Food Scholar is born
All that effort led Miller to uncover his purpose: sharing food stories to unite the world. As the Soul Food Scholar, he aims to “bring people together, especially in these fractious times, and it seems like food is one of the easiest ways to do that.”
Miller loves all food history, he says, but has chosen to focus on African American culinary traditions “because of the historical neglect of these stories. There’s just so much fascinating stuff to share.” He writes books, contributes freelance pieces and delivers presentations around the world on Black food traditions. He spoke at Newtopia Now in August; it’s available to watch on-demand.
To be sure, there is such depth and breadth of history and tradition behind African American food—and the where, why, how and when—that it’s most illuminating to refer to Miller’s writings and speeches for the full insight. And, without a doubt, much of that history comes with pain—pain that some current politicians, whether directly or indirectly, reinforce as they seek to clamp down on diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives, Miller says.
Even so, Miller would like to reframe the sense of pain around soul food, while honoring that aspect of its roots. Because Black cooking “was a badge of servitude and slavery, there are a lot of African Americans who don't want to have this history highlighted,” he says. Focusing “entirely on the negative,” though, does a disservice to the legacy of Black food in America, he adds.
“It was a way to build community. It was a way to show ingenuity, because they were taking parts of West Africa, parts of Western Europe and parts of the Americas, from Indigenous people, and creating these dishes that became beloved,” Miller explains. “Some were leveraging their knowledge of food to sustain themselves in horrific conditions, because typically, on a plantation, the slave owner would give limited amounts of food every week as a display of their power. Enslaved people had to forage, hunt, garden, fish and do all these things in order to supplement their diet and survive. So that takes a level of ingenuity. And then people were, at times, able to leverage their food knowledge to buy their own freedom—buy the freedom of their own family members—set up businesses and prosper.”
Miller also pushes back against the narrative that soul food “is going to kill you,” as he puts it.
“People are looking at the health disparities of African Americans, and they're blaming soul food for it,” he says. “And response to that is, if you actually go and look at what people are eating, it's really that they're loading up on junk food and fast food and all this other stuff in addition to soul food. In fact, I would say soul food is probably a minor part of the diet for a lot of these people, so there needs to be more complexity there. And then also, if you look at the things that dietitians are telling us to eat—more leafy, dark leafy greens, more sweet potatoes, more fish, hibiscus, okra—these are all superfoods that are part of the soul food tradition. So, it's really a matter of context.”
Remember, too, he says, that historically, the story of food in the South reflects class and place more than race.
“White people were eating the same foods,” he says. Of course, because of racism, “they weren't eating them together, but they were pretty much eating the same foods.”
Now, in the vein of bringing people together over the same food, over soul food, Miller seeks to create communities “where people can have people who disagree with them over for dinner and enter an extended conversation over several meals.”
It’s a grassroots movement that remains in the nascent stages, but Miller sees great possibility for “cultivating those relationships and friendships.”
Adrian Miller signs a copy of “Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue,” at Metropolitan State University of Denver in February. “Black Smoke” won the 2022 James Beard Award for Reference and Scholarship. Credit: Soul Food Scholar
Soul food trends change over time
In the meantime, Miller is tracking trends that are shaping the next iteration of soul food. First, there’s “a lot of creativity with vegan,” he says. Then, there’s upscale soul food, which emphasizes heirloom vegetables and meats, and their presentation. From there, health-conscious soul food—which removes, minimizes or substitutes the butter, sugar and salt—also is gaining traction. Finally, a number of soul food chefs are doing fusion—think collard green quesadillas, soul food tacos and soul food egg rolls, Miller says.
In addition, there’s growing interest in diasporic dinners, where a menu tells a story.
“Usually, it's the story of African migration, forced migration to the Americas,” Miller says. “So, the first dish will be something West African. The next dish will be something Caribbean, because a lot of enslaved people were taken to the Caribbean for ‘seasoning’ right before they were brought to the America of the United States. And then they'll have a dish that's reflective of their journey in the United States.”
That marks a shift in the soul food approaches Miller has witnessed since he first started this work, he says.
“There were quite a few Black chefs who didn't really want to emphasize the African roots of their cooking because of the negative.”
But perceptions are changing. Now, Miller says, “I'm seeing this wide embrace of West Africa. People are saying, ‘No, this is my food,’ and just telling the story. They’re taking the shame out of it, and just really creating an empowering narrative, and a delicious narrative, of these food traditions.”
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