Every Nation Has Its Dish: Black Bodies and Black Food in Twentieth-Century America by Jennifer Jensen Wallach (review)

Every Nation Has Its Dish: Black Bodies and Black Food in Twentieth-Century America explores the role of food in the history of efforts by African Americans to achieve political and social equality from the late nineteenth century through the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. Historian Jennifer Jensen Wallach draws on the rapidly expanding body of scholarship on African American culinary history and contributes new research of her own. Readers already versed in this field of study will probably not find that Wallach’s book fundamentally reorients their perceptions of key dynamics and debates, but her work nevertheless warrants praise for shedding new light on black culinary activism that predates the emergence of the concept of soul food in the 1960s.

Wallach’s seven main chapters attend in varying degrees to food production, procurement, preparation, and consumption. Chapter 1 explores how elite African Americans pursued racial uplift after Reconstruction by promoting dietary practices that overlapped in significant ways with those favored by white Progressive-era food reformers such as domestic scientists. The second and third chapters extend this argument about the efforts of the so-called Talented Tenth to foster social change via food through examinations of renowned leaders Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. Typically held up as examples of opposing political tendencies, the two men are united in Wallach’s interpretation by their mutual recognition of the consuming body as a key domain in the larger battle for African American rights. Two highlights of Every Nation Has Its Dish, in fact, are Wallach’s fascinating treatment of Washington’s ambivalent fondness for stigmatized foods associated with slavery and Du Bois’s intrusive preoccupation with the eating habits of his daughter.

The remaining four chapters tease out selected strands of the subsequent history of food’s imbrication in the politics of black racial uplift. Chapter 4 revolves around the impact of black migration on both the reality and the perceptions of African American dietary practices. Wallach focuses particularly on the challenges that educated advocates of respectable eating faced in gaining support for their goals among the far larger numbers of working-class black people who abandoned the rural South in the 1910s. Chapter 5 then examines the reverberations for black culinary activists of demands placed on the national food system by World War I, when the government began urging citizens to display their patriotism by reducing their consumption of high-status beef and wheat. Finally, chapters 6 and 7 examine the symbolic significance of the iconic meal of Coca-Cola and hamburgers to the lunch counter sit-ins of the early civil rights movement and trace the evolution of the concept of soul food beginning in the 1960s.

Of course, this cursory summary cannot do justice to Wallach’s research or her arguments. Yet readers might nevertheless wish that she, in turn, had been more generous in acknowledging the myriad ways her own work is derived from the scholarly endeavors of her predecessors. For example, the endnotes offer citations to many primary sources but not infrequently fail to acknowledge the labor of other scholars who actually identified and guided her to those sources in the first place. But the more fundamental problem is that Every Nation Has Its Dish is too brief for Wallach to have done justice to such a long span of time. Particularly as the book speeds forward from World War I into the civil rights era, the reader ceases to feel that Wallach’s arguments are deeply tethered to the broader historical context. Perhaps most notable, World War II receives only one passing mention in the context of Wallach’s discussion of Coca-Cola. Then again, wishing that this book had been longer can, and in this case should, be taken as a form...