For more than a century, Black Americans have protested, marched, and campaigned for civil rights and equal protection under the law; in response, the US government has falteringly, piecemeal, doled out the rights of full citizenship. Concurrently, criminal, legal, and geospatial laws and systems have worked to patrol and control Black lives in the United States. These realities are not divorced from questions of food access—they are, in fact, central to them. How have Black Americans persisted, and developed foodways, within this context of pervasive state-led anti-Blackness? Ashanté Reese explores this question, what she calls making “ways out of no way” (p.9), in her ethnography, Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C.
Reese offers an important re-centering for the field of food studies—too often, our conversations ignore how food access is only one concern among many priorities in eaters’ lives; and moreover, that many eaters’ lives...
University of California Press