Image description: Dr. Pysche Williams-Forson sits before a black background with her arms crossed, wearing a blue top, red lipstick and colorful beaded jewelry. She has red locs, and is looking toward camera and smiling softy. The Ologies logo appears in the lower left. Photo via https://psychewilliamsforson.com/

What’s the difference between Southern cooking and “soul food?” Is there a correct type of mac and cheese? And whose business is it what you eat? (Hint: no one’s). Culinary historian, scholar of African American life and culture critic Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson is a professor at University of Maryland College Park and department chair in the Department of American Studies. She also authored the books “Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America” and “Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power.” We chat about everything from oral traditions to “soul food” in popular culture, gendered roles in cooking, hyperlocal produce, systemic oppression and why someone would make chicken without seasoning it. On national television.

Listen via Stitcher, Apple, Spotify, Google, Podbay, Podcast Addict, Overcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Visit Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson’s website and follow her on Instagram and Twitter

Buy Dr. Williams-Forson’s books: Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America and Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power

A donation went to: Cultivate Charlottesville

Links to things we discussed:

Digital Schomburg African American Women Writers of the 19th Century

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century

Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South by Pauline Hopkins

Buy Contending Forces on Bookshop.org

Afroculinaria post mentioning Dr. Williams-Forson’s work by Michael W. Twitty

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century via The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture