Food Trauma
- The Self Care Snob
- Apr 21
- 7 min read
Salted Memories & Heavy Plates
A journey through the grief we swallowed and the recipes we almost forgot.
Colonialism and the Disruption of Food Sovereignty
Colonialism didn’t just take land—it restructured the way people grew, accessed, and valued food. Across Africa, North America, and the Caribbean, colonial powers imposed agricultural systems that privileged export crops over community nourishment. Fertile land was seized to grow coffee, sugar, cotton, and cocoa for European markets, while Indigenous and African communities were forced to abandon their diverse, nutrient--rich local staples like millet, plantain, cassava, and wild greens.
Traditional practices—such as communal farming, crop rotation, seed saving, and food-based spiritual rituals—were either criminalized or dismissed as “primitive.” Colonial governments redefined agriculture to serve their empire(s), displacing generations of ecological knowledge in favor of monoculture and total market dependency.
In places like Jamaica, British rule converted smallholder farming communities into plantations, decimating local food autonomy. In Francophone West Africa, the French imposed quotas for export crops and punished those who resisted. Belgian rule in the Congo restricted traditional food growing and turned palm oil and rubber into for-profit, extractive industries.
And in the United States, this pattern took a different—but equally violent form. After Emancipation, formerly enslaved people acquired land and began building independent agricultural communities across the South. But these gains were short-lived. Through white supremacist violence, discriminatory lending, and legal dispossession, Black land ownership was systematically stripped away.
By 1910, Black farmers owned more than 15 million acres of land in the U.S. By the early 2000s, that number had dropped by over 90%. Federal agricultural programs intentionally excluded Black farmers from access to credit, equipment, and subsidies that white farmers received in abundance. Meanwhile, Black farming knowledge—rooted in African agronomy (agricultural science) and generations of survival—was marginalized or erased from the American narrative.
The long-term effects are visible today: former colonies and historically Black farming communities alike rely heavily on imported, industrialized food. Many traditional grains, vegetables, and cooking methods have been replaced or stigmatized. What was once cultural and nutritional wisdom has become hard to access, underfunded, or altogether forgotten.
Colonization didn’t just steal land. In every region it touched, it severed people from the taste of home, and from the power of feeding themselves and their communities on their own terms.
Propaganda was part of this erasure. Colonial powers not only criminalized traditional growing practices—they also framed local American, African and Indigenous diets as backward or inferior. In British-run Caribbean territories, posters and health campaigns encouraged “modern eating” that meant canned meats and white bread, discouraging cassava, collard greens, callaloo, or yam. The message was clear: colonial control didn’t stop at the borders; it entered kitchens, shaping taste and trust in one’s own food.
They took the land, and with it, the taste of home.
Slavery and the Invention of Survival Foods
The transatlantic slave trade uprooted people not only from their families and homelands, but from their food systems. Enslaved African descendants and those who were later taken there, possessed deep knowledge of cultivation, preservation, and cooking—but they were denied access to the foods they once grew.
Instead, they were given rations designed to sustain labor, not health: cornmeal, pork fat, flour, and molasses. These ingredients were never meant to nourish—they were meant to suppress hunger enough to continue exploitation. But within this cruelty, Black people created cuisine.
Using memory and skill, enslaved cooks transformed scraps into stews, made medicine from “weeds”, and infused flavor into what was meant to be flavorless. Okra, black-eyed peas, greens, rice—these ingredients became anchors of continuity, even in a land built to erase identity.
And yet, the very foods that kept people alive were later vilified. Soul food, born from resistance and creativity, became shorthand for disease and dysfunction in the mouths of public health officials who refused to understand its origins.
As Black Americans rose from slavery, the foods of survival became symbols of lack in the public eye. In minstrel shows, caricatures of Black people eating watermelon, chicken, or chitterlings turned nourishment into mockery. These images stuck over time.
In the 20th century, nutrition guidelines and school health campaigns targeted “Southern” or “ethnic” diets as risk factors for disease—without context. Soul food became the scapegoat, rather than examining systemic food deprivation and ongoing racial stress that led to them becoming cultural norms and traditions.
We seasoned what was meant to starve us—and they still blamed the seasoning.
Capitalism and the Commodification
of Nutrition
As plantation economies evolved into modern capitalism, food became another profit center. For Black communities, that meant increasing isolation from fresh, affordable food and growing dependence on highly processed, chemically preserved alternatives.
Grocery stores disappeared from inner-city neighborhoods while fast food chains rapidly multiplied. But this wasn’t random—it was strategic. Economic divestment in Black areas meant fewer options and higher prices for healthier foods. Meanwhile, processed products, subsidized by agricultural policy, became ubiquitous.
Corporate messaging played a massive role in shaping those habits. From the 1970s onward, food companies targeted Black neighborhoods with high-sodium canned goods, sugary cereals, and fast food chains. These brands launched commercials during Black TV programming, plastered their ads on buses in Black cities, and used slogans like “I’m lovin’ it” to build loyalty through familiarity.
Black women in particular were targeted in political campaigns that framed poverty as moral failure. The “Welfare Queen” myth accused Black mothers of irresponsibility and indulgence, turning state-sponsored aid into a site of shame. Feeding your children with food stamps became a public spectacle, a performance under scrutiny.
The outcome? A generation of children raised on foods that were affordable but nutritionally empty. And when chronic disease followed, the blame landed not on policymakers, but on the mothers who were trying to feed their children with what was available; blamed for the calories, but no one asks about the absence of options.
Anti-Blackness in Health and Wellness Systems
Health care in the West has long positioned Black bodies as pathological—too large, too loud, too resistant to discipline. Weight becomes the explanation for everything, even when deeper issues are at play. Pain is ignored. Symptoms are downplayed. And food is reduced to numbers on a chart. Meanwhile, wellness marketing in the U.S. has defined “healthy” with visuals of thin, white, affluent bodies drinking smoothies and eating quinoa. Cultural foods—flavored, fried, or made with care—are either omitted or vilified.
Nutrition advice rarely considers culture. Instead, it imposes Eurocentric ideals of “clean” eating that leave little room for plantains, callaloo, or catfish. Wellness becomes an aesthetic: green juice, yoga, quinoa—foods and practices that come at the cost of erasing Black culinary identity.
The BMI, a tool created by a white European mathematician in the 1800s, remains the standard by which health is judged—despite its complete disregard for ethnic, gendered, or body diversity. Our bodies are policed when we eat, and pathologized when we don’t.
Diasporic Distance and Cultural Food Shame
Across the diaspora, migration brought new possibilities and new pressures. In pursuit of safety or stability, Black families from all over the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa found themselves in environments where their foods were not only unfamiliar—but unwanted.
This shame wasn’t created in a vacuum—it was fed by media, advertising, and institutional tone. Children’s cartoons often made fun of “weird food,” reinforcing the idea that white, processed lunches were the norm. School cafeterias rarely served diasporic dishes, and food pyramids rarely reflected the needs or tastes of non-European communities.
Children who brought jollof rice, roti, or collard greens to school were laughed at. The smells, colors, and textures of cultural meals became markers of otherness rather than the norm they otherwise would have been. Parents, wanting to shield their children, began packing sandwiches and applesauce—neutral foods that didn’t raise eyebrows.
This pressure to assimilate led many to leave tradition behind. Young people grew up without knowing how to make the dishes their grandparents once cooked. Cultural identity was folded away in favor of survival. The plate became a performance—what we were allowed to enjoy had to be made palatable to someone else.
Gender, Care, and the Labor of Feeding
In many Black communities, women have carried the burden of nourishment. They wake early to prepare breakfast, plan dinner while working full-time jobs, and feed entire families while often neglecting their own needs.
Propaganda around gender and food has long painted Black women as either caregivers or abusers. The mammy archetype—smiling, cooking, nurturing white families—evolved into modern stereotypes of overfeeding, smothering “Big Mamas” blamed for health disparities in Black households. Media often reduced matriarchs to food pushers, framing their care as harmful, rather than naming the structural barriers they worked within.
Feeding others is one of the most sacred acts of care—but it’s also unpaid labor, emotional labor, and generational labor. For many, food is love. But it’s also stress. It’s control. It’s expectation.
“She fed everyone else and forgot how to feed herself."
Mothers and grandmothers pass down recipes—but also anxieties. They urge us to eat more, clean our plates, take another helping. Their intentions are to show us love and care, but the outcomes are complex. We inherit both the healing and the heaviness.
Counter-propaganda: Resistance, Reclamation, and Return
When a Black farmer revives okra seeds passed down for generations, they reclaim truth from a system built to erase it. When a Black chef centers Afro-diasporic cuisine in a fine dining space, they push against the lie that our food is unrefined. When a mother serves stew instead of frozen pizza, not out of scarcity but out of pride, she is restoring what was distorted.
The future of Black food doesn’t lie in rejection or replication—but in reconnection. To land. To legacy. To each other.
Despite everything—displacement, trauma, policy, propaganda—Black communities continue to reclaim their food systems. Across the diaspora, there is a return happening: to land, to seeds, to ceremony.
Black farmers are reviving ancestral growing methods. Healers are preserving spice blends and bone broths. Chefs are rewriting the narrative of what wellness looks like on our plates.
The most recent numbers from the USDA show more than 45,000 Black farmers working the soil again. That number is small compared to what we once held—but it’s growing. Slowly, steadily, intentionally. And the movement is looking different now.
We’re seeing young folks, queer folks, women, urban growers, rural elders—people who didn’t grow up on farms but still feel the pull. People who never stopped believing land could be a place of healing, not just labor.
Across the diaspora, we’re witnessing a return. To ancestral seeds. To soil that remembers our names. To food that doesn’t need permission to be powerful. And it's not just about farming. It’s about reclaiming what was interrupted—and feeding our people with care, on our own terms.
We may never get back every acre, but we are reclaiming something just as deep: our right to nourish, to know, to stay rooted.
Because the land is calling us back.
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