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The Spirit of Soul Food
August 7, 2022 @ 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm EDT
The Baton Foundation, in partnership with the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, will host a lecture about the confluence of the history of Black American foodways with a Christian ethical response to food injustice. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
Soul food has played a critical role in preserving Black history, community, and culinary genius. It is also a response to—and marker of—centuries of food injustice. Given the harm that our food production system inflicts upon Black people, what should soul food look like today?
Christopher Carter’s answer to that question merges a history of Black American foodways with a Christian ethical response to food injustice. Carter reveals how racism and colonialism have long steered the development of US food policy.
The very food we grow, distribute, and eat disproportionately harms Black people specifically and people of color among the global poor in general. Carter reflects on how people of color can eat in a way that reflects their cultural identities while remaining true to the principles of compassion, love, justice, and solidarity with the marginalized. Both a timely mediation and a call to action, The Spirit of Soul Food (University of Illinois Press, November 2021), places today’s Black foodways at the crossroads of food justice and Christian practice. PURCHASE BOOK HERE.
About the Author
Reverend Dr. Christopher Carter’s teaching, research, and activist interests are in Black, Womanist, and Environmental ethics, with a particular focus on race, food, and nonhuman animals. He is the co-creator of Racial Resilience, an anti-racism and anti-bias program that utilizes the combined insights of contemplative practices and critical race theories. His academic publications include The Spirit of Soul Food, and “Blood in the Soil: The Racial, Racist, and Religious Dimensions of Environmentalism” in The Bloomsbury Handbook on Religion and Nature (Bloomsbury, 2018).
The passion that informs all his work evolves out of his family’s struggle to loosen the chains of systematic racism – similar to bell hooks, he believes that education is the practice of freedom. He believes that at its broadest level, learning should be transformational: it should transform how the student views herself, her neighbor, and her worldview. Currently, Reverend Carter is an Assistant Professor of Theology at the University of San Diego, a Faith in Food Fellow at Farm Forward, and lead pastor of The Loft in Westwood California.