What Black America Ate Before Fast Food — And How the Dietary Shift Is Killing Us

Your great-grandmother did not eat what you think she ate. The thing you have been calling soul food — the version drowning in refined sugar, saturated fat, processed flour, and sodium levels that would alarm a cardiologist — is not the food that sustained Black communities through slavery, Reconstruction, the Great Migration, and the building of every major American city. The original soul food was a whole-food, plant-forward, seasonally driven cuisine that was among the healthiest diets ever developed by an American population, and the story of how it was transformed into one of the deadliest is not a story about Black culture choosing poorly. It is a story about what happens when an industrial food system deliberately targets the communities least equipped to resist it, strips them of the agricultural knowledge and food access that had kept them alive for centuries, and replaces a cuisine of survival and nourishment with a cuisine of convenience and chronic disease.

Michael Twitty, the culinary historian whose The Cooking Gene traced the African roots of Southern American food, has documented what the original diet looked like: field peas, black-eyed peas, collard greens, turnip greens, sweet potatoes, okra, watermelon, cornbread made from stone-ground meal, river fish, wild game, and the extraordinary variety of legumes, tubers, and leafy vegetables that West African agricultural knowledge brought to the American South. This was not poverty food, although it was the food of poor people. It was a nutritionally sophisticated cuisine built on the crops that enslaved Africans brought with them or cultivated from indigenous American plants, and it was dense with the fiber, complex carbohydrates, plant-based proteins, and micronutrients that modern nutrition science now identifies as the foundation of metabolic health.

What the Original Diet Actually Was

To understand what was lost, you must first understand what existed. The diet of Black communities in the rural South from the mid-1800s through the mid-1900s was built on a foundation that any modern nutritionist would recognize as exceptionally healthy. The staples were legumes — field peas, butter beans, lima beans, lentils — which provided plant-based protein and fiber in quantities that most contemporary American diets fail to deliver. Leafy greens were consumed in enormous quantities: collards, mustard greens, turnip greens, dandelion greens, poke salad. These were not side dishes. They were centerpieces, prepared in a pot liquor — the mineral-rich broth left after cooking — that was consumed as a nutrient-dense drink.

Sweet potatoes, which are now classified by nutritional science as one of the most nutrient-dense foods on earth, were a daily staple. Cornbread was made from whole-grain, stone-ground cornmeal — not the refined, sugar-added version that dominates today. Fish was more common than red meat in many communities, particularly along rivers and in coastal areas. Pork was used, but primarily as a flavoring agent — a ham hock in the greens, fatback in the beans — rather than as the centerpiece of the plate. Fruits were seasonal and local: peaches, plums, blackberries, muscadine grapes. And perhaps most importantly, much of this food was grown by the people who ate it, in kitchen gardens and community plots that provided fresh produce from spring through fall.

“The cuisine of the enslaved was one of the most nutritionally complete diets in the Americas — born of necessity, refined by African agricultural genius, and nearly destroyed by the forces that claimed to liberate it.”
— Jessica B. Harris

Jessica Harris, in High on the Hog, traced these food traditions back to their West African origins, documenting the agricultural knowledge that crossed the Atlantic in the holds of slave ships: the cultivation of rice, which became the foundation of the Carolina Lowcountry economy; the introduction of okra, sesame, sorghum, and the black-eyed pea to American agriculture; the fermentation and preservation techniques that allowed communities to maintain food security without refrigeration. This was not a cuisine of deprivation. It was a cuisine of extraordinary ingenuity, developed by people who were given the least desirable ingredients — the parts of the animal that the plantation owner discarded, the vegetables that grew in the least productive soil — and who transformed them, through technique and knowledge, into a dietary tradition that kept their communities alive under conditions designed to destroy them.

The Great Migration and the Great Disruption

The transformation of the Black American diet is inseparable from the Great Migration — the movement of approximately six million Black Americans from the rural South to the urban North, West, and Midwest between 1910 and 1970. This was the largest internal migration in American history, and its consequences extended far beyond geography. When Black families left the South, they left behind the agricultural infrastructure — the gardens, the farms, the knowledge of growing seasons and soil and seed — that had made the original diet possible. They arrived in cities where food came from stores, not from the ground, and where the stores in their neighborhoods were increasingly stocked not with the whole foods of their grandmothers but with the processed, packaged, shelf-stable products of an industrializing American food system.

The shift was neither immediate nor voluntary. It was the product of three converging forces: urbanization, which separated people from the land; industrialization, which replaced whole foods with processed ones across the entire American diet; and segregation, which concentrated Black populations in neighborhoods where fresh food was expensive, scarce, or unavailable. The term “food desert” was not coined until the 1990s, but the phenomenon it describes — neighborhoods where processed food is abundant and affordable and fresh food is distant and expensive — began forming in Black urban communities decades earlier, as supermarket chains followed white flight to the suburbs and left Black neighborhoods served by corner stores, liquor stores, and the emerging fast food industry.

The Fast Food Invasion

The 1970s were the decade that transformed the Black American diet from a nutritional asset into a public health catastrophe, and the transformation was not accidental. The fast food industry’s expansion into Black neighborhoods during this period was one of the most successful and most destructive targeted marketing campaigns in American business history. McDonald’s, which had 1,000 locations in 1968, had over 5,000 by 1978, and a disproportionate number of the new locations were in Black neighborhoods. The company actively recruited Black franchisees, partnered with Black churches and community organizations, and sponsored Black cultural events. By the 1980s, McDonald’s was spending more on advertising targeted at Black consumers than any other company in America.

This was not philanthropy. It was market capture. The fast food industry recognized that Black neighborhoods represented underserved markets with concentrated populations, and it moved in with the same efficiency that any industry applies to an uncontested market opportunity. The result was a dietary environment in which a meal of fried chicken, French fries, and a sugar-sweetened beverage was available on every corner for two or three dollars, while a meal of grilled fish, collard greens, and sweet potatoes required a drive to a supermarket that might not exist in the neighborhood, the time to prepare it that a working mother might not have, and a cost that was two to three times the fast food option.

The replacement of home-cooked meals with fast food was accelerated by the same economic pressures that drove the Great Migration itself. In two-parent households, both parents increasingly worked. In the growing number of single-parent households, the sole provider had neither the time nor the energy to prepare meals from scratch after a double shift. Convenience was not a luxury. It was a survival strategy. And the food industry was ready with a product that was cheap, fast, engineered to be addictive, and nutritionally catastrophic.

The Health Data That Should Terrify Us

The health consequences of this dietary transformation are measured not in abstractions but in bodies — in the bodies of Black Americans who are dying of diet-related diseases at rates that constitute, by any reasonable definition, a public health emergency. The numbers are these: Black Americans are 60% more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than white Americans. Black Americans are 40% more likely to have high blood pressure. Black Americans die of heart disease at a rate 30% higher than white Americans. The age-adjusted death rate from stroke for Black Americans is nearly twice the rate for whites.

These are not genetic inevitabilities. They are dietary outcomes. The USDA’s dietary surveys consistently show that Black Americans consume more processed food, more added sugar, more sodium, and less fresh produce than the national average. But the word “consume” obscures the mechanism. Black Americans do not consume less fresh produce because they prefer not to eat vegetables. They consume less fresh produce because 39% of Black neighborhoods qualify as food deserts, because the average distance to a supermarket in a Black neighborhood is 1.2 miles compared to 0.5 miles in a white neighborhood, because a dollar buys more calories at a fast food restaurant than at a grocery store, and because the agricultural knowledge that once allowed Black communities to grow their own food was severed by urbanization and has not been replaced.

The cost of this crisis is $93 billion per year in healthcare expenditures related to diet-related disease among Black Americans. That number is an estimate, drawn from CDC data on the cost of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and certain cancers attributable to dietary factors, adjusted for the disproportionate burden borne by Black communities. Ninety-three billion dollars per year spent treating diseases that are, in the majority of cases, preventable through dietary intervention. To put that in perspective: the total annual budget of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — food stamps — is approximately $112 billion. We are spending nearly as much treating the dietary diseases of Black Americans as we spend feeding all low-income Americans. The math is insane, and the fact that we continue to pay for treatment rather than invest in prevention is a policy failure of historic proportions.

The Food Sovereignty Movement

The return to what Black communities once ate is not a nostalgic fantasy. It is a growing movement with measurable results, and it is being led not by government agencies or corporate wellness programs but by Black farmers, urban gardeners, and community organizers who have recognized that the recovery of food sovereignty — the power to grow, choose, and prepare your own food — is as fundamental to Black liberation as any political right.

Ron Finley, the “Gangsta Gardener” of South Central Los Angeles, began planting vegetable gardens in the parkways of his food-desert neighborhood and turned a guerrilla gardening project into a national movement. Will Allen’s Growing Power in Milwaukee became the most visible urban farming operation in America, demonstrating that commercial-scale food production is possible on city lots. The National Black Food and Justice Alliance has built a network of Black farmers, food cooperatives, and urban agriculture projects across the country, and its members are not merely growing food. They are rebuilding the agricultural knowledge system that the Great Migration disrupted.

Black farmers markets have emerged in cities across the country — in Detroit, in Atlanta, in Oakland, in Washington, D.C. — creating distribution networks for Black-grown produce that bypass the supermarket chains that abandoned Black neighborhoods. Farm-to-table programs specifically designed for Black communities are connecting urban consumers with regional Black farmers, and some are incorporating cooking education that teaches the preparation of traditional dishes using whole ingredients rather than processed substitutes.

What Soul Food Was Meant to Be

The most powerful intervention may be the simplest: the recovery of the actual tradition. Not the soul food of the chain restaurant, with its deep-fried everything and its sides that are more sugar than vegetable. The soul food of your great-grandmother — the pot of collard greens simmered with a single piece of smoked turkey, the black-eyed peas with onion and garlic and tomato, the sweet potato that was baked whole and eaten without the marshmallows and brown sugar that a later generation added, the cornbread made from whole-grain meal and buttermilk, the fresh fish pulled from a river and fried once in a cast-iron skillet, not battered and deep-fried three times in recycled vegetable oil.

This food is not exotic. It is not expensive. It is not difficult to prepare. It is, in fact, one of the most affordable healthy diets available, because its staples — dried beans, greens, sweet potatoes, cornmeal, seasonal vegetables — are among the cheapest whole foods in any American grocery store. The barrier is not cost. The barrier is the loss of knowledge, the loss of time, the loss of the cultural infrastructure that once transmitted food preparation skills from grandmother to mother to daughter, and the deliberate replacement of that infrastructure by an industry that profits from selling Black communities the processed food that is killing them.

The recovery of traditional foodways is not a rejection of modernity. It is a rejection of the specific version of modernity that replaced a healthy, culturally grounded, community-sustaining food system with a corporate food system designed to extract profit from communities that cannot afford the health consequences. It is the recognition that the original soul food — the real soul food, the food that nourished the people who built this country under conditions of unimaginable hardship — was not the problem. The problem was what replaced it: the fast food franchises on every corner, the processed food on every shelf, the sugar in everything, the food deserts that made the healthiest options the hardest to find, and the loss of the agricultural knowledge that would have made all of it unnecessary.

The history is there. The knowledge is there. The seeds are there — literally, in some cases, heritage seed banks that preserve the varieties of field peas, sweet potatoes, and greens that West African farmers brought to America three hundred years ago. What is needed is the commitment: to teach what Black great-grandmothers knew, to grow what they grew, to cook what they cooked, and to feed Black children the food that kept Black ancestors alive rather than the food that is killing their descendants. The kitchen was always the center of Black community life. It is time to reclaim it — not as a place where families reheat what the industry sells them, but as a place where they prepare what the land gives them, the way Black Americans always did, before someone decided that Black health was worth less than corporate profit.