ABSTRACT Black women in the US South have carried forward the legacy culinary and care traditions of their mothers, grandmothers, and ancestors from Africa and the African diaspora. In this paper, we extend Katherine McKittrick's concept of aesthetic labor—the “music, groove, text, poem, photo” that make Black consciousness and life possible on its own terms—to legacy cooking. Based on community desires to document and preserve their food knowledges and the role of food sharing in their lives, we highlight testimony from conversations and interviews with a tightly woven community in the South Carolina Midlands, demonstrating how care and cultural production are entwined through practices of food sharing that advance food justice. The spaces and relationships curated through ancestral recipes, culinary delights, and the call to care for and feed one another enact legacy cooking as gustatory “waveforms” and “grooves” that push back against racial oppression by radically celebrating Black life.
Ross et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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