EP 72: Watermelon
Why do some people feel shame about the foods we eat? We ask people how they feel about eating foods that are used to stereotype Black people and unpack the history behind some of this food shaming. From choosing what to drink on a flight to a watermelon eating contest we’re trying to get to the root of this with American Studies professor, Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson, Anthropologist Dr. Gail Myers, and chef Bryant Terry.
Watermelon
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:02] Pilot: Ladies and Gentlemen, very shortly we’ll be ready for departure. So, all your mobile phones and electronic devices should be switched off. Please make sure your seat belt is fastened and do make yourself comfortable. Thank you.
[00:00:12] Flight attendant: Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts. We're ready for takeoff.
[00:00:16] Leila Day: Hana, I'm remembering something that recently happened.
[00:00:20] Flight attendant: Welcome to flight 203 with service to San Francisco. We hope you enjoy your flight.
[00:00:27] Leila Day: Okay, I've been running around all morning trying to catch this flight. I was hungry. I was thirsty. The flight was packed.
[00:00:36] Flight attendant: Hi ma’am, would you like some water, pretzels, snacks?
[00:00:40] Leila Day: I just couldn't stop thinking about taking a sip of something cold and refreshing. My tongue was dry, my body dehydrated.
[00:00:48] Hana Baba: I know the feeling on those flights. It is a dry, dry situation.
[00:00:53] Leila Day: Uh, yes! And so, when the flight attendant arrived, she asked-
[00:00:57] Flight attendant: Hi ma’am, would you like some water?
[00:01:00] Leila Day: ‘Yes.’ I said.
[00:01:01] Flight attendant: Still or sparkling?
[00:01:03] Leila Day: Sparkling please.
[00:01:04] Flight attendant: Regular or watermelon?
[00:01:08] Leila Day: Why did she say that so loud? Why in front of all these people? Why does she have everyone looking at me? I can see them all looking, waiting, smirking, knowing what I'm going to order. There aren’t many Black people on this flight. They know what they're doing.
[00:01:24] Flight attendant: Ma'am, regular or watermelon? Which one would you like?
[00:01:30] Leila Day: I'll have the regular.
[00:01:35] Hana Baba: Okay, Leila but you wanted the watermelon, didn't you?
[00:01:39] Leila Day: Yes, I did want the watermelon.
[00:01:42] Hana Baba: So, why didn't you order it?
[00:01:44] Leila Day: We need to Stoop this out.
*Voices of The Stoop, intro music: The Stoop. The Stoop. The Stoop. The Stoop. Stories from across the Black diaspora that we need to talk about. My cousins were water and grease girls, and I couldn't be a water increase girl. That's what I'm talking about, ballerina in the hood. We be Gullah Geechee anointed people. When a Black woman walks up to the desk in labour, what preconceived notions do you have about her? I didn't even know we had a hair chart. The Stoop*
[00:02:28] Hana Baba: Hey Leila.
[00:02:29] Leila Day: Hey Hana.
[00:02:30] Hana Baba: We are back. It is season eight of the Stoop. We are excited to be back.
[00:02:37] Leila Day: I know. I know. And today we're talking about the stereotypes around the foods we eat because it's a real thing.
[00:02:47] Hana Baba: It is real. There's been writing about it, talks about it. It’s something that has been studied and we are about to talk about it today.
[00:02:56] Leila Day: Yeah, like do any of us feel shame around the things we eat and why?
Voices of The Stoop
[00:03:01]
I grew up hearing about that stereotype of Black people, they love fried chicken and watermelon. That seems to be the only food that we eat is fried chicken and watermelon.
***
Listen, the history of Black culture will always be ridiculed, picked apart, laughed at because it's just something that isn't understood because we weren't allowed to live our life. I don't like watermelon, so I won't be eating it but if it's fried chicken in front of me, Imma tear it up.
***
Are anyone afraid to eat watermelon and chicken in front of White people or Black? Hell nah, Imma eat chicken, watermelon, pineapple, papaya, mangoes and everything and lick the fingers too.
***
I'm a chef but we used to make jokes about it like, ‘Why they gotta put the Black person on fried chicken.’
***
Yeah, I have no fear of eating watermelon and fried chicken in front all the races and stuff like that. No, not at all.
***
I have a really good girlfriend who did not start eating watermelon until maybe four or five years ago because of the stereo type of like Black people eating watermelon. But who doesn't love fried chicken and watermelon? It was made fun of to ridicule us but the people that were ridiculing us like it too. And I would laugh at her until finally I said, ‘Girl, just eat this.’ She was like, ‘Oh my God. I didn't know it was so good.’ And I’m like, you’ve denying yourself years of watermelon.
***
[00:04:19] Leila Day: This feeling of shame goes way back to these stereotypes around Black people eating watermelon.
Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll conclude this part of the entertainment with a brand-new song sung here in Chicago for the first time on any stage, by myself and company.
[00:04:45] Hana Baba: And it's not just watermelon. Things like fried chicken also are tied to the same type of feeling for some people. This shame.
[00:04:54] Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson: Food shaming occurs, I think, in a number of different ways.
[00:04:58] Leila Day: Hana, this is doctor Psyche Williams-Forson and professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.
[00:05:06] Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson: And I study and write about the lives of African American people and Black people throughout the diaspora. And specifically, I study peoples cultural lifeways and the ways in which they engage with their material worlds specifically around food and culture.
[00:05:22] Leila Day: Doctor Psyche has written a book about food shaming called Eating while Black: Food Shaming and Race in America.
[00:05:30] Hana Baba: Aha. So, Dr. Psyche might give us some context about why some people have this shame around eating things like watermelon.
[00:05:42] Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson: Many Black folks do not want to eat chicken and watermelon in mixed company. So, here now we have a situation where Black folks have to monitor and police what they eat and where they eat it because of the ignorance of people around them. I know lots of Black folks who are like, ‘Oh no, I am not eating a watermelon in public and I'm certainly not eating it if it's not cut up into small pieces.’ Right? We're talking about a fruit, but the legacy of that fruit is so endemic to our society. We saw this when President Obama was elected the first year, right, the first time he was elected. A postcard circulated on social media that showed a picture of the White House in the South lawn covered with watermelon. In fact, the title of my book, Eating While Black, actually comes from an article that was written by Damon Young back when he was with the Root, right. And he had a picture of President Obama eating or there was a caption where he was eating a piece of chicken and Damon Young says, ‘You know, once again, here we are just living while Black. Eating while Black.’ And I said that's exactly what I'm talking about. Going about our daily lives eating food but because we are not that far removed from those historical underpinnings, those racist historical underpinnings, we cannot escape, right. We cannot escape. I know folks who won't eat chicken in public. One woman says eating chicken at your desk at work is ghetto. Why? Everybody else eats chicken at work. Why is it ghetto for Black people?
[00:07:40] Hana Baba: Okay, so Leila, let's talk about the roots of the watermelon. Where this fruit came from. Of course, it's from Africa. Researchers have traced it back to a region in Sudan and that region is called Kurdufan. It's in the West of Sudan. It’s actually where my mom's family originally came from. Hey! and watermelons have even been seen in ancient hieroglyphics in Egypt as far back as before 3000 BC.
[00:08:10] Leila Day: Yeah. I mean, free Black people grew watermelon. They sold it. It was a huge source of income for the Black community.
[00:08:17] Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson: It was a tool of self-sufficiency until that self-sufficiency became a problem. It’s through growing of watermelon and harvesting watermelons, selling it. This is one of the reasons our farms were taken from us, right, through the USDA, being denied loans, anything that would allow us to be self-sufficient. You know, when we were not given that 40 acres and a mule now, we're going to take everything from you.
[00:08:42] Hana Baba: So, then the image of the watermelon was used to humiliate Black people.
[00:08:48] Leila Day: So, the watermelon came through the transatlantic slave trade and free Black people enjoyed it. You know, why not. It’s good. But then there were these racist tropes, these caricatures of Black people and watermelon became a central image of the Black minstrel.
[00:09:18] Hana Baba: These minstrel shows were basically used to normalize racism. But the watermelon was actually a symbol of freedom for Black people, right.
[00:09:28] Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson: We started to see Black children and adults in these compromising positions, if you will, with the watermelon. Big lips, shiny face, a smile and so you know it's because of technology in popular culture that these images began to circulate in the same ways that they did with chicken. That same image that is sparked from the watermelon then became a trope for the chicken because you had a restaurant for example called the C**n Chicken Inn and the emblem for the C**n Chicken Inn was that Sambo face, right. Well, chicken did the same thing that watermelon did both during enslavement and well after. For centuries Black folks, Africans first and then African Americans over time, used chicken to, in some – When they were allowed in particular to find their ways towards self-sufficiency either to furnish their homes to buy their freedom, to do a variety of different things.
[00:10:34] Leila Day: It was the late 1800s and these images of Black people in racist cartoons, the blackface, you know, it ran rampant.
[00:10:43] Hana Baba: Yeah, and in 1916, there was this song that was released. It has a very familiar tune.
*Ice cream truck tune*
[00:10:58] Leila Day: It's a tune that’s still heard today in the ice cream trucks.
[00:11:02] contributer: For many people chasing after the ice cream truck after hearing its now famous Jingle is a summer ritual, but would you believe that the song actually has some racist origins?
[00:11:44] Leila Day: I must say I've had no problem eating watermelon, Hana, in front of people. No problem eating fried chicken for the record. Okay.
[00:11:51] Hana Baba: Okay.
[00:11:52] Leila Day: It was just that one moment in a very White space. I was feeling trapped on a plane, you know. I had this knee jerk reaction that you know this is a set up, you know.
[00:12:04] Hana Baba: Yeah, I mean when you're telling the story, it sounds a lot like it was very much related to this space you're in. You know, it kind of depends on where you are who you’re with. Like so maybe if I was sitting next to you on that plane, would you have felt the same way do you think?
[00:12:21] Leila Day: I don't think so. I probably would’ve ordered two. Give me two watermelon spritzers please.
[00:12:30] Hana Baba: Or maybe, like you said, it was just your mood that day. Stuff you were thinking about, right.
[00:12:35] Leila Day: Yeah. Right. I mean the mood, the space, that all factors in. I had a very rough week with work, and I was questioning a lot of things about systems, about how things were set up and then came the question. And then the looks.
[00:12:55] Flight attendant: So, would you like regular or watermelon?
[00:12:58] Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson: I think when we clamp down on each other’s joy by shaming, that's when we have fallen into, and bought into the narrative of Black deficiency. That's when we bought into the narrative of Black inability and that's when we fallen into the narrative of Black without freedom and liberation. I think seeing Black people have joy that is disruptive to the national order.
[00:13:27] Hana Baba: So, the watermelon was basically used as a weapon against Black people. But that was then. things are different now.
[00:13:37] Dr. Gail Myers: Go, go, go, go, go.
[00:13:40] Hana Baba: Welcome to the twenty-first century where a watermelon eating contest is happening at a farmers market in Oakland, California.
[00:13:52] Dr. Gail Myers: Okay, you gotta get in there. You gotta get in there. Oh oh, I see a winner. I see a clear winner. I see a winner. We wanted to diminish the shame. We wanted to bring back the celebration and we also wanted to make sure that – Because our farmers sell watermelon, you know, we want people to be eating watermelon.
[00:14:13] Hana Baba: Leila, this is Dr. Gail Myers. She's an anthropologist and she studies Black farmers, food and land. She started this organization called Farm to Grow and every Saturday for the past nine years they've been here at this farmers market.
[00:14:29] Dr. Gail Myers: You know, it's a healthy food.
[00:14:32] Leila Day: People have their hands behind their backs everyone has a watermelon slice in front of them and they're bending down, they’re eating that juicy watermelon.
[00:14:40] Dr. Gail Myers: You know, watermelon is an incredible food. It's hot. You need something that's hydrating, right. And so, it's- It's nature's natural hydration we wanted to make sure that we weren't ashamed about eating watermelon in public. Come on out, we gonna have a contest to see how fast you can eat your watermelon. In public and we celebrate that. We celebrate the winner.
[00:15:11] Hana Baba: And Leila, another part of this, like Doctor Gail said, is that these foods that have been stereotyped, they’re all Black grown foods, right. Like we said that come from Black farmers and Black culinary traditions. She directed this film about all of this. It’s called Rhythms of the Land.
*Narration, Rhythm of the Land* These are our elders kneeling there for us to stand on their shoulders. We honor them with this rhythm.
[00:15:41] Dr. Gail Myers: I interviewed thirty former sharecroppers, farmers – current farmers – a basket weaver. And they told me what it was like. There is a woman that's 109. My great-aunt, Aunt Rose was 99 at the time and so they remember their grandparents who were in the civil war. They had Guineas. They raised geese, turkeys. They had sorghum and all of these are African foods.
[00:16:16] Hana Baba: And Leila, Dr. Gail says it wasn't just about growing food to sell the food. It was about the actual act of sitting down and actually eating it.
[00:16:29] Dr. Gail Myers: These people talk so fondly of growing food and giving it away. Feeding the community. Taking care of the community. I think there is a reclaiming, and it has to be intentional and has to be on purpose. We have to decolonize our mind when it comes to our food and our land and our relationship to community and that's really the power behind that.
[00:17:06] Leila Day: All of this talking about reclaiming our food got me really interested in how we could do that. So, Hana, I went to the Black Food Summit hosted by chef Bryant Terry. He's an award-winning chef and author of this incredible anthology on Black Food called Black Food and so this event was spearheaded by the Museum of the African diaspora in San Francisco, and it was a weekend dedicated to Black food and Black solidarity.
[00:17:39] Bryant Terry: It's been a life mission of mine too highlight the contributions that Africans and people of African descent have made throughout time in history and around the globe because so often, as you know, these contributions have been erased or unrecognized and so I'm always committed to that work of elevating and uplifting the contributions that my people have made.
[00:18:07] Leila Day: So, we gathered on a farm in Pescadero about an hour South of San Francisco. A group of Black folks, all of us interested in the Black food movement, all travel to a ranch called Tomcat Ranch.
[00:18:19] Bryant Terry: You know, I really wanted to have Black folks talking about and writing about, and meditating on our food and doing it in a way with very little concern for the – No concern actually for the White gaze.
[00:18:34] Leila Day: And when we arrived, we were greeted with green smoothies and some of these sweetest juiciest watermelon I had ever tasted.
[00:00:42] Hana Baba: Oh!
[00:00:43] Leila Day: Yes, girl. Yes.
[00:00:45] Bryant Terry: Lots of just really engaging in fun activities at the ranch and then we’ll be ending today with a community supper.
[00:18:54] Leila Day: And we ate together, we pet horses to destress. We did breathwork. And there was this moment, Hana, where we all lay down together in a room to rest. It was called the nap ministry.
[00:19:25] Hana Baba: The nap ministry, yes. I know that organization. It’s based in Atlanta; it's led by Trisha Hersey. And she gathers Black people to just come together, close their eyes and rest. To nap. Leila, I love this idea that you’re just all laying down and disconnected and not thinking about all the things we have to do. You're just at peace.
[00:20:09] Leila Day: I mean not thinking about arguing about the validity of our Black centred projects the ways that we’re fighting to be heard and understood. I mean we were all just letting go of all of this and just resting.
[00:20:28] Trisha Hersey: You are enough, you've always been enough.
[00:20:32] Hana Baba: Yeah, that's definitely a powerful experience.
[00:20:38] Leila Day: And at the end of the nap, Hana, I looked around the room and all these Black people are just resting, surrounded by good food.
[00:20:48] Hana Baba: What does that feel like? What did you feel? Were you able to just relax and let go like that? Like, was it easy?
[00:20:57] Leila Day: I was. I totally was. And you know, the thing is, I think about of course on that plane earlier, I wasn't resting, and I wasn't around people that looked like me at all and I was very triggered. And so, this space was creating a place of like disconnect and now we were surrounded by a lot of the foods that we were shamed for eating, you know, in our past so you know what I did?
[00:21:28] Hana Baba: I mean, I hope you ate some watermelon and went to ride a horse.
[00:21:34] Leila Day: I didn't ride a horse. But I for sure did lean into the idea that sometimes you just gotta let your mind rest.
[00:21:47] Hana Baba: Eat your watermelon girl.
[00:21:50] Trisha Hersey: Imagine a world filled with justice. Imagine you’re justice. What does it feel like? What does it look like? Daydream. Daydream.
[00:22:31] Hana Baba: And that is the Stoop
[00:22:34] Leila Day: And that is The Stoop. Yes.
[00:22:37] Hana Baba: Wake up Leila, we gotta do the credit.
[00:22:39] Leila Day: Oh, I am napping. The stoop is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. A network of independent listener supported artist owned podcasts.
[00:22:50] Hana Baba: The Stoop family – you got me all yawning and stretching. The Stoop family includes producer Natalie Peart, sound design by James Rowlands, art by Neema Iyer, social media by Summer Williams.
[00:23:07] Leila Day: Thanks to California humanities. A non-profit partner of the NEH find them at calhum.org. And special thanks to the NPR Story Lab.
