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Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019): 73-75     ©  American Folklore Society 2020 

Review of: 

Every Nation Has Its Dish: Black Bodies and Black Food in 
Twentieth-Century America 
Jennifer Jensen Wallach. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina 
Press, 2019. Pp. 248, bibliography, index.  

Review by: Marissa Francisco Farahbod  
__________________________________________________________ 

Every Nation Has Its Dish by Jennifer Jensen Wallach is an intriguing work that 
centralizes the importance of foodways to the study of group identity 
construction. Laying emphasis on the fact that the study of food choices and food 
habits provides an entryway into a significant yet elusive kind of historical 
knowing, Wallach eloquently elaborates on the nuances of black identity 
construction in the twentieth century. She uses a plethora of examples from 
relevant literature and introduces readers to the lives and works of numerous 
African American activists, writers, and dedicated food reformers.  

Throughout her work, Wallach demonstrates the ways in which cultural and 
political meanings are embedded within the ritual of mealtime: the comestibles, 
the ways of eating, and the places where one eats. Thus, the performative act of 
dining and the heavily symbolic act of accepting or rejecting a meal can reveal 
much about values, social hierarchies of class and race status, and heritage. The 
author demonstrates how, in the era of post-emancipation, food practices became 
a significant tool for African Americans to distance themselves from the 
debasement of slavery by revealing their transition through food choice, dining 
etiquette, hygiene, and meal regularity.  

Every Nation is divided into seven chapters that serve as a thought-provoking 
survey of African American identity formation through food behavior. Her initial 
chapter, “Creating the Foodways of Uplift,” is dedicated to examining the highly 
performative and race-conscious food practices of middle-class African 
Americans in the movement for racial uplift. Wallach introduces readers to food 
reformers and respectable eaters who deliberately distanced themselves from 
culinary practices that were tainted with representations of poverty and slavery. 
These middle-class reformers had the privilege to opt for factory-produced food 
(also known as pure foods) that was symbolic of modernity and cleanliness. 
However, while these practices were designed to gain the unlikely approval of 
white Americans, they simultaneously created social hierarchies among black 
community members.  

In Chapter 2, “Booker T. Washington’s Multifaceted Program for Food Reform at 
the Tuskegee Institute,” Wallach provides a detailed history of Washington’s 
program for food reform at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. To Washington, 
for whom food choices and food habits were an important vehicle for social uplift 
and assimilation, the creation and management of food systems by and for black 
people was a dream to which they could aspire. Wallach elaborates on the 
challenges and apprehensions that Washington faced as the principal of the 
institute and his ultimately elusive dream of self-sufficiency.  



74     Farahbod, Review, Every Nation Has Its Dish  Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019)

“W.E.B. Du Bois, Respectable Child-Rearing, and the Representative Black Body,” 
Chapter 3, reveals the anxieties felt by African American food reformers as 
specifically set forth in Du Bois’s writings.  Wallach’s helpful excerpts from Du 
Bois’s work tangibly reveal his frustrations, if not obsessions, over his daughter’s 
health, as well as his own. For Du Bois and his like-minded contemporaries, 
morality, manhood, and character were linked to good health and slimness, 
which could be achieved through good food practices. 

In chapter four, “Regionalism, Social Class, Elite Perceptions of Social Class 
Foodways during the Era of Great Migration,” Wallach discusses how, throughout 
the uplift movement, an important agenda for middle-class respectable eaters 
was to refrain from consuming food with racialized associations. Instead they ate 
what was performatively American in order to transcend negative stereotypes. 
However, the staple foods of working-class African Americans living in poverty in 
the South remained the “three m’s diet” of meal (corn), meat (pork), and 
molasses (sweetener). Far from succumbing to the middle-class desire to 
abandon food choices that were symbolic of a history of violence and resistance, 
these African Americans maintained their Southern food roots, labeling them 
“soul food” in the 1960s and reclaiming their culinary heritage.  

By then, however, soul food ingredients such as corn and pork had been 
rebranded and reframed as patriotic food choices. With the aim of conserving 
staples of middle- and upper-class American diners, such as beef and wheat, 
cornmeal and pork had been advertised during World War I, linked to the 
ideology of nationalism, and their customary symbolic associations forever 
changed. Wallach covers this theme brilliantly in Chapter 5, “World War I, the 
Great Depression, and the Changing Symbolic Value of Black Food Traditions.” 

Wallach moves to meaningful food choices made by African Americans after the 
Civil Rights Movement, in Chapter 6, “The Civil Rights Movement and the 
Ascendency of the Idea of a Racial Style of Eating.” She explains how much is 
revealed about exclusion, racism, and second-class citizenship in America when 
patriotism, nationalism (which she broadly describes as a feeling of belonging), 
and first-class citizenship are symbolized in the consumption of certain foods that 
are denied to some citizens. Wallach treats this topic in depth especially with 
regards to the civil rights movement and the symbolic significance of Coca-Cola 
and hamburgers that were both globally and locally associated with American 
culture. She relates numerous stories about such food denials to African 
Americans in the era prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Most notably she tells how 
Mohammad Ali, despite winning an Olympic gold medal for the US in 1960, was 
denied service when he asked for a coke and a burger at a Kentucky restaurant 
after he had returned home.   

The author concludes with “Culinary Nationalism Beyond Soul Food,” focusing 
on the history of black culinary nationalism in America.  Her survey reviews 
activism in the promotion of pan-African diasporic soul food, in the rejection of 
soul food as a marker of black identity, in the rise of vegetarianism, and in 
building a new national black culinary identity.  

Throughout this very well-researched work, Wallach displays her profound 
knowledge of African American history and foodways, presenting the experiences 
of generations of African American activists and reformers. Helpful illustrations 



Farahbod, Review, Every Nation Has Its Dish Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019): 75

make the narrative more tangible to readers, although some historically 
important photographs do not find their way into the pages of this book (such as 
the photograph of Diane Nash and other student activists drinking Coca-Cola in a 
newly desegregated diner). Notwithstanding Wallach’s vivid descriptions, the 
visual impact of such culturally significant photographs would have made the 
work as a whole more powerful.  

Every Nation Has Its Dish is a compelling work that examines and decodes food 
practices, habits, and choices to reveal the ways in which individuals and groups 
construct and reform social, political, and cultural identities. Wallach’s work 
serves as a strong introduction for students and scholars interested in African 
American foodways in the twentieth century.  


