Field Guides to Food

Psyche Williams-Forson, all video

Psyche Williams-Forson is a professor of American Studies, Women’s Studies, and African American Studies, and a member of the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity at the University of Maryland. She is also an Associate Editor of Food and Foodways journal and (with Carole Counihan) co-author of the forthcoming anthology, Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways In A Changing World (Routledge, 2011). She also authored the award-winning book, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (2006).

Some of Prof. Williams-Forson’s research includes “Bet Your Bottom Dollar: The Politics of Consuming from Dollar/Discount Stores in a Changing Food World,” which explores the role of the value market as an immediate site of food acquisition and a project on class, consumption, and citizenship among African Americans by examining domestic interiors from the late nineteenth-century to the early twentieth-century. In this interview she talks about how she came to study food and African-American food culture, etiquette and the effect of memory on food habits. 

March 4, 2011 
*Professor Williams-Forson took part in How We Talk about Feeding the World, an interdisciplinary symposium held at the Institute for Advanced Study, March 3-5, 2011.

Table of Contents: 
(0:05) STUDYING FOOD BACKROUND 
 FHA involvement (0:03) 
 Material Culture (1:00) 
 African American Novel and Food (1:40) 

(2:30) AFRICAN-AMERICAN FOODWAYS 
 Studying the ‘why’ (2:45) 
 Talking to People (3:07) 

(3:44) THE DIRECTION OF FOOD 
 Alternative-alternative food networks (4:03)

(4:38) KINDS OF RESEARCH
 Two Problems (4:50) 
 Oral culture (4:58) 

(6:35) HOW POWER OPERATES THROUGH OBJECTS
 Vegetarian Dinner Party (7:15) 
 Class status and structure (8:30) 

(9:10) RITUAL AND ETIQUETTE  
 Oprah Magazine (9:56)
 Behavior (10:40) 
 Film Dinner Party (11:03) 

(12:00) RECREATING MEALS 
 Knowledge of food etiquette (14:00) 

(15:20) STRANGE FOODS IN MATERIAL CULTURE
 Unfamiliar foods (16:02) 
 Trying new foods (17:30) 
 Annie Hall reference to food (18:23) 

(19:00) CLASS, RACE RELATIONSHIPS WITH FOOD 
 Food Memories (19:52) 
 Food Restrictions and exotic tastes (21:30) 

(24:10) SOUL FOOD 
 The history (24:25) 
 Cultural identity (25:20) 
 Sunday Dinner (25:55) 

(26:52) DEFINING A MEAL 
 Family structure and time (27:53) 
 Unacceptable foods for Sunday dinner (28:18) 
 What needs to be included? (28:50) 
 Festive Meals (29:40) 
 Scarcity (32:02)

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