welcome to between the covers summer series where we put the spotlight on South Florida authors I'm Anne Bok and joining me is culinary historian Diane M Spivy with her new book at the table of power food and cuisine in the African-American struggle for freedom justice and equality Diane thank you so much for being here today this is a powerful book and what the book is not according to my take it's not a nostalgic look back in time it's a culinary telling of africanamerican story and tell me about the research because this must have taken you a lifetime well I started in 2006 and I had intended on being finished with it much sooner than I was but I kept going in terms of the research because I kept having questions of my own that were not being answered so I kept going and collecting and going through repositories different libraries um and it it's it's it was quite a quite a trip to tell you the truth I I can only imagine the there's a this narrative that is surrounding the African-American contributions to to American Cuisine a As We Know It And as I'm reading this I see where over history it has been trivialized in many cases absolutely erased tell me about the implications of that well it's like I say I guess in the first on the first page of my book I mean the foundation of America's Cuisine was planted and formulated by Southern black Cooks but if you read the 19th 20th centuries and even many of today's culinary historical accounts uh you will find that the true African contribution has been erased or pushed to the periphery and I call the American accounts The Culinary Master narrative because of the fact that it has not only erased the contributions of African and African-American uh Cuisine but these accounts also represent culinary and reinforc culinary partide um and that is the theft of African and africanamerican creativity and contributions by assigning those contributions to others the term culinary aparte I think is SP spot on I mean there are so many instances where white women actually published cookbooks that in reality were were recipes from their own black Cooks in their kitchen and I'm reading this and I'm thinking isn't this really theft of a culture well of course it is it absolutely is and you can compare it to apartheid in South Africa because in South Africa whenever the whites in power wanted a particular area of land and always always there were already indigenous Africans living on that piece of land they would simply bulldo the area remove the black folks from that particular area of land they would claim it and rename it as their own so this is it's straight up theft absolutely there were chapters on presidents and particularly Thomas Jefferson and George Washington that were fascinating to me there there was I think it was Washington's personal chef his name was Hercules he was enslaved was he not oh yes he was he definitely was um he uh was quite a Craftsman when it came to cooking though but he was enslaved yes he decided to leave though he just disappeared one day and he nobody was able to find him he was never returned uh and the president had a fit because you know this this this was the way he this person cooked his meals the way he liked and cook he it was a disaster just a disaster and he usually did not um advertise for any of his slaves who happen to disappear but in this case his cook he had to get that cook back but he never did wa um I reading in the book and I see that you are not a fan of the term soul food for people who have not read your book do you want to talk about that for a minute well it's just that I would say soul food I guess is a term that's applied to the cooking of African-Americans from the south uh who have moved up north it was a term um coined I guess in the 60s or 70s for the foods that that supposedly African-Americans eat and they have been pushed into a corner black hols have been pushed into a corner I I cons consider it a cultural and culinary shackle to be honest with you because if you look at uh what foods are attributed to uh African-Americans you'll just see Fried Chicken in collard greens and blackeyed peas and that's considered in the category of soul food and most definitely those are not the only items that uh African-Americans are known for cooking and cooking well Diane I'm switching this up a little bit what's the first book that you remember reading that had a real impact on you the African Heritage Cookbook by Helen Mendes in 1971 so you have to remember that 1971 was still the 1960s that's still the 1960s I got married that year and I had also began reading uh John Henry Clark France venon Yosef benj Canon JC degra Johnson uh basil Davidson Leo Wier France boss Leo for I began reading all of them that same year and um 1971 that was it was pretty much a pivotal year for me I was trying to learn different uh recipes so that I could cook for my husband new bride and I went and discovered uh a lot of cookbooks some of them were on African cooking some on South American cook cing but they all had this theme running through them and that was that Africa had no Cuisine they had nothing until Europeans came and they gave them everything that they had in terms of food and uh I just knew these were lies but I hadn't done the research I began to do the research and uh I I found that um there were a lot of commonalities between the foods and cooking methods of Africa and many other countries um all over the world and Helen Mendes's book was the first book that I had seen at that time that linked Africa African cuisine and American African-American cuisine at the time I thought it was just fascinating so it was kind of helpful in terms of inspiring me to write what it is I now write that was the start of your journey Diane M Spivy is the author of at the table of power I cannot thank you enough for sharing your time with me Diane thank you so much thank you for having me I'm Anne boock 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