He shares the relationship between food and healing and why it’s important to know a dish’s past
Moved to Charleston: From DC in 2008
Lives: Summerville
Works: Owner of Thyme Travelers, a food history and cooking demonstration company, and Laptop and Coffee Shop Productions, his documentary business
Favorite Food: Southeast Asian cooking because I specialize in spice blending. India has some of the most complex blends. Not only are the dishes rich in flavor, there are Ayurvedic health benefits with each spice blend.
Food historian and documentarian Julian Gooding doesn’t want people to just enjoy food, he wants them to understand the origins of the flavors they’re tasting. Gooding, who often demonstrates recipes through the Charleston County Public Library, is on a mission to give credit to the cultures and foodways that provide the South with many of its ingredients. His work to champion lifelong learning earned him the library’s Cynthia Graham Hurd staff award in 2021.
This month, Gooding will host “Slave Chefs and the Creation of American Cuisine” at McLeod Plantation and make recipes including macaroni and cheese developed by chef James Hemings, who was trained in Paris while enslaved by Thomas Jefferson. Here, Gooding shares the relationship between food and healing and why it’s important to know a dish’s past.
CM: How did you become interested in food history?
JG: For four decades, I was primarily a documentary filmmaker, and people would often ask me to stay and break bread with them. If you understand food history, if anyone asks you to sit at their table and they start sharing war stories, you’ve done something good. They’re inviting you into their private world. I started collecting the stories I would hear, the recipes, and the history of those recipes. I began understanding the forgotten, lost histories of some of those dishes because of colonization, and I wanted to bring those stories back to life.
CM: Why do you focus on equity issues around food?
JG: With colonization and other aspects of marginalization, a lot of food has been appropriated. In America alone, there are so many ethnicities like the enslaved African or European cultures fleeing persecution. Oftentimes, these individuals wouldn’t have access to their own food because land was taken from them or they did not have money to import ingredients from their home country. Food is so important to cultures, and whomever the colonizer was, they would often try to destroy the food connected to the people. For Native Americans, the colonizer tried to kill the buffalo because it was sacred. The English used the Irish Potato Famine as an excuse to starve out the Irish. I’ve interviewed people over the years in my documentaries, and food is so important to them because they are holding on to their ancestry.
CM: Tell us about the relationship between food, healing, and comfort.
JG: Comfort food is a memory of a time when you felt happy, and it is even more comforting if you’ve been unhappy.
In Jewish culture, we see the setting out of bitter herbs and matzo to let the children of the next generation know of the suffering in the past and to be grateful now for the struggle. In African American culture, we cook chitlins once a year, not because we like it; it’s that it reminds you of what we had to eat: pigs’ ears, pigs’ feet, chitlins. We cook it so the next generation knows.
For all societies that have been marginalized, the only time you do feel good is eating a warm meal and sitting with family and reminiscing, sharing stories of hope. Food becomes that comfort. We even do that today. We binge eat when we have stressful days or are feeling sad. We want something that sticks to our ribs, that is flavorful, sweet, and rich. It’s in our DNA. We are wired to want the foods of our ancestry.
If you look at African American culture and enslavement, some plantations would let enslaved people have Sunday to worship—it was a day to feel human again. When humanity had been stripped away, Sunday meals became special. Post Civil War, when you have spent the week hunting and collecting and sweating to survive, Sunday is the day for a big meal or a fish fry at the church. Those are the times when you are feeling comforted and at peace.
CM: How do you feel about the homogenization of cultural foods in the United States?
JG: If you take a food away from its history and it becomes a whole new story, you are helping to eradicate the existence of a people. If I’m cooking an Indian dish, I won’t say, “This is Julian’s Indian dish,” I will say, “This dish is inspired by….”
For many African Americans, we were told not to eat certain foods for health reasons, or the food was stigmatized, and then several generations later, the people who stigmatized us are giving it a new name and selling it back to us at a crazy expensive price—like putting pork rinds on an appetizer menu for $10.
The problem comes with making something and not mentioning its roots. My cooking demonstrations are not about telling people not to use these ingredients. Keep cooking the dishes you grew up with, but know where the ingredients came from in the first place. And once you find out the truth, share the truth.
To hear Gooding: Visit the McLeod Plantation page on ccprc.com for the dates of future programs.