The Kitchen Crisis?

I found the topic of this reading to be very strange, and from the beginning the topics of the paper seemed to vary. I was not sure what about this article was real and what was fictional. I am certain that the man did not actually eat the meal in pill form, but it still left me questioning when the exaggerations stopped and where the real story began. The author seems to me to spend the majority of the first part of the article discussing some of the reasons that white people irritate her. I had a very hard time concentrating on the issue of food, because I was so involved in her separate conversation of race. The essay seemed to stray even more when the author describes the beating of the African American slaves.

While I do not agree with the direct approach of the author, I do understand the importance of food in her culture. My grandmother lives in the same town the Verta Mae Grosvenor used to live in, Fairfax, and I have seen the poverty in that section of the state of South Carolina myself. There are many children from that region that are in middle school and can’t write their own names. It seems that there is little hope for these children, and they do not have much left. The little piece of life that they have left to hold on to is their culture, and this relates closely back to food. In the days of slavery the slaves had nothing except for the food they where given by there masters. These slaves made this food their own, and they still celebrate the use of these culturally rich foods today. While slavery no longer exists in the United States these African American people face challenges everyday because of their race, and food is something that can not be taken away from them. Even in extreme poverty you must eat to survive, so no matter how poor these people may be they will always have their food.