THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 6, 1996 TAG: 9609060517
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: 51 lines
A study from the National Institutes of Health asserts that after decades of dietary improvement, upscale white Americans are eating nearly as well as poor blacks.
That's not surprising.
The reason is the predominant place of soul food in the diets of blacks.
For a couple of decades nutritionists have been stressing the need for eating more vegetables, especially leafy ones: collards, turnip greens, spinach and mustard greens.
All that came natural without benefit of dietitians to poor blacks and to a great many struggling whites as well throughout the South, especially in the 1930s during the Great Depression.
Too much is made of the use of fat back or streak-of-lean streak-of-fat bacon or salt pork in Southern diets.
There wasn't enough meat to go around for everybody at the table in those days, so it was used often for a little judicious seasoning in the bubbling pot of greens or string beans, butter beans or black-eyed peas.
The juices, the essence of the vegetables, remaining in the pot were called pot likker.
A steaming bowl of pot likker, with cornbread crumbled in it to produce a dish just short of mush, would, as they used to say, ``stick to your ribs.'' A glass of buttermilk on the side made it all the more delectable.
Over the generations as families made their way up the ladder of economic opportunity, their love of soul food persisted and children of the 1950s picked up the tastes of their Depression-bred parents.
Had the nutrition study, instead of being national in scope, centered on the South, the disparity of diets between blacks and whites would not have been as marked.
The roots of soul food, of course, go back even further than Southern culture, all the way into the Old Testament.
A grateful king offered Daniel and his young followers a place at his table, but Daniel and his fellows declined politely and said, if he didn't mind, they'd just as soon continue to eat from the fields of greens. The king was dumbfounded at their hearty health.
Guidelines after World War II stressed high-protein meats and dairy products; but, starting in the 1980s, nutritionists extolled vegetables. In a kind of closing of the circle, hamburger drive-ins installed salad bars although few had any field greens, save spinach.
Even at those bars patrons neutralized the salads' benign effects by heaping them high with dollops of creamed sauces that Daniel and his men wouldn't have thought of touching. Soul food saved Daniel in the lions' den. by CNB