Getting What We Need Ourselves

"Getting What We Need Ourselves should be required reading for all students of American foodways—and for that matter, anyone interested in the complex set of behaviors we call ‘American cuisine.’ Within these pages, Jen Wallach exquisitely crafts an important—and readable---overview of one of the most important, and little recognized, voices in the American food landscape—that of African Americans—and in doing so, carefully notes the many scholars and writers who have painstakingly contributed to this history.  This is a rich, moving, poignant, and timely history of our nation via the expressive power of food in and beyond the African American experience.” -- Marcie Cohen Ferris, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Sweeping in scope yet telling in details, Getting What We Need for Ourselves masterfully introduces the importance of food in African American history. Jennifer Wallach explores the everyday uses of and meanings behind food in a way that is sophisticated and nuanced, deeply grounded in historical sources and current literature, and still accessible and richly satisfying. Through her prose, Wallach proves herself a premier teacher of African American foodways, and readers will learn a great deal.” -- Rebecca Sharpless, Texas Christian University
"Cutting through the obfuscations that so often accompany stories of Southern cooking, Wallach provides a polyvocal history of African American foodways from origins on the African continent to today’s high-end Harlem eateries, disrupting and complicating any notion of a “single story” of African American identity. Rather than a search for a single narrative thread to draw a straight line from “then” to “now,” Wallach’s goal seems to be to multiply the threads and to sever some that have been drawn too tightly and conveniently, all with a prose style that is effortless and engaging." -- Carrie Helms Tippen, Chatham University
“Mapping the journey of African Americans’ cooking practices, memories about food, and rhetorical significance people give to foods, Getting What We Need Ourselves, crates a cartography that highlights the multiple routes and roots that lead to defining the complex, complicated and often contradictory nature of claim certain foods as those defining an ethnic group. Wallach offers a candid reminder of the dangers in oversimplifying any eating practices of a giving ethnic group or region or nation to that only reflect misunderstanding and promote racial essentializing: African Americans eat watermelon, fried chicken, pork and cornbread. She challenges this tendency by tracing how the foodways of African and African American people have had and has historical, political, and ideological trajectories that have never been just one single story. Wallach adds a great contribution to the fields of Food Studies and Ethnic Studies with the reminder that a group of people’s food practices, memories about food and symbolism given to food are always never static, but always changing according to concrete historical, political, economic and geographical realities." -- Meredith E. Abarca, author of Voices in the Kitchen