Fried Chicken Is Soul Food & Should Be Honored And Embraced As Such

[struggle4progress]

52. It would be better not to assume any particular food item has any particular meaning for

a subculture

"Soul food" can mean many different things -- but among other things, one meaning might be: "This is what we ate when we had to eat real cheap," stuff like ham hocks, pig ears, tripe, and chitterlings

Producing a safe and flavorful meal from something like chitterlings takes some work: first, you have to get them really clean, so you aren't literally feeding folk pigshit

It's probably true lots of folk who ate "soul food" liked chicken. Chicken is, in fact, still a very popular popular food today, across the US. But chicken, until fairly recently, was an expensive high-status food. Fried chicken is very labor-intensive to produce from scratch: you've got to kill the chicken, pluck it, disassemble it, bread it, and fry it. Since your hens might be giving you eggs, you aren't going to slaughter them if you're poor. And anything you feed the chickens, like crushed dry corn, is something you might instead have put on your own table. When you're really poor, your table scraps and left-overs go back into stew to eat later

The people who lived in the original "soul food" cultures, as slaves or share-croppers, didn't eat a lot of fried chicken: somebody who fed you fried chicken was really being nice to you