- Food is central to the daily existence of Americans, whether we're growing it, shopping for it, preparing it, consuming it, or even just hungry for it.

Today's guest argues that for many, food intersects with race and class to help form our identity as individuals.

He's Dr. Joseph C Ewoodzie Jr., this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(soft upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G Wayne Miller with "The Providence Journal".

- This week we're joined by Dr. Joseph C Ewoodzie Jr, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Davidson College.

He's also the author of a fascinating new book, "Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and Food in the American South."

Joseph, thank you so much for being with us.

- It's my pleasure.

Thank you all for having me.

- So race, class, and food, what drew you to that trifecta?

- So, you know, as somebody who's, I was in graduate school thinkin' about studyin' race and really always trying to complicate what it means to be Black, you know.

My focus has been in America, but, you know, with my next projects will be a little bit more than just being in America.

I was really interested in understanding, what is the life of Black folks in the American South today?

And I'm also a cultural sociologist, and so I'm always really looking for a nice avenue to enter people's life, to understand the things that I'm interested in understanding, and food just kind of happened to be one of the things that, you know, we can learn so much about ourselves through food.

I'm not a food scholar.

I'm always a little insecure around food scholars who really know their stuff, but I use food as a way to understand Blackness in American South.

And I'm also trying to like, this is an ode to like an old way of studying Black life, where we don't just focus on one class of Black people, but we focus on Black folks across class, because there's a lot of reason to believe that we learn so much more about any group of people, when we study them across class.

- Well, so, you know, we're gonna get into this in some detail, but for the audience who maybe hasn't read the book yet, can you give us a 30,000 foot overview?

- Sure, so, I went to Jackson, Mississippi.

I spent pretty much all of 2012 and the summer of 2016 there.

I got there and I was interested in trying to understand how Black folks up and down the socioeconomic ladder make decisions about what they eat.

And then I also wanted to see how looking at the way they make decisions about what they eat, get us to understand what's happening or what the life is for Black Americans in the South.

So I got there in January.

You know, I do this with my students all the time.

If you get to a new city and you're trying to understand food, where do you begin?

So, you know, I spent some time at restaurants, and, you know, walking around in grocery stores, but it turns out soup kitchens are a really nice place where you can go and immediately sit at the table with folks and really get to see what they're thinking about in terms of their food.

So I spent three and a half months on the streets with people who are homeless.

And then through some of the men that I mentored, these were all men, there's a lot of reason why I couldn't get into thinkin' and learnin' about homeless people who are women, and so through some of the men that I met, I met folks who are sort of in the midst of the thickest of urban Southern poverty as we know it today.

So I spent three and a half months with them, and then moved up again to middle class folks, and then moved up again to upper middle class folks.

And so four classes of Black folks.

And for each of them, I had three questions.

The first is, what kinds of foods are available?

The second is, how do they make decision among what's available?

And then the third is, how do they eat the foods that they're available, that they are choosing?

And I'm sayin' in the book that if we wanna understand Blackness across class and we do it through this food lens, there's actually a lot that we get out of it.

- So why did you choose Jackson, Mississippi, and I guess a correlated question is, could you have done this book in another Southern city or Northern city for that matter?

- Yeah, that's an excellent question.

So I chose Jackson, again, sort of accidentally, except for as a race scholar, I wanted to understand the South, and for us, a place like Mississippi, Louisiana, like the American South is always so rich in terms of thinking about race and thinking about Blackness.

I'm not from the South at all, but I've always been really, really intrigued by it, and I think there's a lot to be learned from the American South.

Another motivation in terms of how I'm speaking to my discipline is that we actually just don't write as much about the American South as I think we ought to.

We used to, and we used to do it in such a way that writing about the South was a way of trying to understand the rest of the country.

And then we moved to a way of writing about the South, where it just became sort of thinking about the peculiarities or the uniqueness of the American South.

And then I think, you know, with this work, and there's a bunch of other of my colleagues, people who I also respect a great deal who are saying, you know what, we should go back to the South and try to study it, and not just as a way to understand the American South, but study the American South as a way to understand the rest of the country.

Because as we see now, some of the most pressing social problems that the country is facing is all playing out in the South for old Southern issues that are reflective of the whole country that still have not really been resolved.

But how did I choose Jackson, Mississippi specifically?

I drove through it and I was intrigued by the city, where there's so much history.

There's so much culture, but there's also so much deprivation.

And so, you know, my sociological sort of instincts just sort of got me to ask, what happened to a place like Jackson, Mississippi?

What do we know about a place like Jackson, Mississippi?

I guess I could have done this in Birmingham.

I could have done this in maybe Memphis.

I could have done this in a bunch of different places, but Jackson, Mississippi, I drove through it once, and I was intrigued by it, and I always told myself if I ever got a chance, I would come back to it.

I don't think I was interested in doing this in the American North, because there were so many books about the North in a bunch of different cities already.

And so this was really particularly trying to understand the South.

- So you're from the North, from New York City, is that correct?

That's where, - Yep.

that's where your roots are.

So here you are - Right - from New York city and you go to Jackson, Mississippi.

What surprised you about what you found there?

And then, we're gonna get into more depth on the book itself.

- Yeah, there's so much, there's, so, I mean, my first sets of field notes when I was in Jackson, if I go back and I read them, all I keep asking myself is, where is everybody?

The streets felt emptier than streets that I was used to or that I had seen, especially on the weekends.

So if you're in downtown Jackson, there just isn't that many people around.

And again, sociologically speaking, I think there's a lot of reasons, there's a lot of explanations for it.

So that's part of what I was hunting, to try to find why there weren't as many people, why it's not as densely populated.

The only people left in Jackson itself are the people who can't leave or the people who are doing so well, that they don't want to leave at all.

Anybody in the middle is tryin' to find their way somewhere else.

So that was a really big thing.

I was born and raised in Ghana, West Africa, and so the other thing that really shocked me was seeing a level of poverty that was, that's not, I guess, was not what I would expect in the U.S.

It reminded me of home, of back home in Ghana.

And so seeing that sort of like really deep sense of deprivation moved me.

It changed my life.

It's made me rethink about the sense of urgency that we have for what we do as sociologists.

So that was also really, really important.

And so the human cost of deprivation made a mark on me.

And then I think the other thing that was really important too, is to see as a sociologist, one of the things I'm really interested in, is how the people that we, the people who are receiving, who are experiencing the harshest forms of oppression, how they cope, how they make do?

And part of that is seeing the deprivation, but other part of that is really seeing how they just manage their lives, how they connect with institutions that are supposed to help them and sometimes do, sometimes don't.

And then, how does all of this make them feel about them?

How does all of this sort of, for me, trying to understand, how do they feel about themselves as they're navigating all of this stuff?

And so all of that was completely new to me in a deeper sense than I think I had seen or read about, seen anywhere or read about in any book.

- Yeah, Joseph, one of the things that surprised me about the book was your description that food is not the, or food availability, is not the primary concern of the homeless men you were spending time with.

I guess, two questions.

Why not and what is?

- Yeah, that was surprising for me too.

And that became clear to me the most, actually, when I was reflecting on my field work.

So I ate only when people around me were eating, and I ate exactly what they ate.

And so if they weren't eatin', I didn't eat either.

And after a while I realized, especially when I got up all across the socioeconomic ladder, I realized that putting aside the deliciousness of the food, I ate most frequently among people who are homeless.

I ate least frequently among those in poverty and those in the upper middle class.

And so I started to think to myself, why is it that I'm eating most frequently among people who are homeless?

And then I realized that it's 'cause they actually have regular access to food, but there's a cost to it.

They can get two, three square meals every single day.

The cost is that they have to organize their lives completely around the operating hours of the service providers.

That is to say, and this is the other finding that became really important to me was that all their lives had to be shaped by when things are open.

And, remember, they're walking to places, so they have to, in terms of geographically, be close to where they are hoping to get their next meal.

That got in the way of them actually workin' to get out of homelessness.

And so, you know, one of the big surprising things for me is surviving homelessness for these men that I was around, made it nearly impossible for them to get out of homelessness.

So surviving homelessness made it nearly impossible to get out of homelessness.

And I was so surprised by this that I went back and spoke to a couple of the managers that work at some of the soup kitchens and the places that I saw these young men, young, I shouldn't say young, they weren't, they were like my father's age, these men going around, and they were not surprised by that.

They realized that the thing that they were doing was helping people survive homelessness, and the services weren't always about helping people escape homelessness.

- Yeah, I wanna press you just a little bit on that, 'cause I found that absolutely one of the more remarkable revelations in what is really a remarkable book, but the quote that I noted here was, "Surviving homelessness was incompatible with escaping homelessness."

What is it about the kinds of services they receive and the adaptations that individuals make to survive homelessness that makes it more difficult, if not impossible, to escape homelessness?

- Yeah, so I'll tell you, and in the work I say, there are three things that the men who are homeless have to do to get regular access to food.

One, they had to, they had to know all the operating hours, as I already mentioned, right?

So when I first got there, and I make it very clear in the book, I wasn't homeless.

I was not trying to pretend that I was homeless, but I was shadowing them and trying to understand their lives.

So the first thing you do is you gotta understand all the operating hours, you know?

This place opens from this hour to this hour on these days.

This other place opens from this hour to this hour on these other days.

This church serves on these days, this other church serves on, so you have to know that, and also almost, like, have it memorized.

The next thing is when you enter these places, you have to follow whatever rules they give you.

You know, when you walk in, they're going to sort of like scan you, make sure you don't have any knives or anything, like sort of like getting through an airport.

And then, you know, you can't take food here, you can only eat this, you can't do, so you have to operate all of this.

And then the third thing that was really, in some ways important, is that you had to accept your homelessness.

If you didn't accept your homelessness, you are not their client really.

They're not trying to help folks who are, for the most part in my experience in Jackson, Mississippi, they're not trying to help folks who are trying to escape homelessness.

So the practicalness of this is this.

So if you want to have dinner and a place to stay at, let's call it Men's Shelter in Jackson, you would have to get in line around 3:30, 4:00, okay?

Now, if you're sort of low skilled labor person, you have a lot of spots in your resume, you take work as it comes, be it as a laborer on a construction site, or, you know, somebody's painting somewhere and you want to go help him out, get a couple of dollars or, you know, cut this person's grass.

The fact that you have to show up at the men's shelter at 3:00, 4:00 really disrupts any effort to being able to get any of these kind of menial jobs that would help you.

So the hours mattered in some ways.

I remember also one man who had an ailin' in his arm, and I remember him judgin' between walkin' over to a free clinic that was operating one day versus hangin' around where we were at.

Because if you know, he knows that if he goes to the free clinic, he might get help with his arm, but he misses lunch, right?

So if he didn't have a good breakfast, maybe because he didn't stay at one of these shelters, he felt like, you know what, I wanna stay out under a tree or in an abandoned building somewhere, and he didn't have a good breakfast.

He can't not have lunch 'cause then it's taken.

So that's the kind of calculation that folks are makin' all the time, when I was around them and observing their lives.

And that kind of stuff just made it very hard to think about really anything else, right?

It's also sort of a bandwidth thing.

It made it very hard to think about anything else in terms of trying to balance in this surviving versus escaping homelessness.

- So, Joseph, there must be public policy implications of your research.

Can you walk through those for us?

- Yeah, I mean, that's always the dream, right?

Let me caution what I'm about to say with this.

First is that I think that's, when I talked about the sense of urgency that we should have as sociologists, I think part of it is that we should, the public, let me back up, we need to be trained better in graduate school to understand the public policy implications.

Because if I'm being totally frank with you all, public policy implications for our research is something that, sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes, we put as the last paragraph under dissertation or the paper, and you turn it in.

We've become so obsessed with doing academia that we've forgotten that just about every sociologist got into this field because we do care about the world and we wanna make it better.

So that's the first thing.

And I think there's a bunch of scholars who are workin' in a way to get us to take that more seriously.

You know, Matthew Desmond has single handedly made us all pay attention to eviction, maybe single handedly is an overstatement, but he's really made us pay attention to eviction in ways that we weren't before, and a lot of it has pushed interesting public policy.

So for my work here, especially as it relates to the persons who are homeless, you know, I've always thought it would be interesting to, what if we could think about the experiences of people who have been long-term homeless versus people who are newly homeless, and think about the sets of services that we provide to those two different kinds of populations?

Because the people who are newly homeless probably have a bit more of an itch and an urge to try to get back into their other lives as quickly as they can.

Can we make sure that the service providers are also set up in a way to help those who are in that sort of stage of homelessness?

And then for folks who are long-term homelessness, how do we think about that?

So one actually very promisingly, interesting thing that I saw sort of related to food as well.

I went back to Jackson, Mississippi, and the opportunity centers that they shelter, the new director has set up a whole bunch of urban garden plots in the parking lot.

And so these men who are sittin' around this space because they need to be, because the soup kitchen is down the street, so if they're going to eat, they're gonna be there all day, they're attendin' to these gardens.

When I saw that, I was like, that's a beautifully creative way of saying, yes, you are having to operate your lives around the operating, around the soup kitchens and the service providers, but there's still a way that you can be a productive member of society by just bein' around here.

And it turned out a lot of these men grew up in rural Mississippi, and so they were familiar with gardening and what it takes to make these plants grow well anyway, right?

So, I thought that was a really creative way of doing it.

I would sort of say that like anywhere across the country, there must be, and we just have to think about the way we think, the way we provide the services to people who are homeless, and the way that fits into the context of their lives, wherever they might be.

And then I think, obviously, the housing first model is something that is worth continuing to put resources and efforts behind.

Because I think, as you asked earlier, what's the thing that they're thinkin' about if it's not food?

Well, they're tryin' to get back to some kind of a stability, and we know that housing is one of the places that once you sort of have that checked, you can just ease up the bandwidth to think about whatever other aspect of your life that you're trying to make an improvement in.

- So, obviously, public policy is set by a number of different bodies, whether it's regional, municipal, federal, and so forth.

Do you have any sense of optimism, or any sense that some of the changes that are needed, and you gave a very good example of small, but important change, that this can happen in America in 2022?

- We absolutely have to believe that it can happen.

If not, then these men that I spent time with who have become people that I've, you know, I've gotten to love and gotten to know really, really well, we can't just accept that that's the extent of their lives, right?

The, and, you know, when I talk about this, one tidbit that always sticks with me and really sort of pushes me to continue to find a creativity to get into this is, I was talking to this man, Charles.

We had come back from eating at a soup kitchen, and we were just sittin' on this bench, overlooking cars that were passing by us.

And he was talking all kinds of, right, like just shooting the breeze, as they would say, reminiscing about his old life.

In sociology research, we call that identity talk.

They're talking a lot about themselves in their previous lives, as a way to make sense of their lives now.

And then he launches into this long monologue about how he, how his life ended up the way it did.

And then at the end of it, he says, it's like my life, I'm in a basketball game.

My life is, it's a basketball game.

I have fouled out of the basketball game.

Now I just have to sit and watch the game come to an end.

And it's like the life, life is still going to happen in front of him.

He just can't participate anymore.

So it's on us to figure out, can we, should we, can we change the rules of the game so that he can be a part of it?

Is there a role he can play, even though he's just sitting on the bench watching this?

I have to believe that there's a way moving forward, because I can't accept, and none of us should accept, that there are a bunch of people who feel like they fouled out of life, and they have to sit and watch the game come to an end.

And this is not on some like individualistic, you know, we need to find this particular Charles person, no, at a larger societal level, we just have to think about, are we okay with life being structured the way it is, where a bunch of folks are just sitting on the sidelines feeling like they can't participate anymore?

I certainly am not.

- Yeah, Joseph, we've got about three minutes left here and we're, we've basically talked about the first quarter of the book.

- [Joseph] Sure.

- But, you know, I wanna step up the next rung in that economic ladder, because you spent a fair amount of time also with folks who are working poor, barely getting by.

They're housed, but they're, but food is a challenge.

It's a daily challenge.

I was moved by your account of one of the families that you were spending time with struggling to get food, and one of their children asking you to take them to the store.

You're an ethnographer.

You spend time observing people in their natural day to day living environments.

How do you process that as a human being, though, who's clearly got a good heart and care about the people that you're spending time with, when they ask you for food?

How do you navigate that as a human being?

- Yeah, those are the emotional scars that I think we collect and, you know, I'll do you one better.

How do I now, the book is out and I'm givin' these talks, you go to different places, I know for sure that I got my job at Davidson, because I had the promise of this book was part of my tenure package.

How do I do that when I know that the folks that I'm writing about are still in some ways in the similar situations?

You know, another OG ethnographer mentioned that, you know, we collect dirty stories and then we sort of sanitize 'em and present them to the world in the way that we've been doing.

So the way I live with myself in that is that I know it's my occupation to write down these stories, if for nothing at all, they become part of written history of folks, right?

And so that's really, really important.

The public implication portions of this is also really, really important.

The dignifying them, dignifying their stories in these books is also really, really important.

So that family that you're talking about, over Easter break, I was there, I was in Jackson with them.

I got to see them spend, some time with them.

And a small little uplift in life is that their stories are part of this book, and it's in this book.

And it's, but it's something that we live with as ethnographers.

It's, I guess, a occupational hazard.

It's just part of what we have to deal with, and so, you know, a great deal of love from your family and a little bit of therapy, and that's how you move forward from it.

But it's not easy at all.

It's difficult, but I think it is our job to get close as possible to the human consequences of the world that we're building, and then come back and tell those stories.

- Well, Joseph C. Ewoodzie, the book is, "Getting Something to Eat in Jackson."

It's a remarkable accomplishment, congratulations.

He's Joseph C Ewoodzie Jr. That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about, "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org, where can also catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, ask you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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