How Soul Food Became A Symbolic Part Of Kwanzaa Celebrations

Although there isn't a definitive menu to be served at Kwanzaa (the seven-day holiday honoring African-American culture), soul food has become a significant part of the festivities. Activist Maulana Karenga, a California State University at Long Beach professor and Kwanzaa's founder who helped set up the first Kwanzaa celebration in 1966, grounded the family and community holiday on the harvest observances of West, East, and Southeast African cultures. He went on to attach seven key principles to the week-long observation. Naturally, soul food like black-eyed peas and collard greens became significant at Kwanzaa, representing an excellent way to illustrate the legacy of enslaved people forcibly taken from Africa to North America.

Many of the foods enjoyed by celebrants have their origins in the Transatlantic slave trade. Africans brought with them the skills needed to cook such provisions as collard plants, black-eyed peas, corn, sweet potatoes, and okra. With time, other foods from the African diaspora have appeared at the Kwanzaa feast. But none are more symbolic than the collards, black-eyed peas, and corn.

Southern cooking utilizes corn in a variety of ways: hush puppies, cornbread, and as a coating for fried catfish and okra. In many African cultures, corn represents fertility, prosperity, and connection to the ancestors. In North America, corn was a staple readily doled out to the enslaved, who turned it into hoecakes, ashcakes, cornbread, and grits. On plantations, enslaved people were often allowed to grow collard greens for their own consumption, among other crops. The tradition of cooking pots of greens with either a ham hock or salt pork for flavor continued long after emancipation. Besides being a sustainable food choice, collard greens came to represent prosperity.

Rounding out the trio are black-eyed peas. This bean — no it's not really a pea — was another staple on the plantation. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, especially in the winter months, black-eyed peas helped nourish starving citizens in the South, helping to enshrine it as a luck-bringing food to ring in the New Year (though the association appears to have already existed before the war). When the enslaved people were emancipated, some accounts reported that they ate the food in celebration, helping make it a popular food to eat at Juneteenth celebrations today. During Kwanzaa and at New Year's in some Black households, black-eyed peas and collard greens are often eaten together along with a hefty piece of cornbread. The peas represent coins, the greens symbolize paper money, and the cornbread is the gold.