Anela Malik worked as a diplomat before becoming a storyteller about Black food history — and much more. She hosts the web series, “Our Block,” about Black businesses and local heroes, organizes global travel and is the writer and content creator behind the website formerly called Feed the Malik.
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She’s also the author of “American Soul: The Black History of Food in the United States” (National Geographic, $40), which traces the history of Black foodways in the U.S. from the first documented arrival of African peoples to a North American settlement in 1619 to today. The book, which came out in September, emphasizes just how deeply Black food history is American food history.
During slavery, Africans’ agricultural and culinary work formed the backbone of the colonial economy, and food and water access were used as tools of control, she explains. African foods like millet, rice, yams, black-eyed peas, avocados, eggplant, peanuts and many more were brought across the Atlantic with enslaved people.
The slave trade also transformed sugar from a rare luxury good to an affordable commodity, and enabled the immense wealth that shaped American cuisine, allowing rich enslavers to try out agricultural and culinary experiments, train chefs and staff, and import expensive ingredients.
For example, George Washington’s enslaved workers maintained an ice house that enabled him to serve cold treats even during the summer, and his enslaved chef, Hercules Posey, was one of the country’s first celebrity chefs.
And James Hemings, an enslaved chef at Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in Monticello, trained as a pastry chef in France while Jefferson was there and was probably one of the best-trained chefs in America at the time. He helped to popularize macaroni and cheese, then a well-known dish in Paris.
In the North, many great early American caterers were Black tastemakers and culinary trendsetters. For example, Thomas Downing, the freeborn son of enslaved parents, started the Thomas Downing Oyster House, a fine-dining oyster restaurant that was also a stop on the Underground Railroad.
After the Civil War, many jobs available to Black peoples involved work in agriculture, food service or domestic work — roles with deep ties to food systems. In the West, Black peoples had a major impact in shaping the livestock industry: It’s estimated that Black peoples made up about a quarter of the cowboys working on cattle drives and ranches, Malik writes.
“American Soul: The Black History of Food in the United States” by Anela Malik and Renae Wilson (National Geographic, $40) is available in bookstores and online now. (Courtesy Andrea Pippins)
In the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance made Harlem a hub for Black food and culture. Black chefs were also a core part of the Civil Rights Movement: In the 1950s, Georgia Gilmore and other Black women created the Club From Nowhere, a group that sold food during the Montgomery bus boycotts to help fund the boycott, supporting the carpool system needed to keep the boycott going and feeding people whose extended commutes left them less time to cook.
In the 1960s and ’70s, the Black Panther Party provided free breakfast to schoolchildren in Oakland, helping address community food insecurity.
But Malik’s book doesn’t end in the past. She identifies many contemporary leaders and influencers in the culinary world who continue to shape Black foodways: people like Bryant Terry, former chef in residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, whose work focuses on food justice; and Pierre Thiam, a renowned Senegalese chef based in Oakland, who leads efforts to popularize fonio, a drought-resistant West African grain, among many other leaders today.
In “American Soul,” Anela Malik identifies Bryant Terry, former chef in residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, as an important Black culinary leader. In the photo, Bryant poses with his book, “Black Food,” at his studio in Oakland on Oct. 8, 2021. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Malik took a break from Arabic classes in Oman to chat with The Mercury News. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got into this work, exploring the Black history of food in America.
A: I was a U.S. diplomat in another life, and my focus was primarily on the Middle East and Arabic. That’s what I studied. That’s why I got a master’s degree in. Then I got the job and did the things. And then I quit.
I had been exploring food in the Middle East primarily as a way to connect with people and get out of the expat bubble. I’d spent tens of thousands of dollars learning Arabic and wanted to actually use it instead of just going to French and Italian restaurants. I had been telling stories about food in that way.
After I left the Foreign Service, I was exploring and documenting food in D.C. and food in America. I thought I would try storytelling on social media and see what happened. If that didn’t work, I planned to get a job in a restaurant, because through high school, undergrad and grad school, I had always worked in restaurants.
And so I started telling stories about food and culture, food and history, food as something more than just food, on social media. Eventually, this book project came about, and then I spent three years in rooms talking to people and reading about and researching Black foodways. Ultimately, where I’ve landed is that food is a universal language in the same way that music is.
Even now, I’m in Oman, and there are a few elements that anyone can relate to, even if they don’t quite understand the ingredients, or maybe the words. That’s my approach now: food as this living memory, a living history as both a cultural and historical item at the same time.
Q: You cover so many different parts of Black American history in your book. How did you go about trying to capture all of that in one space?
A: There’s absolutely no way to capture everything, but I tried to set up the book as a starting point. There are going to be people who are left out, and there are going to be historical moments that are left out. That’s just the nature of a history that’s so long. Black people have been in North America for a very long time. My approach was to take a semi-historical approach, to walk people through major moments and movements.
Of course, we cover enslavement and the deep entwinement of Black peoples in the agricultural space during that period. But then there’s a section in the book on early American and colonial economies, because these imported ingredients and food trends at that time were really Frenchified. We wouldn’t have that if there weren’t immense wealth generated by enslavers to import ingredients and to send their enslaved chefs for training in France.
And then we talk about things like the Great Migration and the movement of peoples. My approach was to give people historical references that they might have heard in other contexts, and then complicate them — because it is a complicated story.
Q: What were some surprising or interesting parts of your research?
A: Some of the best moments for me and the most resonant were the interviews I conducted with chefs, people working in the food space today, or with people working in food media today, because so many of them have parallels to the stories that are told in the historical parts of the book. It’s one thing to research the Great Migration, and then it’s another thing to ask how did most of my favorite Black chefs in New York land with their families in New York?
Take someone like Cheryl Day, who is such a force in Southern baking. She moved back to Savannah after her family had migrated to the West Coast. Today, L.A.’s barbecue scene is so very Black. But why is that? Because of the Great Migration.
Q: Where does the Bay Area fit into this history? You mention the Black Panther Party’s breakfast program.
A: The book definitely talks about food as an integral part of these social justice movements in many ways. The Breakfast Program is one. Another is Georgia Gilmore and the Club From Nowhere and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and how integral food was to support that boycott.
There are historical movements that are not really food-focused: They’re focused on changing the underlying structure of our society. But over and over again, we see food either used as a tool, or food folks — so chefs, bakers, home cooks, etc. — stepping up to support those movements, which is what we still see today.
In every city, when there’s a crisis, the first people who are either feeding people or raising money, they’re usually people who work in the local professional food space. Hospitality people are hospitable. I think that’s often part of their core being.
Q: You talk in the book about how Black history is so much bigger than just Black History Month. But we’re putting this story together for Black History Month. Is there a particular historical moment you share in the book that you wish more people were aware of?
A: National holidays and Black History Month, I think, are nudges to us as consumers and citizens to pay attention. Black history in the United States right now is so contentious. And not just Black history, but so many marginalized histories are being battled over, in school boards and online and in book clubs.
Instead of pointing readers to a particular historical moment or even a particular story in the book, I would urge them to consider that all of this history in this book continues today, and the exploitation and marginalization and violence committed against Black and Indigenous and all these other peoples continue today.
We’re in a historical moment where it’s very out in the open, and it’s up to us to have the hard conversations to combat that. So rather than point them to like a particular historical moment, I would say that maybe the moment is at the dinner table with your cousin, and maybe the right moment would be not just Black History Month, but forever.
Q: Anything else you’d like to highlight or share?
A: There’s so much of our history that we are not taught or are not aware of for a myriad of reasons. But Black history is American history, undeniably. At times, it can be uncomfortable, but the discomfort is what we learn from.
I think there is an urge to just look at the Martin Luther Kings of the world, through the framing of his nicest, most polite quotes, when in fact, it’s much more complicated and much broader. “American Soul” is an attempt to look at a sampling of that.
There are so many people throughout the country who are doing this work. Many of them are in the book, which is why I deliberately wanted to include a more forward-looking section. I think it’s very important for people to consciously diversify what they’re consuming, and sometimes to be challenged by what they see or listen to or hear or watch. And so this book stands in a long line of people who have done this work, but they’re not all historical figures. Many of them are alive and doing it today, and many of them are in the book.
Details: “American Soul: The Black History of Food in the United States,” by Anela Malik and Renae Wilson (National Geographic, $40) was published Sept. 9, 2025. Learn more at anelamalik.com or follow her on Instagram at @theanelamalik.
