In Part 2 of Dieting While Black, Kelly and Darryl get into their own personal experiences dealing with body image and fat phobia. They review the history of fat phobia, race, and the long practice of “othering”. Myths about diets are revealed and they evaluate health (and lack of care) as another system that has been created in our culture and is supported by our government by giving more money to drug research instead of food subsidies.
They end the conversation by discussing self-care and ways that they move and exercise with love and care to their bodies. Food and Health and Bodies and Racism are all so tightly linked together, we hope you listen with an open mind.
We’re back in the New Year and we’re here to talk about dieting. Darryl and Kelly discuss their own experience with diets, the bold choice to take up space, and the different ways it affects men and women.
We also got the chance to talk with our friend Leslie Cuyjet a Louisville KY native and professional dancer based in New York City. We discuss Leslie’s work, relationship to diets, and how things are changing in the world of dance as the BLM movement continues. Leslie brings her perspective on body image as a black woman whose own body is a main component of their work.
On a personal note, I wanted to include this picture of Darryl and me that we had taken when we were making the website. When I reviewed the pictures, I felt devastated. To me, I looked bigger than I felt and didn’t like the way my stomach pushed out over my jeans. But since then (this may be surprising) I have stopped trying to lose weight. I have put my scale away, stopped counting calories, and also threw away those jeans. Not only were these all things that were not serving my health, I’ve realized that the way I look at my own body is a practice in fat phobia, and I was approaching my wellness in a way that looked at my own body as evil.
This is all to say that it takes time and patience to move beyond the cultural ideas that fat is bad and dieting for weight loss is good. Be kind to yourself, send love to those parts of your body that you often hate, and maybe go outside for some fresh air. Treat yourself with love and kindness as we move into this New Year. Cheers!
Happy 2021! We have been soaking up some much needed vacation time with our families and looking forward to big things in the next year. We’ve spent the past two weeks eating all the food, bingeing all the TV, and sleeping in past 7AM (we still have kids so let’s be reasonable).
This year, we have some major subjects to cover including bourbon, school lunch, Juneteenth, mac n’ cheese, and much more. We’re going to start off the year talking about dieting and weight loss, and the racist root of this awful, made-up construct. We also had the chance to have a long overdue phone call with our good friend Leslie Cuyjet about body image in the competitive field of dance. We’ll be recording next week, and the first show of the year will be posted January 19th.
If you can’t wait until then to hear all of the empowering and brain-changing things we’re going to discuss, do yourself a favor and stop dieting now. If you want to do something for your body, take it outside for some fresh air, feed it some power food, and let it rest.
We posted our holiday episode last week, and if you haven’t had the chance over this busy week to listen to it (just like it took us a week to post it here on the blog), then you can check it out now.
Darryl and Kelly got together to discuss some of their weird family foods and the little they know about the origin of these dishes. We look forward to doing more in-depth episodes on these “salads”in the future.
If you have weird dishes that your family serves, please tell us about them in the comments or send us an email at butterpecanpod@gmail.com
Thank you all for following us in 2020 as we began this podcast – it has been one of the few gifts that the year has provided both Kelly and Darryl. This show has been something that we have both wanted to do for some time and it somehow got dug out of this insane, horrible, depressing year. We look forward to a big 2021 and hope to see you all on the other side.
How weird it must be that you’ve decided to make Coca-Cola Pecan Pie. Like a lot of dishes we found made with Coke, this peculiar recipe is odd and delicious. It also points to the omnipresent Coke marketing Machine and it’s far reaches in different aspects of our life.
First, as always, I attempt to do the most – I oven smoke the pecans with apple wood and rosemary. They really give the pie a deeper richer flavor. Pecans and rosemary work together beautifully.
Ingredients:
1 cup dark Corn Syrup 3 eggs 1 cup granulated sugar 2 tablespoons butter, melted 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract Tb cinnamon 2 cups whole pecans 1 9-inch unbaked OR frozen deep-dish pie crust (see our recipe for pie crust) 2 liters of Coke
Rosemary and Wood chips for smoking the pecans
Directions:
1. You need to prepare your oven to smoke the pecans first. Place a handful of wood chips and 2 sprigs of rosemary on a metal or glass baking dish. Just barely cover with water. Put cooling grates on top and cover with aluminum foil.
2. Poke holes through the foil and set pecans on top. Now cover the entire pan in foil and place in then at 250 degrees. The foil will start to puff up ensuring the smoke isn’t escaping.
3. Smoke the pecans for 35mins as not to over roast them – just enough to kiss them with smoke. Then allow to cool – this is important because we don’t want to accidentally scramble our eggs!
4. Reduce the two litter of Coca-Cola on medium/high heat till it reduces down to a half cup of thick syrup. Watch carefully, stirring as to not make caramel and burn the house down as I did. This can take around an hour or so.
5. Mix eggs, sugar, butter, vanilla & cinnamon together in a large bowl. Stir in corn syrup and reduced Coca-Cola after it has cooled. Then fold in the smoked pecans.
6. Pour into pie crust, place on center rack and bake for 60-70mins at 350 degrees.
7. Pie will have some jiggle when you take it out of the oven. It will take 2 hours for pie to completely cool and set.
This all started with ice cream. After a year of working for Louisville Cream, Kelly had noticed a pattern that she felt too shy and too embarrassed to ask anyone about. A google search did not answer her question and she didn’t yet consider turning to twitter, so one day she asked: Is Butter Pecan a “black thing”? With Darryl’s signature laugh, he replied, “Of course.” And so began months of research and digging, and what ultimately became the larger project of this very podcast.
In this episode about our namesake, we share what we have discovered so far about ice cream, and talk a little bit about how it all began. If you have your own story about Butter Pecan ice cream or eating ice cream while black, please send us an email at butterpecanpod@gmail.com or leave a comment below.
Lucy Candler Heinz, daughter of Coca-Cola founder Asa Candler, was upstairs getting ready for bed in September of 1943 when she heard her husband yelling for her downstairs. She hurried down to find her husband, Henry Heinz, wrestling with an intruder. While Lucy ran upstairs to retrieve the gun Henry kept in their room, she heard a loud gunshot and returned to find that her husband had been shot. The story that follows is weird, confusing, and let’s not forget, racist.
Listen to our second Gravy episode as Kelly and Darryl take a break from food to discuss how they might get rid of a body, and how they themselves would like to be remembered. Kelly also weaves a fantastical story of murder and mayhem as Darryl geeks-out about old-timey architecture.
In our final installment on Coca-Cola, Darryl and Kelly cover the discrimination case brought against the company in 1999-2000 and the decades leading up to the final ruling. We talk dress code, hierarchy, and “the issue of invisibility” at Coca-Cola. The series ends in the present day as we process Coca-Cola’s response to the Black Lives Matter movement in June.
Please bare with us as we recorded this episode remotely, got silly at times, and freaked out a little bit about the stuckness of it all. We also did the Pepsi Challenge, which was at the same time hilariously fun and incredibly disappointing.
As promised, here is the silent footage of Robert Woodruff’s plantation outside of Atlanta. You can see some of the people who lived on the acreage and take in the vastness of the property. Below are quotes from the script from Episode 3: Ice Cold Sunshine. You can listen to the full episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Darryl: If Walter Mack is the David in this narrative, Robert Woodruff of Coca-Cola was the Golaith. Robert Woodruff was the son of Earnest Woodruff – a rich businessman who took over Coca-Cola in 1919, purchasing the company for 25 million (376 million today). Robert became president in 1923 (refusing the position several times before finally accepting). Unlike his father, Robert enjoyed his wealth – among his handful of homes, he owned a plantation outside of Atlanta, called Ichuaway.
Kelly: Robert enjoyed the luxuries wealth provided. Woodruff’s plantation was 47,000 acres of “vast game preserves comprised of a group of homes, stables, and kennels surrounding a grassy circle shaded by magnolia trees.” There were 300 workers on the plantation who were mostly black sharecroppers. Black servants at the main house wore white porter coats and (to his face) called Woodruff “Colonel Bob” or “Mista Bob”. On Saturdays, after dinner, staff would sing spirituals for guests who were trained by Woodruff’s wife.
Welcome to our third installment of our series on Coca-Cola. In this episode, we further discuss the racial history surrounding cocaine and the impact of the “dope fiend” trope, discuss how Pepsi had a different approach to black workers and black customers, and find out how Coca-Cola finally begins to catch up to the changing political and culture climate of the 1950s.
In the second part of this episode, we talk to Darryl about his pecan pie recipe and how we burned Coca-Cola in his kitchen in the first attempt. We talk about the odd custom of drinking peanuts with Coke and the other dishes you can make using Coca-Cola.
Butter Pecan Pod 