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Episode

E 23. Tastes Like Chicken and Sadness & E 24. Sunday Supper

E 23. Tastes Like Chicken and Sadness
E 24. Sunda Supper

In our first episode back from an unexpected hiatus, we catch up on all the horrible things that haven been happening the past few months, and then we talk chicken. Also, Darryl made fried chicken cutlets and talked about how bad he is at frying chicken.

We kept this first episode kind of loose since we had been gone for so long. We share a few facts about chicken and give a short intro.

In the second episode, we go more in-depth about the economical impact chicken had in the lives of the black people as they tried to obtain their own freedom, and how chicken became a part of church.

We share a dinner of Popeye’s chicken sandwiches, discuss the chicken sandwich phenomenon, and how the fried chicken business has succeeded locally for black owners but how there has yet to become a national chain with a black person at the helm.

Sources for E23. and E 24.

Soul Food

Zora Neal Hurston on Florida Food by Frederick Douglass Opie

Black Past: Coon Chicken Inn

Leo Weekly: Friend Chicken Showdown

Code Switch: Where Did That Fried Chicken Stereotype Come From?

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Episode

Just Gravy 9: Holiday Leftovers

Divorce, depression, and candy corn–we cover it all in this bonus episode about dealing with the holidays.

This year may be especially difficult as we come back into a life that we have not experienced in some time. The pandemic has figuratively taken our lives, thrown them up in the air, and now as things begin to come back down, it can be tough to find value in the same things we used to.

We hope you find comfort in our show because it has definitely been something that we have found solace in over the past year. But, if you feel overwhelmed and need help, please reach out to someone. If you don’t or can’t reach out to anyone, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is: 800-273-8255

Resources:

National Suicide Prevention

CDC Helplines

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Episode

E 22. Native American Heritage Month with Nicole Robey

This November we got to sit down and chat with Nicole Robey who is Winnebago Ho-Chunk and lives in Louisville, KY. She works for Amazon and is part of their Indigenous Leadership Board.

Robey brought fry bread to discuss the delicious and divisive history of this native food, and share her memories of it growing up. Although a childhood favorite to many, this dense, chewy, fried treat has its own dark history of colonization that is embedded in the stories of most native families.

We talk with Robey about everything from food to music to football to what it means to be white presenting. Did we say she can also dance? Yeah, she does that too.

Although we didn’t quote or pull directly from any source material, here are some of the articles and sites we used to prepare for our conversation:

Native American Branding In American Football: A Forgotten History

Nephi Craig, Farm to Table Food, and the Movement to Rediscover Native American Cooking

Fry Bread Is Beloved, but Also Divisive

Journal of American Indian Education

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Episode

E 21. BIG CANDY

Look, sugar is racist. And we’re going to cover all of that in an upcoming episode, but for this one, we just wanted to enjoy some candy—too bad Kelly bought pounds of the grossest assortment she could find.

Circus Peantus, Bit-O-Honey, Caramel Chews—we ate them all.

Was Darryl extremely upset? Yes. But did he quit? Absolutely not.

We review a quick history of each of these candies and their similar beginnings which mainly occured during the Great Depression. Candy empires were forged during this time, as the price of sugar dropped after WWI. Sugar farmers in the U.S. Cuba, and Puerto Rico took a beating as the value of their crop fell.

But really, we’ll get to all that later. Right now, just eat some candy (the good stuff, not anything we chose (except Chick-O-Stick, that ones a keeper)) and listen as Darryl yells at Kelly for making him eat such trash.

Bit-O-Honey Commercial

Source for E21. BIG CANDY

A Brief History of Circus Peanuts

Atkinson Candy

Goetze Candy

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Episode

Just Gravy 8: Magnet Schools

Okolona School, Louisville KY 1943

Just as we released our 3rd and final (for now) episode on school lunch, The Courier-Journal was just beginning to release their own investigative articles on the JCPS school system. Their series of deeply researched articles also comes with a new podcast produced by the newspaper.

Knowing that we could not ignore the work of our local newspaper and the overlapping information we cover in our own series, we decided to read the first article and discuss their findings. Darryl also shares his personal experience in the JCPS school system and how his story aligns with those told in the article.

Not about food, but definitely rooted in history and the ongoing racism our youngest members of society experience in childhood and as new adults.

Bannecker School, Louisville KY 1921
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Episode

E 19. School Lunch (Part 3)

Having too much to say in this episode, we actually broke it into two parts. In the first part of Part 3, Darryl and Kelly talk about the Supreme Court rulings that made school integration mandatory, and the redlining practices that lead to systematic segregation, and eventual busing.

Because this subject matter is so vast, we decided to keep it super-local and stay within the city limits of Louisville, KY, so for those of you from out of town, here is a reference map when we talk school clusters. This map is for elementary schools within the metro area but be aware that Middle and High Schools have separate maps.

In the following episode, we will discuss the history of busing in Louisville, the Supreme Court decision that took race out of the list of factors for busing, and what the current system looks like for Jefferson County Public Schools.

Sources for E19. School Lunch Part 3

Louisville, Kentucky: A Reflection on School Integration

The Quest Education

Pioneers Recall Busing in 1975

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

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Episode

E 18. School Lunch Part 2

In our second episode on School Lunch, we take a hard look at how the metaphor of a Melting Pot to describe the necessary assimilation of American immigrants, might be a little problematic. The school lunchroom is the place where newly immigrated children were (and still are) introduced to the “American diet”. Where classrooms taught U.S. history and civics classes, the lunchroom taught that stew and cow’s milk was what you consumed to fit in. In evaluating these food choices, we look at food sensitivities across nationalities and how dairy specifically does not fit well into most children’s diets.

We also look at some personal stories of the lunchroom drama that immigrant children have had to deal with and the various reaction their parents had when requesting Lunchables over sticky rice.

There is a quick introduction to school lunch and how an American-born, European immigrant began the first lunch program in his German factories.

We end the episode by giving Darryl a short quiz on school lunches across the globe. If you would like to take a similar quiz and see how you do, you can find the same images he was describing at this website: Name The Countries These Lunches Were Served

Sources for E18. School Lunch Part 2

Public Schools in the Twentieth Century: The “Melting Pot” for Immigrants

Dietary Assimilation among Mexican Children in Immigrant Households: Code-switching and Healthy Eating across Social Institutions

Eating while immigrant: The bitter taste of assimilation and the joy of ‘stinky’ food

Being Bullied About My Lunch Made Me a Better Person

Lactose Intolerance by Ethnicity and Region

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Episode

E 17. School Lunch Part 1

Welcome Back to School! (and our podcast) After a much needed break from research, writing, and talking about kind of bummer stuff, we are back and ready to do all these things again. We welcome all of our listeners back with a series about school lunch.

Our series begins with Native American Boarding Schools which parents were forced to send their children to in order to assimilate to White/European culture. From there we examine how the idea of the American Melting Pot used public schools as a tool to assimilate immigrant children. Then we will move on to redlining, integration, the Black Panthers, and the Soul Food movement in schools. Which will bring us to where we are now: the healthy school lunch movement, the Hunger-Free kids act, and COVID’s impact on school lunch.

With our first installment, we follow the history of Native American education by colonists, churches, and the U.S. government. Off-reservation boarding schools became very popular after the Civil War as a way to forcibly assimilate indigenous cultures. We look at how this movement created generational trauma for students and their families, changed their diets in harmful ways, and taught skills that were useless in their own culture.

Students learning to cook at Carlisle Boarding School

We’re glad to be back and excited for this deep dive as we enter our second year of working on this podcast. Thank you to each person who has followed us and continues to support our work. We couldn’t do this without you.

Sources for E 17: School Lunch Part 1

THE BOARDING SCHOOL LEGACY: TEN CONTEMPORARY LAKOTA WOMEN TELL THEIR STORIES by Kathie Marie Bowker

Death By Civilization by Mary Annette Pember

No More “Die Bread”: How Boarding Schools Impacted Native Diet and the Resurgence of Indigenous Food Sovereignty by: Patty Telehongva

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Episode

E 16. Butter Pecan Plays Hot Ones

For your listening pleasure, Kelly and Darryl decided to take the challenge of playing the card game version of Hot Ones. If you haven’t seen the wildly popular show Hot Ones, do yourself a favor and find your favorite celebrity taking the challenge on the network First We Feast. Celebrities are interviewed as they taste hot sauce on chicken wings – the concept is silly but the result is amazingly entertaining.

In our version of the game, we mixed the rules from the take home game with the format of the talk show. Darryl created his own hot sauce for the episode (recipe to come) and then picked out several from the store that looked delicious. The final hot sauce we tried was from the game itself, The Last Dab.

On the episode, we tasted each hot sauce and then pulled cards from the game to ask one another questions. Questions and Answers are on the podcast but here is a rundown of all the sauces we tried:

Darryl’s Hot Sauce

Truff Hot Sauce

Frontera Agave Red Chile Hot Sauce

YellowBird Habanero

Secret Aardvark

Melinda’s Ghost Pepper Wing Sauce

Hot Ones Last Dab

No sources for this episode, just Hot Sauce.

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Episode

E 15. Red Hot Chili Chilies

If you take nothing else from this episode, please know that chilies are not peppers. When chilies were first discovered by European explores, they noted that they had a similar “heat” as the black pepper they were already using to season their food. Therefore, they also called chilies “peppers”. Could this be the oldest example of White Nonsense? Possibly.

Marcos Paulo Prado

This was the first episode we did in which members of our Patreon were able to vote on what they wanted to hear. We hope we covered the information our patrons were looking for and can’t wait to do more episode requests in the future.

We take listeners all the way back to 200A.D. with the idea of heat as a use for healing, and then follow the story of hot sauce all the way to Beyonce’s bag. We travel from Europe to West Africa to Jamaica to Louisiana to a small saloon in the corner of Nevada. Haven’t gotten a chance to travel in awhile? Then follow us as we crisscross the globe with the history of hot sauce.

In our next episode, Darryl and Kelly play our version of the party game Hot Ones: Truth or Dab. We start with Darryl’s homemade hot sauce and go until we reach the Last Dab. It does not disappoint.

Sources for E15. Red Hot Chili Chilies

Hot Sauce in Her Bag by Mikki Kendall

Hippocrates, Galen, and The Greek Physicians

Cayenne Peppers – All About Them

Soul Food by Adrian Miller