In the United States, our cuisine is a woven tapestry of flavors and ingredients from all over the world. Some culinary traditions that make up the American diet found their way here, with immigrants seeking a better life in the new world. Other traditions arrived on our shores with slave ships whose captives adapted African traditions to the harsh conditions of their new way of life to create what we know as soul food. In the following generations, soul food has become a culinary staple of the American South and part of African American Culture in the South and beyond.

Soul food didn’t enter the zeitgeist until the 1960s when the Civil Rights Movement sparked a cultural and political awakening for African Americans in the United States. The food behind the phrase, however, has been a part of the American diet since the early days of the slave trade in the seventeenth century. Adrian E. Miller, a self-described “recovering lawyer and politico” and author of Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time, says, “‘Soul food’ has become shorthand for all African-American cooking, but it’s really the food of the interior Deep South, that landlocked area of mainly Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama—essentially what used to be called the Cotton Belt and the Black Belt.” Soul Food found its way across the United States during the Great Migration and is now a part of the Black identity across the country.

When slaves were taken from West Africa, they carried with them the many traditions of their native lands, which included several culinary practices that were able to endure through generations of slavery in the new world. These practices centered around ingredients like millet, sorghum, yams, and palm oil, which were part of daily meals. Cooking methods such as stewing, roasting, and fermenting produced flavorful dishes that often combined grains, meats, and vegetables in communal preparations. Stews and soups, flavored with local herbs and spices, were slow-cooked for flavor while roasting and fermenting preserved food. These food traditions extended beyond sustenance and played a key role in the community.

Soul food’s origins are obviously African, but much of the ingredients that make up popular soul food dishes aren’t just uniquely American but unique to the slave experience in the United States. African cooking techniques for seasoning meat, preparing grains, and slow cooking and frying were applied to the available ingredients of the time, which were often unwanted crops and meat rations. Salted pork was widely available for slave rations and became a staple ingredient of many soul food dishes.

At the same time, collard greens, okra, and sweet potatoes were grown in small gardens available to enslaved people. The lack of access to high-quality cuts of meat led slave chefs to become masters of ingenuity, creating dishes with whatever ingredients were readily available, including pig’s feet, chitlins (chitterlings), and neck bones.

For enslaved communities, food was a way to retain autonomy and power in the face of unimaginable hardship. Preparing and enjoying food was a communal experience that not only helped established communities of enslaved people within the new world but also connected enslaved people to their African roots. Because most slaves were forbidden from learning to read or write, recipes and traditions were passed from one generation to the next through oral history and communal practice.

Soul food as we know it today would not exist without the influence of the Native American Indigenous population. Long before the arrival of Europeans in the United States, Native Americans harvested many agricultural staples we rely on today, like corn, beans, squash, and sweet potatoes. The use of cornmeal to make grits is directly influenced by Native American cooking traditions. Additionally, European ingredients and cooking methods play a role in soul food, like the use of salted pork and ham hocks. Additionally, the introduction of wheat to the new world by Europeans led to the creation of biscuits, cornbread, and other flower-based dishes.

According to Miller, as enslaved people migrated north in search of freedom and later as freed people in the Great Migration, “they did what any other immigrant group does: They tried to re-create home.” With cooking techniques that crossed the Atlantic and have been passed down through generations, African American migrants traveling north and west incorporated a myriad of new ingredients into their dishes.

Miller points out, “If you think about immigrant food in this country, it’s usually the celebration of the food of the old country… Fried chicken, these glorious desserts, fried fish—that stuff was originally celebration food. But once you get to a point where you can prosper a bit more, you start to eat it on a more regular basis.” After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, soul food became a vital part of African American economic and cultural expression. In the early twentieth century, Black entrepreneurs opened the first soul food restaurants that helped preserve these traditions and introduce them to a broader audience.

As the twentieth century wore on and the Civil Rights movement began to materialize, the term soul was first applied to music as a logical descriptor for what was happening in jazz clubs in the 1940s. When Black identity began to challenge the White status quo, Southern became a White identifier, while soul became a way to express Black identity and pride. While Southern food may include soul food, the two are not the same.

Much of the American and Southern diet can be traced to soul food, from barbeque and mac and cheese to fried chicken and collard greens. Critics of soul food point out that many of the ingredients and preparation techniques can be unhealthy; however, Miller invites those critics to “reassess soul food, because if you look at what nutritionists are telling us to eat these days, it’s leafy greens, sweet potatoes, more fish, more legumes.

All of those things are the building blocks of soul food.” Many of today’s leading soul food chefs are pushing the genre to new heights by revisiting old recipes in a new, healthier way. Oakland’s Chef Rene Johnson is on a mission to keep the soul in soul food with a healthy twist through her catering company, Blackberry Soul. Making a shift from canned goods to healthy, fresh ingredients and whole plant foods can make many soul food dishes not just delicious but healthy.

As the popularity of Southern food grows across the nation, it’s important to honor their true origins and understand how a simple pop culture dish, like Nashville Hot Chicken, can trace its history to Southern plantations. The legacy of soul food lives on today, not just in kitchens across the country but around the table, as tradition and culture are passed from one generation to the next.