The Roots Run Deep: A Short History of Soul Food

You can't talk about Black health in America without talking about soul food. And you can't talk about soul food honestly without talking about where it came from. At Ruby Jean's, we hold this history with respect, because you can't reform what you don't first honor.

From West Africa, across an ocean

Soul food's deepest roots reach back to West Africa, where ingredients like okra, black-eyed peas, sorghum, and yams anchored rich culinary traditions. Enslaved Africans carried that knowledge — and sometimes those very seeds — across the Middle Passage. In a new and brutal land, they adapted: sweet potatoes stood in for African yams, cornmeal became cornbread, and the food-ways of a continent took new form in Southern soil.

Genius born of survival

Here's the part that deserves real reverence. Much of what we now call soul food was created from the scraps. Enslaved people were given the leftovers of the plantation — the offal, the fatback, the ham hocks, the cornmeal and molasses — and through sheer culinary genius transformed those castoffs into food that nourished bodies and held communities together. Chitlins, greens cooked with smoked meat, cornbread: these weren't choices of abundance. They were acts of resourcefulness and resistance, of making a way out of no way.

A name born of pride

The food sustained generations. And in the 1960s, as the civil rights and Black cultural movements surged, it earned its name: “soul food” became a banner of pride, tying Black American cooking back to its African origins and declaring it worthy of celebration. To eat soul food was to taste survival, family, Sunday dinner, and identity all at once.

Honoring the roots, asking the hard question

We carry all of that with us. Ruby Jean Bates — the grandmother our founder named this company after — was raised on that soul-food table, and it fed a family and a legacy. And yet the heaviest, most processed version of that cuisine, especially as it industrialized in the decades that followed, has also been hard on the very community that created it, contributing to the diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease that hit Black families at the highest rates in the country.

Holding both truths is the work. The tradition is sacred. The genius is real. And love for our people means asking: how do we keep the soul, the story, and the flavor — while letting go of what's quietly making us sick? That's the conversation we'll pick up next time. Because honoring our grandmothers doesn't mean cooking exactly like them. Sometimes it means carrying their love forward in a form that lets us live longer to share it.

Call to action: Come taste tradition reimagined — our Soul Food Bowl is on the menu at 3000 Troost.

Sources

1. Unlocking the History of Soul Food (Hemp & Fork)

2. The Origins and Cultural Significance of Soul Food (USC Dornsife)