In the classroom this week we learned about the Second Great Migration, which occurred during and after World War II. Millions of African Americans left the Jim Crow South and took jobs in cities in the North and the West. In San Francisco specifically, many African American families moved into neighborhoods (for example, the Western Addition) that had been recently vacated when the government interned Japanese Americans or where there were opportunities to work in the defense industry (for example, at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard). We watched a video of two chefs, Michael Twitty and BJ Dennis, cooking collard greens and talking about the food traditions of the Lowcountry. The dish, a blend of a West African cooking tradition and a base ingredient native to Europe, tells the story of America and the ingenuity and continued survival of the enslaved peoples who built it.
In the kitchen, we made a vegan version of collard greens, flavored with smoked paprika, smoked salt, and hot sauce. We learned that many slave plantation owners thought of the liquid left after the process of cooking collards, known as potlikker, as something to be thrown out, but that African American cooks knew how nutritious and delicious it was, the perfect complement for a cornbread muffin.
