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Soul Food needs a makeover: Byron Hurt's Soul food Junkies on PBS in January
By April MacIntyre Nov 27, 2012, 16:18 GMT
Courtesy of the TCA and PBS. Keep the Soul Food, but lose the sugar, fat and meat.
Keep the Soul Food, but lose the sugar, fat and meat.
Fans of American soul food, the staple comfort food of the black community is loved, cherished and in dire need of a makeover if you ask culture historian and comedian Dick Gregory, a man hale and hearty into his late senior years.
He is correct, according to dieticians who can read the statistics of heart disease, diabetes and cancer within the black community.
"Soul Food Junkies" is an important film that dares to go there and question the menu of "Big Momma," the traditionalist within the African American community for serving up high fat foods with loving intentions that please the tongue but slay the body.
PBS brings the new film from Byron Hurt (Hip Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes), which will premiere on the PBS series Iindependent Lens on Monday, January 14, 2013.
From PBS
Inspired by his own family’s complex relationship with “soul food” -- fried chicken, ribs, macaroni and cheese, peach cobbler and the whole panoply of down-home foods made with grease, sugar and love -- acclaimed filmmaker Byron Hurt asks whether this diet is nurturing or destroying the African American community.
With humor and heart, Hurt travels from NY to Georgia, Newark to Mississippi, and questions the effects of “soul food” on the health of not only African-Americans but all who guiltily consume this most comforting of American comfort foods.
Filmmaker Byron Hurt explores the upsides and downsides of soul food, a quintessential American cuisine. Soul Food Junkies explores the history and social significance of soul food to black cultural identity and its effect on African American health, good and bad. Soul food will also be used as the lens to investigate the dark side of the food industry and the growing food justice movement that has been born in its wake.
