Based in Brooklyn, NY, Fusion East is known for offering a groundbreaking blend of Caribbean and soul food. In addition to stimulating the tastebuds, their menu kindles a flavorful experience for the mind by way of its rich and multifaceted heritage.
Developed by African Americans in the southern United States, soul food is a direct product of its dynamic inventors. Born out of the terrors of American slavery, soul food was originally a necessary solution to limited ingredients and food stores. Left to make do with unwanted scraps of meat and forced to hunt, fish, and farm for themselves, American slaves began to cultivate a vibrant cuisine that would live on long after slavery was abolished.
During the Reconstruction era in the latter half of the 19th century, black church gatherings strengthened culinary traditions with weekly feasts of watermelon, chicken fried steak, catfish, and sweet potatoes, creating a celebratory contrast to the frugal habits of the weekdays. Once the “Great Migration” of the 20th century began, millions of Southern blacks moved upward throughout the country,
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Today, soul food restaurants modify traditional dishes by adding upscale ingredients or cutting down on high-calorie ones.
Aptly located in the hip borough of Brooklyn, the Fusion East soul food restaurant pays homage to the history of the cuisine with their wide range of classic dishes like cornbread, black-eyed peas, oxtail, and yams. With such proximity to the Big Apple, impressions of other global cuisines are evident in creative choices like creamy curry parmesan penne pasta, or the Caribbean-influenced modern favorite, chicken with coconut waffles.
Call the Fusion East soul food restaurant at (718) 975-5065 to request carry out or make a Sunday brunch reservation, or visit the website to browse their culturally rich
The landowners took advantage of their tenants by overcharging for land and underpaying for the crops. The tenants began falling deeper into debt. They could not leave until they paid off their debt, which was nearly impossible. Although former slaves had been freed, they were still facing many struggles in free life. America’s plan for reconstruction had good intent, but did not give African Americans the equality they deserved.
Soul food is part of the African-American group since the time of slaves, and continues as tradition. It has become part of their culture. The Process of cooking soul food is also a way of socialization for the African-American community. Although soul food brings African-Americans together, some of the foods in their diet are a cause of stratification within the minority group
Today, African Americans have one of the highest leading obesity rates, that “more than two-thirds of the African American community are overweight or obese”(Dr. Tyeese Gaines, thegrio) and soul food is one of the many reasons that contribute to that. Soulfood is a cuisine that really elaborates on flavor and texture. Thus, large amount of spices such as cajun seasoning, which contains high quantities of salt, garlic powder, paprika, black pepper, onion powder, cayenne powder, oregano, thyme, and red pepper are constantly use in many Soulfood dishes and that leads to high blood pressure and can eventually cause heart attacks. Also, many soulfood dishes such as fried chicken are deep fried in lard which is made from rendered fat of a pig to create a crunchy and flavorful texture.
During the Reconstruction Era from 1865 to 1877, Southern white people were segregated to a large extent between wealthy plantation owners and poor white farmers. Both E. B. Seabrook and a New York Times’ writer compare poor white farmers’ horrid lifestyles to freed slaves because there was an extreme similarity between the two. Although the slaves were emancipated as a result of the Civil War, they underwent economic hardships similar to poor white farmers in the South. In fact, the New York Times author makes the argument that the poor whites lived in a worse condition than freed blacks. - “The use of slave labor… tended to create a monopoly in the hands of the capitalists, and increased, in an almost insuperable degree, the difficulty of a poor man’s rising, but making nearly impossible the enlarging of his sphere of operations” (Seabrook).
During the nineteenth century, the abolition of slavery did not lead to many positive changes for former slaves. This was due the fact that a majority of newly freed slaves did not achieve anything close to political equality. An example can be seen in the period of “radical reconstruction” in the southern of United States, where freed blacks were able to gain full political rights and power but it came with the harsh price of segregation laws, virulent racism, denial of voting rights along with a wave of lynching that continued into the twentieth century. The economic lives of slaves also did not improve dramatically either. With the rise of the highly dependent labor like sharecropping, it had soon replace slavery and the reluctance
During the early 1800’s, President Thomas Jefferson effectively doubled the size of the United States under the Louisiana Purchase. This set the way for Westward expansion, alongside an increase in industrialism and overall economic growth. In fact, many citizens were able to thrive and make a better living in the agricultural business than anywhere else. All seemed to be going well in this new and ever expanding country, except for one underlying issue; slavery. Many African Americans were treated as the lowest of the classes, even indistinguishable from livestock.
Emily Hay-Lavitt March 7, 2016 Week 8: Reconstruction and the Gilded Age After the ratification of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, life did not get significantly easier for emancipated slaves. Despite being free from slavery, African Americans in the United States remained figuratively enslaved within social realms due to several restrictions on every-day activities. Plessy v. Ferguson established the regulation of “separate but equal” in 1896 for whites and colored people, which was a significant aspect of American societies for decades.
In the Antebellum US in the 19th and 20th centuries, pork dominated the plates of those eating and remained the most common meat in the region dubbing the south a “hog-eating confederacy”; through this hog meat ingestion, class, race, and gender were analyzed. Information such as what types and cuts of pork, the quantity consumed on a regular basis, and how ways eaten generated a distinct southern class structure; the diet of these people reflected the variety of social distinctions within the culture. For instance, white southern planters owned dozens to hundreds of slaves, and they consumed fresh pork (a luxury for a lot of southerners in the Antebellum region). Commonly they fed on hams, pork terrines, multiple cuts of pork, and different iterations in the same meal, and this reflected their position at the top of the social southern
As the 20th century was nearing, the American obsession with wealth kept increasing, and the poorer class – including the newly freedmen - became the worst sufferers of its effects. To keep up with the rapid global industrialization, it became necessary for businesses to engage in mass production. Since, their largest source of laborers – slavery – had been crushed with the Union’s victory in the Civil War, the rich could only think of bringing back laborers by oppressing the poor through systems such as
More specifically, he argues that the common goals freed slaves faced between 1830 and 1860—racial animus and Southern planters’ resistance— resurfaced again in the early 1900s. The planter class used their financial and political wherewithal to subjugate black laborers in a state of perpetual servitude—ex. sharecropping. “Keep the Negroes in the South and make them satisfied with their lot.” In response, the Negro Rural School Fund employed industrial supervisors to teach black educators. James Anderson also recounts the urbanization of the South and its impact upon the public education landscape. He sheds light upon the absence of black high schools in rural areas in the years following Reconstruction.
The Great Migration and/in the Congregation The Great Migration was the migration occurred within the United States between 1910 and 1970 which saw the displacement of about seven million African Americans from the southern states to those in the North, Midwest and West. The reasons that led thousands of African Americans to leave the southern states and move to the northern industrial cities were both economic and social, related to racism, job opportunities in the industrial cities and the search of better lives, the attempts to escape racism and the Jim Crow Laws that took them away the right to vote. As every social phenomena, the Great Migration had both positive and negative effects; in my opinion the Great Migration can be considered a negative development in the short and medium term, but, if we analyze the benefits brought to the African-American communities in the long term, their fight for integration has shaped the history of the United States in its progress to democracy and civil rights.
Between 1910 and 1930, African Americans migrated from the rural South to the urban North in search of better economic opportunities and as a means of escaping the racism of the South, but they were disillusioned with what they encountered. To begin, African Americans still experienced racism—segregation, profiling, and unjust law enforcement—In the North, though it was more subtle. As a result, blacks were forced into lower-paying jobs than whites. Thus, while the northern white, middle-class population grew wealthier during the post-WWI economic boom and were moving to the suburbs, blacks and other poor, working-class groups were left in the cities, the state of which grew progressively
“The South grew, but it did not develop,” is the way one historian described the South during the beginning of the nineteenth century because it failed to move from an agrarian to an industrial economy. This was primarily due to the fact that the South’s agricultural economy was skyrocketing, which caused little incentive for ambitious capitalists to look elsewhere for profit. Slavery played a major role in the prosperity of the South’s economy, as well as impacting it politically and socially. However, despite the common assumption that the majority of whites in the South were slave owners, in actuality only a small minority of southern whites did in fact own slaves. With a population of just above 8 million, the number of slaveholders was only 383,637.
Have you ever seen soul food? If you have you would know that soul food looks good, but did you know that soul food tastes good too? I know right. It’s mind blowing. Most people think the most popular soul foods originated in N African American culture.
Culture and memories are expressed through food. Everyone can identify themselves with a concrete culture and in every group there are numerous food dishes that satisfies one, or brings back peerless memories and feelings only they can relate to. Food itself has meaning attached to it, from the way it is prepared down to the ingredients used. Factors that influence food can be anything from practices and beliefs to the economy and distribution. Culinary traditions are important in helping express cultural identity.