If the plate of food doesn’t raise my blood pressure I don’t want it 🤷‍♂️

It’s not the veggies.

It’s the fact that the veggies are deepfried in pig fat with bacon bits and axle grease on top, and served with a stick of butter.

Like seriously, saying you’re eating healthy ingredients might be true but deepfrying the whole damn thing in lard negates any benefit you have from it.

Like claiming that your triple animal style fries are a vegetable so it’s healthy. Or that Karen can’t understand why she can’t lose weight because she just has salad but neglects to mention it’s the salad bar where she uses a soup tureen and puts three pieces of Lettuce at the bottom of a pile of cheese, eggs, bacon, and everything else that isn’t a veggie.

Nope, sorry.

There are TONS of soul food recipes that are vegan/vegetarian that hit all the notes without using half a Costco container of pork lard to make it.

Edit: this ain’t about veganism or vegetarianism. Just that you can pare down the amount of bad shit in a recipe and increase the flavor with alternative ingredients. You do not have to deep fry everything for it to taste good.

Unless it’s kale. Seriously, kale is the exception to everything. The only thing you can do with kale is to coat it in literally everything unhealthy and eat it that way. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy the taste of wet cardboard.

I’ve said this before in other posts in this sub, but while I like soul food every once in a while, there’s a reason why black folks in the U.S. have the highest rates of heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, etc. A lot of y’all here act like other cuisine is bland just because it doesn’t have your body weight worth of butter and salt with dumping the whole can of Zatterain’s seasoning on it. Y’all manage to turn vegetables and mac and cheese and the like into 4000 calorie meals and wonder why we’re so unhealthy.

Soul Food isn’t historically what it is today, same with Italian food.

When the Great Migration happened, many members of the black community were exhausted and homesick. They had fled the South hoping to escape the cruel Jim Crow South only to find the same race riots, lynchings, and bigotry of the South.

So the black community started preparing dishes that were once rare luxury dishes reserved for parties and big events. Slow cooked ribs, cornbread made with sugar and white flour, greens with chunks of meat in them, Mac and Cheese, and Chicken (yes chicken used to be a rare food). Black owned food carts produced similar food items sometimes called them letters from home.

The modern Soul Food movement is built off these dishes.

It’s disingenuous to claim Soul Food was just BBQ ribs, because they weren’t.

Italian food isn’t just Lasagna and Pizza, and Soul Food isn’t just Ribs and Mac&Cheese.

There are many classic Soul Food dishes, from African inspired versions of Gumbo in New Orleans to the homestyle cooking of Lima Beans, Fish, and Cornbread of the Mississippi river delta. There is even an entire history of African dishes made by slaves and share croppers using available American ingredients that have almost been lost to history and are being recovered by black culinary historians.

Someone bring up that Boondocks clip of Huey ranting about Soul Food plz cause apparently folks still don’t know that while it taste good ofc, it ain’t good for you 🤷‍♂️

Wtf was shorty tryna say ?

The Mac and cheese might be a little unhealthy but how often are you eating soul food that it impacts your health that much?

White people bad because deep frying veggies is unhealthy 😡😡😡

Soul food isn’t even meant to be eaten everyday it’s for holidays and family events. I agree with the caption

My dad always used to make his healthy side dish of peas or stringbeans with like a stick of butter. Best veggies you’ll eat

I beg too differ. I cook healthy soul food.

It isn’t healthy. There are vegetables, but they all have heaps of meat, fat, and sugar in them. There’s lots of carbs and bread too. If someone gives me greens without meat in them or sweet potatoes that don’t have butter and brown sugar in them, I don’t want it.

The history of soul food is making the food white people didn’t want to eat good and using good food as one of the few luxuries we could afford. It isn’t going to be healthy.

Adding to that, most people don’t have physical jobs anymore. If you’re sharecropping or working a difficult, manual labor job you can burn a lot of calories and keep your cardio fitness high. Not so much when you sit at a desk. Or when you get older and you naturally start slowing down.

i’m thinking of terry crews talking about the gout. “pass me the big piece of chicken”

See: The Boondocks, episode: The Itis

Ain’t a damn thing healthy about soul food but that’s not why we eat it. It’s FOR MY SOUL.. right there in the name. And since we on the topic, Thanksgiving is right around the corner and I’m HYPE. Showing up with my own Tupperware this year. 🤙🏾

It’s called “soul food” for a reason.

It puts my soul closer to leaving my body after my heart gives out from eating that incredible deliciousness.