Soul food

Soul food is a variety of cuisine that comes from traditional Native American dishes in the Southeastern United States. It is common in areas with a history of slave-based plantations and has maintained popularity among the African American and American Deep-South "cotton state" communities for centuries; it is now the most common regional cuisine in majour southern cities such as New Orleans, Louisiana, Charlette, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. Soul food influences can be commonly found as far north as Richmond, Virginia, as far east as Jacksonville, Florida, and as far west as Houston, Texas (past which southwesten/mexican cuisine becomes the cuisine of choice). The term "Soul Food" may have originated in the mid-1960s, when was a common word used to describe Black American culture (for example, soul music).

The term soul food became popular in the 1960s, after Alex Haley recorded Malcolm X’s life story in 1963. To Malcolm X, soul food represents both southernness and . Those who had participated in the Great Migration found within soul food a reminder of the home and family they had left behind after moving to unfamiliar northern cities. Soul food restaurants were black-owned businesses that served as neighborhood meeting places where people socialized and ate together. In addition, today's so-called African American and soul food ways can be traced back to influences from Moorish, Arawak and other indigenous American communities. Ingredients such as cloves, cumin, mint, parsley, and turmeric were used in the Moorish diet. The Arawak way of barbecuing pork developed after the Spanish introduced domestic pigs to the Caribbean region.

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