Building up bodies and minds

Spirited Brunch is right around the corner! The Food Section’s signature annual event—a self-guided snack tour of downtown Charleston houses of worship—is scheduled for Sunday, May 3, 12:30-3:30 p.m.

Each year, the program is preceded by a reception for paying subscribers, featuring a guest scholar who’s uniquely positioned to shed light on the congregational visits ahead. In 2025, we were joined by Kevin Sack, author of  “Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church.” (Mother Emanuel is one of 20 houses of worship along the Spirited Brunch route.)

For 2026, we lined up an appearance by Derek Hicks, associate professor of religion and culture at Wake Forest University, and co-chair of the Religion and Food Group at the American Academy of Religion. His next book, “Feeding Flesh and Spirit: Religion, Food, and the Saga of Race in Black America,” is now under review at UNC Press.

Unfortunately, Dr. Hicks won’t be able to join us after all because of a family health crisis, but he kindly agreed to chat with TFS in advance of the 11:30 a.m. event; we hope to see you there!

HANNA RASKIN: So, to start, tell me about what you’ve studied and how you got into the field.

DEREK HICKS: I’m trained as a religionist; a cultural studies scholar of religious experience in the United States. I’m particularly interested in the African American religious experience. My first book and a lot of my early work considered why African Americans would’ve converted to Christianity in such large numbers, given the way it was utilized to maintain docility amongst the enslaved.

HR: Were you able to solve that conundrum?

DH: Well, my first book, Reclaiming Spirit in the Black Faith Tradition, tries to construct a way to understand the function of religion for Black folks. But out of that grew this interest in Black culinary culture, and its convergence with Black religious culture in the way I’m framing Black religious culture: around meaning-making, language, and how we articulate our values.

When I started thinking of it that way, I started thinking about my grandmother’s porch. I started thinking about gumbo, and the way she prepared it, and what the dish conveyed about community. 

You know, I was baptized at El Bethel Missionary Baptist Church in South Central Los Angeles when I was seven years old and eventually ordained in the Baptist tradition and all these things. And yet my recollection of the outward manifestation of church growing up was my grandmother’s porch.

Whether it was slopping pinto beans up with hot water cornbread or slurping gumbo, what was happening on that porch was her mode of advocacy and pushback against society on behalf of people who had yet to expunge degradation from their lives. As my grandmother was feeding the flesh, she was feeding the spirit, through story, prayer, and—in the case of Friday night fish fries—music.

HR: How did those activities interact or intersect, if at all, with organized religion? I understand there’s a profound spiritual aspect to what you’re describing, but does it relate to the church as an institution?

DH: I’m literally arguing that the church has a fuller manifestation in the public sphere on Black porches, at the dining room table, and in the backyard.

I’m talking about the Black Panther party, which was leery of working with Black Baptist pastors, who they thought could be Uncle Tom-like, even though many of those initial Black Panther party leaders came out of the church. But then they coalesce around free breakfast programs.

And so there became a practical convergence of organized religion churches, or even mosques, with this kind of cultural expression of food culture, with an intent on bolstering the Black body.

HR: Let’s linger on the churches and mosques for a moment, since those physical structures form the core of Spirited Brunch. I’m sure we’ll have tourgoers who’ve never been inside a Black church. What do those people need to know about the cultural milieu they’re walking into?

DH: They should know that food is at the center, which sounds really basic. But when I used to enter El Bethel Missionary Baptist Church on Sunday mornings, when you entered the vestibule, before you got into the sanctuary, even as early as 10:30 in the morning, you smelled smothered chicken; a green of the day; maybe cabbage. Something being baked; something being stewed—and then you would come together on the other side of the church worship experience to build up your bodies together.

These were folks showing pride in themselves, even as—external to that space—pride could be hard to come by, given their social and political experiences. And so, food becomes a way to not just feed folks, but to keep them in the space long enough to extend the theology from the pulpit.

HR: It seems like not every kind of church feeds their parishioners a full meal. Is that correct?

DH: I don’t want to fully expand this argument to contemporary churches today. Don’t get me wrong: There are places where I’m asked to preach where I can smell the food when I get there. But there are also churches that we might consider dying mainlines where the convergence of food and faith is holding on by thin threads because it’s the older folks who are doing it. 

HR: So, maybe it’s back a generation, but I’d imagine preparing a meal for everyone who shows up required an enormous investment of time and money.

HR: In those churches, has the standard menu remained mostly the same? Or has Black church cooking changed over the past few generations?

DH: I would say that church cooking changes over time in a similar way that church communion changes over time, and that is to say: convenience often plays a role. At El Bethel, in the preparation space for communion, you are literally breaking up the crackers and pouring the juice into the small cups. That takes time.

But what is also happening in that space is a spiritual fellowship. That allows the preparers to think theologically together about what it means to break up these crackers and pour each individual cup as a manifestation or representation of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

Well, how does that change when you move to the convenience of the pre-ordered cup that has a cracker at the top and juice at the bottom?

If a pastor of the church is saying, “We are going into this more convenient communion model,” and enough people on the deacon board, which tend to be men, [approve], that’s how convenience begins to take over in churches—and it relates to food as well.

Because all of a sudden, so-and-so’s cornbread don’t taste like so-and-so’s. Them greens don’t hit like the greens were hitting. And what happens then? Now you’ve lost it.

Within the Black faith tradition of storytelling, which is exceedingly important, in the same way that you can tell stories of faith, you tell stories of food. We might not see these two separate conversations in the same vein. But they are, at their core, both articulating something exceedingly important: A cultural tradition that emanates from a community that finds pride in its cultural production.

HR: Is there anything I failed to ask? Anything else we should be talking about before Spirited Brunch Sunday?

DH: I will say that the Black faith tradition and Black culinary tradition can sometimes be demonized externally as too emotional or unhealthy. Yet if we think about plantations; about people who were forced to labor sunup to sundown, some of them are exerting enough energy to burn 3000 calories a day.

It was Black food and Black faith that were fortifying these particular bodies. And they couldn’t be fortifying those bodies if they weren’t nutritious. Black folks were ingenious in their jazz-like expression to dance around and through subjugation and extreme maltreatment. 

They were supplementing B vitamins, which means they had to be growing their own gardens. Utilizing okra; utilizing yams, and other legumes; utilizing various field peas and beans, making soups in the summer, which sounds to us like something you would not do because it’s hot. And yet soup would be one of the major ways to offset the loss of fluid in that hard work.

To expand our understanding of the ingenious nature of Black food culture and Black religious culture is [to see] it as a central mode of fortification.