Vertamae Grosvenor was a culinary anthropologist, Black Arts Movement practitioner, and Gullah Geechee cultural worker that used food as an artistic medium, exploring how Black people resisted white, European hierarchies of culinary value. This was both a symbolic and material reclamation. Reclaiming not just West African-inflected foodways but also tracing how they traveled the world as a foundation for contemporary cuisines. A claim for culinary recognition also came with one for cultural knowledge. 

Grosvenor argued that exploring how African American foodways are part of the American project is a way to reckon with the legacies of enslavement and colonial extraction.

Since discovering her work in 2008, I’ve delved into her expansive and interdisciplinary ideas across various mediums. Her performance skills infuse her writing with a powerful urgency, making it meant to be spoken aloud. This is evident in everything from her cooking demonstrations on public television to her role in the first all-Black soap opera, Personal Problems (1980). She captivated NPR audiences with her melodic storytelling and wrote several cookbooks that explore the culinary traditions of the African diaspora. Writers, artists, and nonprofit leaders all honor Grosvenor’s legacy in reclaiming Black diasporic food traditions. While I wasn’t the first to appreciate her work, I found her voice ahead of her time and somehow, right on time.  

THE MANIFESTO THAT FOLLOWS remixes Grosvenor’s cross-disciplinary reflections on food, resistance, and the Black diaspora.

Born in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, Grosvenor moved to North Philadelphia when she was eight years old. At the age of 19, she journeyed to Paris to become bohemian and pursue theater, beginning a lifelong commitment to performance. After her time in Paris, Grosvenor settled in New York to hone her theatrical and culinary skills and became a familiar face in Black Arts Movement circles. Her cooking was renowned among friends and collaborators, including Amiri and Amina Baraka, Larry Neal, James Baldwin, and Niki Giovanni. Grosvenor’s daughter, Kali, wrote poetry which caught the eye of a friend who also happened to be a publisher. Poems by Kali: A Little Black Girl Speaks Her Mind (1970) opened the door for Grosvenor to self-push and write Vibration Cooking or Travel Notes of a Geeche Girl, (1970) which would become her most famous work. A few years later, she published Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off, A Domestic Rap (1972).

Grosvenor would go on to create a wide range of work. She authored cookbooks, published essays and features in magazines like Essence and Ebony, consulted on films Beloved and Daughters of The Dust, and hosted shows on PBS. Grosvenor honed her craft as a member of the Sisterhood writing group with Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and June Jordan, among others. Her dynamic and visionary creative approach seeded the contributions of Black food practitioners thinking across genre, such as Gullah chef B.J Dennis, culinary historian Myron Beasley, chef and author Therese Nelson, visual artist John Pinderhughes, playwright Ntozake Shange, and Our Mothers’ Kitchens founders Khaliah D. Pitts and Shivon Pearl Love. 

The manifesto that follows remixes Grosvenor’s cross-disciplinary reflections on food, resistance, and the Black diaspora. Offered as remembrance, this piece embraces her experimental anthropological practice drawn from ethnographic observation, memoir, interviews, and essays. These observations share her dismay at a whitewashed American culinary history, often using satire to highlight a searing paradox: The dominant story of American (and global) foodways erases Black contributions despite relying on them. 

Grosvenor critiqued the mainstream culinary industry for how it smoothed over the role of race in Southern food. She didn’t stop there however, she also recognized that to mask the African American origins of American foods was to dismiss a whole world of knowledge drawn from the histories of African American life. Her writing shows attention to the structural contexts of these histories, noting for example, how environmental and medical racism are connected in between recounting recipes. Food operated as an important cultural product for Grosvenor because it revealed how Black women in particular participated in forms of everyday critique.

Food like quilts, personal fashion, and hair styling are not just aesthetically pleasing Black cultural products but they also represent a form of critique through self definition (Walker, 1983; Smith, 1977; Bobo, 2001; Ford, 2017; Rooks, 1996). Black feminist cultural criticism seeks to highlight how in crafting these forms Black women speak to dominant discourses that oversimplify them as simply domestic, feminine, and unpolitical. Instead, scholars like Noliwe Rooks, Alice Walker, and Barbara Smith point us to how legacies of personal expression nurtured in domestic spaces are inherently political, especially in the ways they confront dual forces of racists and sexist oppression. When applying this to food. Black feminist scholars have found that the domestic space is not something to be liberated from, as white feminists emphasize. Rather, practices like cooking, caretaking, and food entrepreneurship help define Black womens’ positions within their own communities and within a national food culture (Nettles-Barcelon, 2015; Willaims-Forson, 2006; Nettles-Barcelon, Clark, Thorsson, Walker, Williams-Forson, 2015). 

Grosvenor highlights that American culture is deeply focused on maintaining myths about Black womanhood, particularly through the concept of the “mammy mystique.”

(Grosvenor, 1972, pp.66-70, 113-14). The mystique defined a national obsession reflecting that central paradox; mammy images translate to everyday prejudices and devaluation, yet the dishes of the famed (real and imagined) Black female cook were desired by many. As Grosvenor writes, “Black women mammies are an American institution. W.F’s [white folks] who never had one, feel unAmerican and dream and pray for a Black mammy” (Grosvenor, 1972, p. 66). In her blunt tone Grosvenor connects race, gender, and food in the national imagination to the everyday circulation of mammy images. She directs us to read her cookbooks as a counter narrative to these images.

And cookbooks, as Rafia Zafar’s groundbreaking work insists, can serve as testimony, autobiography, and counternarrative to these myths (Zafar, 2019, p. 62). Grosvenor’s work builds on a legacy of African American woman-authored cookbooks like Freda DeKnight’s Date with a Dish (1948) and the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) cookbooks that began in 1958. While Deknigh argued for the cosmopolitan palate of Black consumers in order to attract food advertisers, NCNW used their collections to fundraise and document the political work of Black women through biographies, short stories and favorite recipes. Grosvenor centers her own subjectivity, travels, and unique citation style to build on this tradition of genre bending cookbooks. 

Although not a self-identified feminist, her early work evolved squarely in conversation with Black feminist counter narratives to the infamous Moynihan Report, the 1965 document by Assistant Secretary of Labor, Daniel Patrik Moynihan that casted the Black mother as masculine and the Black family as a source of antisocial behavior. 

She was key to A SOUL AESTHETIC WITHIN AFRICAN AMERICAN FOODWAYS, expanding culinary representation to include working-class, accessible, and vernacular cuisine.

Grosvenor’s essay “Kitchen Crisis” appeared in The Black Woman, the 1970 collection edited by Toni Cade Bambara. The collection, initially pocket sized and meant for travel, reflected Grosvenor’s priorities in recognizing the need for practical information for working class Black women. The Black Woman was also crucial in that Grosvenor not only responded to the devaluation of working class Black womens’ concerns among mainstream white womens’ liberation but also Black womens’ marginalization within often male centered Black liberation movements (Thorsson, 2013, p. 17 ). When asked about the report on a 1970 episode of Black Journal, Grosvenor responded that she wanted to see Moynihan “face to face” (WNET, 1970). 

No wonder Zafar describes Grosvenor’s unique contributions as “Black Arts gastronomy” (Zafar, 2019, p. 60). She was key to shaping a soul aesthetic within African American foodways, expanding culinary representation to include working-class, accessible, and vernacular cuisine. This was a way to signify, as Zafar notes, the increasingly whitewashed world of the gourmet (Grosvenor often spelled “gore-may”) (Grosvenor, 1970, pp. 122-23).

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“PROTECT YO’ KITCHEN” from The Funky Man 

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“Kitchen Crisis” begins with a surreal scene of a nicely dressed man who sits next to Grosvenor on a bench to eat lunch. His lunch container reads “Pill: Imitation ham and cheese on rye, with diet cola, and apple pie flavor” (Grosvenor, 1970, p. 119). This is an invitation to cast suspicion at white (read: modern) consumption. Equally suspicious is the Black intellectual in the modern kitchen who can quote Sartre, campus unrest, Black Power, and the feminine mystique, but proudly claim they are bad cooks (Grosvenor, 1970). 

Centering her criticism on domestic spaces was nothing new for Grosvenor. Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off, a report and analysis of Black women’s domestic work, calls for these domestics to organize and turn the tables on white employers. Grosvenor would often marry the global extraction of culinary knowledge from Black people by colonial powers to the extraction of labor, child care, cleaning, and cooking from Black women that allowed the time and space for white women to ‘lib’ (Nadasen, 2015; Childress, 2017).

“Kitchen Crisis” is a rap that counters the assumed efficiency of modern, clean, and instant domestic practices and instead offers messiness and hospitality. If a kitchen was too clean it wasn’t making anything worth eating (Witt, 1999, pp. 166-67). In an Ebony article, Grosvenor described her kitchen as “madly multipurpose,” which she doesn’t mind (Garland, 1971, p. 86-90, 92). This piece is a call to attend to how Black subjectivities are produced in the modern kitchen. To Grosvenor, the kitchen doesn’t need more stuff, but more feeling. She calls these feelings vibrations. 

The following takes calls from the essay, adding Grosvenor’s observation across other kinds of thinking to render three critical declarations on how Black women can protect their kitchens; white is funky, vibrations are ancestral knowledge, and domestic action is espionage. 

First, watch for THE FUNKY MAN.

In a 1972 appearance on Soul! Grosvenor expresses doubts as to how “civilized” ancient Europeans were. She goes on to recount how the Queen of France would go a week without washing and French etiquette manuals showed rules for blowing your nose with your hands. “So,” concludes Grosvenor, “we learn that the same character who discovered America and called the Indigenous people savages, was in reality, the funky man out to funk up the world!” (Haizlip, 1972) 

Funk can take on many forms. Funk is in the degrading treatment of Black domestics by white employers. Funk is in the embrace of chemical-infused kitchen goods: Protect your kitchen from modern Teflon and instant meals. What is modern is not what is best, what is modern is made to seem white, but there is no modern world without the Black diaspora. There is no modern foodways without the transatlantic slave trade, and no American culinary industry without the intellectual care of Black cooks, chefs, and farmers. 

Performance infused all of Grosvenor’s offerings often through fantastical, witty, and direct tones. The worlds she invited her readers, listeners and viewers into were entertaining as much as informative. By flipping the presumed dirtiness and backwardness of Black foodways on its head Grosvenor rescripts European origins of gourmet culture as hopelessly funky. The narrative of white paternalism that justified colonization is revealed to be yet another misdirection. The global consumer culture that resulted constantly relied on and left out Black life.  

Next, be hospitable, and CREATE GOOD VIBRATIONS.

Now scientists have discovered a centuries-long truth that plants feel, positive talk matters, and stress is corrosive. For Grosvenor, Black folks have been cooking for centuries with vibration and improvisation, employing smell and touch, and “reacting to the extra-sensory vibrations of those who devour it.” Vibrations make kitchens hospitable, they are a posture, a way to encounter the world and each other. Vibrations are embodied knowledge—you know it when you know it because you smell it, see it, and feel it (Grosvenor, 2011).

Writing on the proliferation of vibration in It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power TV,  Gayle Wald notes how television shows like Soul! communicated a practice of vibration defined by producer Ellis Haizlip. Taking Marian Anderson’s iconic 1939 performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as an example, vibrations serve as a social call-and-response that creates an affective atmosphere ignited by the transformative power of Black performance. When the audience and guests vibe with each other it has the power to transform white, oppressive spaces. Vibrations are also “transtemporal” because they call on embodied memory and attention to the extra-sensory while still anticipating new feelings (Wald, 2015, p. 22-24, 70-103). Vibrations become a source of knowledge and power particularly for Grosvenor because they shape a hospitable environment from which not only good food but reciprocal and intentional relations can be made and remade. 

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Grosvenor practiced her theory of vibration in many ways. Notably, as a dancer and costume designer in Sun Ra’s Solar Myth Science Arkestra and a frequent commentator on Black public television and radio. Through vibrations, food becomes a tool of spatial transformation, it can take the deficiencies of a modern kitchen, represented as an instant pill and infuse it with the abundance of hospitality. Though “Kitchen Crisis” warns of instant rice, milk, and potatoes, Grosvenor’s corrective is Black culinary arts. These don’t necessarily correspond to a nice, neat kitchen however as she notes one of the best meals she had was served by a friend who lived in a two room six story walk. The meal included fresh squeezed tangerine juice, scrambled eggs with marinated onions, pickapeppa sauce, and fried green tomatoes. It was topped off with a warm cup of bustelo coffee served in pottery made at a community workshop for folks in her friends’ low socioeconomic neighborhood. For Grosvenor, food is life and a bad cook is simply bad at life (Grosvenor, 1970).  

Good vibrations are needed for good soul food. In Thursdays, Grosvenor shares a letter from a Black woman working as a domestic to a “cheap” white employer. The employer attempted to stretch a pot roast over multiple days, twisting it into sandwiches one day and throwing it in a blender with celery, onions, and mayonnaise the next. Appalled, the cook wrote to Grosvenor, “Honey, I took the A train home and ate me some fried chicken, rice, and collard greens.” Soul food is the vehicle of good vibration and in Grosvenor’s text, it serves as a foil to the lack of hospitality and pleasure of white food, kitchens, and homes (Grosvenor, 1972, p. 45).

Vibrations are mutual exchanges of energy that are inherently social, a call-and-response that stretches through time. Surely, vibrations are romantic but the lesson to protect one’s kitchen is a political position. Indeed, African Americans’ kitchens have been the site of reform since emancipation. Grosvenor makes clear that instead of a space of surveillance from “Miss Ann” and “Mr. Charlie,” Black cooking with vibrations leads to owning oneself in the space and resisting what cuisine should be in order to recreate what your body knows. 

And finally, remember the tradition of “DOMESTIC ACTION.”

In Thursdays, Grosvenor recounts the ways women manage their labor in other people’s kitchens. She relays interviews of how women came to the work, how the work tended to come toward them, and ultimately how their labor organizing is part of Black liberation tradition. Yet, domestic work is a two-way reconnaissance. Domestic actions are a set of tactics that Black men and women use to build resilience and instill collective imagination. These tactics included poisoning, civil war spies, contamination, refusal, rebellions, stealing, false humility, and misdirection. She reminds us that while Madam CJ Walker was building her limestone castle on 136th Street, Pig Foot Mary (née Lillian Harris) sold hog maws, corn on the cob, and chitterlings on Lenox Avenue buying up real estate as she worked. In San Francisco, Mary Pleasant’s culinary exploits helped fund the rebellion at Harpers Ferry (Grosvenor, 1972, pp. 43, 88). Domestic action is a tradition of refusal instilled in Black kitchens that need protecting.

Mister, COLLARD GREENS Ain’t Never Out of Season for BLACK FOLKS

Growing up, Grosvenor’s father said that a racist grocer was another way “of keeping Black men from feeling like men.” He taught her “when you bought greens, the Black man weighed and wrapped them, but the white one took the money.” She often recounted how Black people navigated everyday forms of indignity around food. These instances continued into adulthood when she was shocked by the high price of greens at her local grocery store. When asking the white grocer what the deal was he responded that they were out of season, she shot back, “Mister, collard greens ain’t never out of season for black folks” (Grosvenor, 1972, pp. 43, 88).

Grosvenor finds wisdom in greens—she often uses them to cook and theorize. To misrecognize greens, as Amiri Baraka noted the “Harvard Negro” might, “European spinach” was not only a matter of taste but a matter of devaluing these food histories and the knowledge they contain (Baraka, 1966, p. 101-104). Greens perfectly reflect Barak’s jazz aesthetic approach to defining soul food. Grosvenor emphasizes this by insisting on improvisation as central to vibration cooking especially within a set of Black diasporic ingredients. There’s the core, the bass and drum, of green leafy vegetables and meat. And the cook’s vibrations act as the soloists, a trumpeter or pianist, whose personal experiences manage the balance of bitter, sweet and earthy that surround the core duo. Grosvenor defiantly fed her second husband artist Ellsworth Ausby greens instead of wedding cake and Vibrations has over 11 variations for the dish. They seem ever present in Black cultural expression including “Cultural Exchange” by Langston Hughes cited in Thursdays and Niki Giovanni’s “Bay Leaves” and Quilting the Black Eyed-Pea (2002). The pot used to make greens at the Florida Avenue Grill in Washington D.C. is so cherished it’s displayed at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. 

Indeed, greens, as Zafar observes, hold an “unshakable place…in Black American life” (Zafar, 2019, p. 67). But as Edna Lewis, an inspiration for Grosvenor, reminds us, greens are also about place. Lewis reflected on how greens are wide-ranging and seasonally dependent. From dandelion, purslane, and poke to watercress, beet tops, and kale, one’s use of greens depends on what is growing around them. Grosvenor’s point that greens are never out of season resonates with Edna Lewis’ observation—greens are for all times (Lewis, 2012, p. 2706).

Reflecting the political imperatives of the Black Arts Movement, Grosvenor often documented the ways structural racism shaped food access in her New York community and beyond. Though available closer to her, these realities forced her to go out of her way and take the train to Harlem for greens in order to avoid the racism she witnessed grocery shopping with her father. She used her writing to record how overpriced low-quality food flooded Black neighborhoods and to advocate for union efforts to stop wage exploitation of domestic workers. They amount to a body of work that catalogs what literary scholar Quandra Prettyman describes as “small hurts” of indignity built into an anti-Black food system. In her varied use of greens, Grosvenor counters these narratives by centering issues of “dignity and respect” attained through culinary knowledge (Prettyman, 1992, p. 131).

Her collard greens recipe “A La Shepp,” named after Archie Shepp, includes unspecified meat, salt, pepper, a bit of hot sauce, and sugar. But in 1969 she upset her mother by cooking greens without meat using peanut oil and bouillon cubes instead (Grosvenor, 2011, pp. 132, 199). Instructions on how to clean them are almost as long as the recipe itself. Fresh is the assumption but frozen was sometimes a necessity. Like Lewis, Grosvenor notes that greens included kale, mustard, rape salat (she had weekly as a child), spinach, poke salat, cress salat, turnips, dandelion, and chard. Each one is a medicine, a pleasure, and a root to the past.

‍Vibrations concludes with a section on poultices and home remedies and another on aphrodisiacs. For instance, sickly babies should take pot likker twice a day. Food, vibrations, and domestic action show how kitchen work extends to the yard, the garden, the stoop, and the crib. Protecting a kitchen means also claiming this extension as a Black tradition where food is medicine. One can use plantain leaves for boils, cigar ashes for cleaning teeth and vinegar for mosquito bites. Foods can be a relief, clay and chewing tobacco can soothe insect bites and stings and garlic juice mixed with honey is good for asthma. Indigestion can be countered with ground ivy and dandelion is good for both gout and rheumatism. And for those wanting to get freaky and werk it, try fennel and cumin (Grosvenor, 2011, pp. 136-39). 

HOME REMEDIES

Use PLANTAIN LEAVES  for boils

CIGAR ASHES for cleaning teeth

VINEGAR for mosquito bites

GARLIC JUICE MIXED WITH HONEY is good for asthma

DANDELION  is good for gout and rheumatism

GROUND IVY  is good for indigestion

And for those wanting to get freaky and werk it, try FENNEL AND CUMIN

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Kitchens can create remedies for all kinds of ailments including homesickness and that knowledge never goes out of season. It’s hard to take the pleasure of home away if you can conjure it anywhere. “Once in Rome I passed someone’s apartment and the smell of collard greens “gently stewing in the pot,” as Langston Hughes wrote, made my eyes tear and my knees buckle. I wanted to go home (Grosvenor, 2019, p. xii).

She sees and often noted how greens travel as callaloo in Brazil and as chiffonade in France. They show the texture of diasporic connection through shared use but these connections are often distorted through urban legend. More than masters’ scraps, Grosvenor sought to counter Black food shame (Williams-Forson, 2022). She learned this lesson early, watching researchers who came to study her Geechee/Gullah community yet not one of them or their book said, “it’s a good thing. Honor the culture” (Grosvenor, 2019, p. xii). 

For Grosvenor, cooking is not a chore for the individual housewife but a “happening,” a performance of syncopation in the present held together through the everyday hauntings of ancestors. As Grosvenor wrote in a 1977 Essence article, “Roots are like that. They are deep. And there’s just no telling where they will reach up and come to grab you.” Consider Grosvenor’s translator’s instruction that “roots” in Geechee means “conjure.” To cook is to conjure. A good cook minds their vibrations and as Grosvenor warns, they must be rooted in the right time, and be sure that they are conjuring the right connections. Black food as resistance can look like rootedness and that is never out of season.

Grosvenor’s theories of vibration, funk avoidance, and domestic action are conjured as a remixed manifesto of how to protect one’s kitchen. Forged in the cultural cauldron of the Black Arts Movement her body of work documents and criticizes a racist American culinary imagination. In its place she centers the food work, and thereby the food lives of Black people globally, serving to empower rather than shame, to conjure up rather than set aside. Our kitchens move with us as vehicles to home.

We protect our kitchens because they nurture critique as well as kinship. What we fill them with and produce from them reflects our commitments to stewarding good relations through food and centering community wellness. “So,” Grosvenor warns, “watch out for rapscallions. They’ll mess up your kitchen vibes” (Grosvenor, 1970, p. 123).

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Peer Reviewers: Ladonna Redmond and Dr. Bobby J. Smith II