How Black Southerners Ate: Racialized Representations of Food in the How America Lives series, 1940–1957

This paper analyzes selected articles featuring Southern families from the “How America Lives” series in Ladies Home Journal, paying particular attention to how  portrayals of race within the kitchen paralleled the slowly evolving racial dynamics of the postwar period. The run of the series coincided with the Jim Crow era in the South. When presenting Southern families, the Philadelphia-based magazine originally took its cue from middle-class white Southerners and through the mid-1950s demonstrated a benign disregard towards Southern blacks. The change to a more positive portrayal coincided with increasing national attention being paid to the Civil Rights movement. The series initially ran from 1940 – 1963, and espoused a uniform set of family values that dominated the magazine’s overall editorial content despite the different ethnic groups and economic classes portrayed. While not a random or scientific collection of family case studies, the series attempted to reflect the economic and geographic, if not ethnic or racial, diversity of postwar American families.  Family dinners and food planning often featured prominently in the family descriptions, as the reporters used these vignettes to literally flesh-out their subjects. 

Over the course of twenty-three years, only two black Southern families made it into “How America Lives,” and a handful more appeared as domestic help for white Southern families being featured. Food played an important part in all theses stories, defining domestic culinary and racial roles in the changing South.