How Harlem Eats

The pizza served at the Harlem spot Raw Soul could hardly be considered traditional African-American Southern fare. The "buckwheat, carrots, and flax, topped with a walnut/brazil nut cheese and sun-dried tomato pizza sauce" isn't fried or dripping with flavorful grease. Still, there's something about it--the rich colors, the multiple textures--that seems to tell the story of a black and soulful experience. "People have an emotional connection to food," explained Lillian Butler, who, along with her husband, Eddie Robinson, is an owner-chef of Raw Soul. "We provide that here." Raw Soul is more than a restaurant and juice bar. It serves as a nutrition and healthy-lifestyle educational center, as well as a hub for a diverse group of people who are determined to shift Harlem's food consciousness.

One of the local food activists who frequent Raw Soul is Moriba Jackson. When Jackson thinks of buying food she always sees color. Not just the race of the people who populate Harlem and the South Bronx, the areas where she lives and works, but the color of the local food itself. Jackson tells the story of buying a head of lettuce from a corner grocery store in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx and forgetting it in her office refrigerator. When she returned to the lettuce more than a month later it was as if it had been suspended in time, with only one small brown spot betraying its advanced age.

"I ran around my office screaming, asking what was going on with this food," Jackson, a 36-year-old African-American, recalls. Within a year Jackson had joined an effort in Harlem to start a food-buying club, a cooperative association that allows people to pre-order fresh, seasonal foods from farmers or distributors at wholesale prices.

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