Fear of new ‘collard’ people

By Clarence Page

Friday, Oct. 17, 2014 | 2:03 a.m.

Collard greens are “the new kale?” So say some chic eaters, even as some concerned cultural guardians fear a new socio-economic menace: “food gentrification.”

Gentrification, simply defined, is when something that you used to buy because it was cheap suddenly turns so fashionable it becomes too expensive for its original consumers to afford.

We usually hear about this process as a good-news/bad-news urban story in recent decades. Depressed neighborhoods have found new vigor as less-fortunate low-income renters are sent packing like urban nomads.

Now it’s happening among the people who talk about food in the way that Bill Hader’s Stefon on “Saturday Night Live” reveals the latest ultrahip nightclub.

“Collards are the new kale,” raved a January headline in the blog of Whole Foods, which is a great food chain if you’re not worried about prices. The headline has since turned up in promotional signs in Whole Foods stores.

Can it be? Back in July 2012, fashion writer and author Derek Blasberg signaled a trend when he tweeted, “What’s the biggest trend in fashion right now? Kale. Yes, I’m talking about the vegetable. It’s so hot right now.”

Ah, when the smart set came for the kale, I said nothing. I was not a fan of kale. But now they’re coming for the collard greens. That hits closer to home.

I grew up on collard greens, whether I wanted to or not. Collards, as in countless other black families, were a basic food group all by themselves. I ate greens at home, in church basements and in other people’s homes cooked into soups or stews with butter, tomatoes and spices, or simply as a side dish with or without cornbread.

And, ironically, I hated greens. Being forced to eat them only motivated me to get a good education so that someday I could afford to avoid them forever.

Little did I expect that, as a young reporter in the 1970s, collard greens, chitterlings (properly pronounced “chitlins,” y’all) and other “soul food” from which I had liberated myself would become all the rage in mainstream America, which, to me, was what the media called white folks.

As one of the few black reporters in the newsroom, I found myself assigned occasionally to report, review and essentially explain soul food restaurants to our predominately white audience. I grew to love greens. My taste buds had matured. Besides, this time I was getting paid to eat.

Now, decades later, greens are coming back as a thoroughly mainstream “Southern dish.” But not everybody’s pleased. For example, on Columbus Day, writer Diamond Sharp at the black-oriented website The Root listed collard greens among “8 Things That Have Been ‘Columbused’ This Year” — meaning, fixtures of black America that suddenly have been “discovered” by mainstream America.

Other examples from Sharp included “bae” as a term of endearment, Timberland boots as a fashion statement and twerking, the dance craze that Miley Cyrus may have pretty much destroyed with her notorious MTV Awards appearance.

But Mikki Kendall, a black feminist writer who tweets as Karnythia, is concerned about more than mere cultural hijacking. Credited with creating the hashtag #FoodGentrification, she has raised alarm bells about a trend that, as she writes on The Grio website, “may well put traditional meals out of reach for those who created the recipes.”

She has a point. Cuts in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program food stamp benefits, even as wages have stagnated for lower-income workers, put low-income families in an ever-tightening squeeze as they try to buy nutritious food.

But Ryan Cooper, who writes for The Week, argues that other factors, such as drought, crop failures, increased worldwide demand and deregulation of Wall Street speculators in commodities futures have a much bigger impact.

No doubt. I think history shows the appropriation of various ethnic cultural creations into mainstream to be as old as the American melting pot, which I prefer to call a Mulligan stew. Every community’s culture eventually borrows from everybody else’s. That’s how we got rock ’n’ roll, among other potboilers.

But the notion of “food gentrification” highlights a much larger problem for low-income families that deserves more attention in Washington’s budget debates, whether their food is in fashion or not.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.