Books to Read This Black History Month (for Adults & Children!)
This Black History Month, we’re soaking up the stories, memories, and wisdom of Black storytellers through books—books that explore the intersection of food with race, identity, community, joy, justice, healing, and resilience. In our fast-paced world, reading is a magical way to slow down, listen, and learn.
In curating this list, we tried to include a little bit of everything: memoirs, anthologies, poetry, academic works, fiction, and practical guides. The list here represents only a sliver of Black storytelling and experiences. We encourage you to continue seeking out stories told by Black authors this month and throughout the year.
Jump to the List:
A note on where to buy (and borrow) books
As with produce, we recommend that you get your books from a local person or place where you can establish a lasting relationship—whether that’s through a book swap with friends and neighbors, by borrowing from your local library, or through supporting the bookseller in your community.
Where we choose to purchase products is where we choose to plant seeds—of investment, energy, and care. It’s up to us to plant and water seeds where we want them to grow.
Our team also recommends looking for secondhand or thrifted copies, and trying out audiobooks (while doing chores, cooking, walking, or weeding!) if you feel like you don’t have time to sit down and read.
8 Books for Adults
Farming While Black, by Leah Penniman
Buy from publisher | San Diego County Library | City of San Diego Library
We can’t stop quoting Leah Penniman and watching (and re-watching) her powerful lectures—for good reason! Leah has been a leader of the movement to reclaim sovereignty through farming for years now, inspiring many through her work at Soul Fire Farm and beyond.
As its title indicates, this book is practical, designed to be a how-to guide for new and beginning Black farmers. However, it’s much more than that—and is just as essential, moving, and eye-opening of a read even if you’re neither Black nor a farmer. Learn about power in our food system, and the enormous contributions of Black and Brown communities in introducing sustainable agriculture and continuing to steward land responsibly.
We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy, by Natalie Baszile
Buy from publisher | San Diego County Library | City of San Diego Library
In this anthology, Natalie Baszile brings together essays, poems, photographs, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine black people’s connection to the American land from Emancipation to today. In the 1920s, there were over one million black farmers; today there are just 45,000. Baszile explores this crisis, through the farmers’ personal experiences. In their own words, middle aged and elderly black farmers explain why they continue to farm despite systemic discrimination and land loss. The "Returning Generation"—young farmers, who are building upon the legacy of their ancestors, talk about the challenges they face as they seek to redress issues of food justice, food sovereignty, and reparations.
All We Can Save, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson
Buy from publisher | San Diego County Library | City of San Diego Library
Intermixing essays with poetry and art, this book is both a balm and a guide for knowing and holding what has been done to the world, while bolstering our resolve never to give up on each other or our collective future. We must summon truth, courage, and solutions, to turn away from the brink and toward life-giving possibility. Curated by two climate leaders, this book is a collection and celebration of visionaries who are leading us on a path toward all we can save.
The Color of Food: Stories of Race, Resilience and Farming, by Natasha Bowens
Buy from publisher | San Diego County Library | City of San Diego Library
By recognizing the critical issues that lie at the intersection of race and food, this stunning collection of portraits and stories challenges the status quo of agrarian identity. Author, photographer and biracial farmer Natasha Bowens' quest to explore her own roots in the soil leads her to unearth a larger story, weaving together the seemingly forgotten history of agriculture for people of color, the issues they face today, and the culture and resilience they bring to food and farming.
High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America, by Jessica B. Harris
Buy locally at Home Ec | San Diego County Library | City of San Diego Library
Acclaimed cookbook author Jessica B. Harris has spent much of her life researching the food and foodways of the African Diaspora. High on the Hog is the culmination of years of her work, and the result is a most engaging history of African American cuisine. Harris takes the reader on a harrowing journey from Africa across the Atlantic to America, tracking the trials that the people and the food have undergone along the way.
From chitlins and ham hocks to fried chicken and vegan soul, Harris celebrates the delicious and restorative foods of the African American experience and details how each came to form such an important part of African American culture, history, and identity. Although the story of African cuisine in America begins with slavery, High on the Hog ultimately chronicles a thrilling history of triumph and survival. It has also been made into a Netflix docuseries!
How to Carry Water: Selected Poems, by Lucille Clifton
Buy from publisher | San Diego County Library | City of San Diego Library
The life work of Lucille Clifton forms a prayer for self-determination. This collection of poems is a love letter to Black womanhood and motherhood, a historical record of violence against Black lives, and a reckoning with injustice. The poems shimmer with intellect, insight, humor, and joy, all in Clifton’s characteristic style—a voice that the late Toni Morrison described as “seductive with the simplicity of an atom, which is to say highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude.”
Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, by Monica M. White
Buy from UNC Press | UCSD Library | City of San Diego Library
Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the Black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of Black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.
Call Us What We Carry, by Amanda Gorman
Buy from publisher | San Diego County Library | City of San Diego Library
Presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning.
Bonus — The $16 Taco, by Pascale Joassart-Marcelli
Buy from UWA Press | UCSD Library | City of San Diego Library
While this book doesn’t come from a Black author, it’s a new, important read that highlights issues faced by BIPOC communities in San Diego County. The $16 Taco is the work of Dr. Pascale Joassart-Marcelli, a friend of the San Diego Food System Alliance and former Leadership Council member!
The $16 Taco traces the transformation of three urban San Diego neighborhoods whose foodscapes are shifting from serving the needs of long-marginalized residents who face limited food access to pleasing the tastes of wealthier and whiter newcomers. The book illustrates how food can both emplace and displace immigrants, shedding light on the larger process of gentrification and the emotional, cultural, economic, and physical displacement it produces. It also highlights the contested food geographies of immigrants and people of color by documenting their contributions to the cultural food economy and everyday struggles to reclaim ethnic foodscapes and lead flourishing and hunger-free lives. Joassart-Marcelli offers valuable lessons for cities where food-related development projects transform neighborhoods at the expense of the communities they claim to celebrate.
8 Books for Children and Young Readers
The Thing About Bees, by Shabazz Larkin
Buy from publisher | City of San Diego Library
Shabazz Larkin’s The Thing About Bees is a Norman Rockwell-inspired Sunday in the park, a love poem from a father to his two sons, and a tribute to the bees that pollinate the foods we love to eat.
Dream Street, by Tricia Elam Walker
Buy from publisher | San Diego County Library | City of San Diego Library
Welcome to Dream Street—the best street in the world! It's where love between generations rules, everyone is special, and the warmth of a neighborhood shines.
We love this book because it reminds us of the vision of our friends at Project New Village and so many other BIPOC-led, place-based projects using food to build community. Dream Street is a beautiful way to introduce children to the importance of community.
Our School Garden!, by Rick Swann
Buy from publisher | unfortunately, not available at libraries
Our School Garden! is a story about how young Michael, new to the city and the school, experiences the garden through changing seasons of the school year. He discovers not just how vegetables grow, but how a community can grow from a garden.
The book, written in verse, also features sidebars on many aspects of school gardening and includes a resource page.
Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table, by Jacqueline Briggs Martin
Buy from publisher | San Diego County Library | City of San Diego Library
Will Allen is no ordinary farmer. A former basketball star, he's as tall as his truck, and he can hold a cabbage—or a basketball–in one hand. But what is most special about Farmer Will is that he can see what others can't see. When he looked at an abandoned city lot in Milwaukee he saw a huge table, big enough to feed the whole world.
Bring Me Some Apples and I'll Make You a Pie: A Story about Edna Lewis, by Robbin Gourley
Buy from Bookshop.org | City of San Diego Library
Long before the natural-food movement gained popularity, Edna Lewis championed purity of ingredients, regional cuisine, and farm-to-table eating. She was a chef when female chefs—let alone African American female chefs—were few and far between. With lyrical text and watercolor illustrations, Robbin Gourley traces the roots of Edna's appreciation for the bounties of nature through the seasons. Folk rhymes, and songs about food are sprinkled throughout the text, and five kid-friendly recipes and an author's note about Edna's life are included.
Soul Food Sunday, by Winsome Bingham
Buy from publisher | San Diego County Library | City of San Diego Library
At Granny’s, Sunday isn’t Sunday without a big family gathering over a lovingly prepared meal. Old enough now, our narrator is finally invited to help cook the dishes for the first time: He joins Granny in grating the cheese, cleaning the greens, and priming the meat for Roscoe Ray’s grill. But just when Granny says they’re finished, her grandson makes his own contribution, sweetening this Sunday gathering—and the many more to come.
Evocatively written and vividly illustrated, this mouthwatering story is a warm celebration of tradition and coming together at a table filled with love and delicious food.
Art of Protest, by De Nichols
Buy from publisher | City of San Diego Library
From Keith Haring to Extinction Rebellion, the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter, what does a revolution look like? Discover the power of words and images in this thought-provoking look at protest art by highly acclaimed artivist De Nichols.
Readers can explore each piece of art to understand how color, symbolism, technique, and typography play an important role in communication. Guided by activist, lecturer, and speaker De Nichols's powerful narrative and stunningly illustrated by a collaboration of young artists, this volume also has plenty of tips and ideas for creating your own revolutionary designs. This is a fully comprehensive look at the art of protest.
For young readers
With the Fire on High, by Elizabeth Acevedo
Buy from publisher | San Diego County Library | City of San Diego Library
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Poet X and Clap When You Land comes a novel about a young Afro Latina women with talent, pride, and drive.
Emoni Santiago’s life has always been about making the tough decisions—doing what has to be done for her daughter and her abuela. The one place she can let all that go is in the kitchen, where she adds a little something magical to everything she cooks, turning her food into straight-up goodness.
Even though she dreams of working as a chef after she graduates, Emoni knows that it’s not worth her time to pursue the impossible. Yet despite the rules she thinks she has to play by, once Emoni starts cooking, her only choice is to let her talent break free.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this list and find a few new titles to get lost in!
Keep following along this Black History Month for more stories, films, articles, and other media about the intersection of food and identity, told from the perspective of Black leaders and storytellers.