Barbershop Cuisine: African American Foodways and Narratives of Health in the Black Barbershop

Exploring foodways as part of a cultural system of the Black barbershop, points to the ways in which community considers dietary behavior, ascribes meanings associated with food, constitutes the social structure and material culture affecting food, and instantiates the historical factors that contribute to the persistence or change in food behavior. By centering the role of foodways in the performativity of Black men’s food habits of acculturation, this paper illuminates cardiovascular screening as a health literacy intervention in Black barbershops. The role of health in the sustenance of Black men reveals unique dimensions of the intersections of food and performance. This paper locates the Black barbershop as a ritualized space of health and healing. Barbers are redefining their role in the African American community by crafting the barbershop as a critical space for performing health care intervention of treatment and control of high blood pressure among Black men.