What People Overlook About Black History Month

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No one understands ecology like the ancestors.

One of the most essential principles to grasp in ecology is energy budgeting. Much of what humans understand about the behavior, distribution, and relationships of organisms in an ecosystem revolves around what it costs an individual or group to acquire energy vs. how much energy they can expect to gain.

Lions sleep for roughly twenty hours each day. They do this partly because cats are lazy AF, but also because the energy it would take to remain active and alert all day would exceed the energy they could expect to gain hunting. Contrary to what we are socialized to think about lions, these big cats steal far more prey from smaller predators like hyenas than they bring down.

The point is that all organisms must balance their energy budgets to stay alive, and many factors go into this equation. Humans are no exception.

Another way to look at this energy math is this. If you can control an organism's options in acquiring energy, you can potentially influence its behavior. This principle is how many of us who own pets control their behavior. Hell, 90% of my parenting involves manipulating my kids’ access to “treats.”

You cannot live without food, and though much of the modern human world is structured around us not being directly involved in what kind of food we have access to, we are incredibly vulnerable to changes in that access.

American cuisine is Black cuisine. Enslavers were so lazy and incompetent with their food that, to this day, many of their descendants haven’t discovered salt or learned that raisins don’t belong in potato salad. Aside from the creativity it took to come up with Mac and Cheese, barbeque, and gumbo, American (Black) cuisine is about a shrewd understanding of mastering the energy budget equation, oftentimes under considerable constraints.

There are countless dishes that people have created out of, not so much necessity but out of oppression, out of being denied resources that went to the oppressors. The irony, of course, is how these dishes eventually cycle into the oppressor-stream culture and are celebrated and appropriated without due credit or acknowledgment.

So, the ancestors knew how to make good food because they understood the energy budget balancing act all organisms have to engage in. They knew how to make delicious food with the choicest ingredients for their oppressors and how to feed themselves well with the leftovers.

I want to take some time to talk about an animal relative at the center of Black cuisine because understanding this animal may be the key to navigating the Trump administration’s master plan of controlling the American public

Why pigs matter.

If you haven’t read Monica White’s book Freedom Farmers, you should. It’s Black History Month, and Dr. White’s book is essential for understanding the links between American politics and food.

Because American society, and so many other societies, are rooted in the oppression and exploitation of a working class to produce the material wealth of the much smaller ruling class, the ruling class’s power has and remains firmly rooted in control of access to food. The struggle that Black people in this country have always had is how to feed ourselves amid white supremacy’s interest to keep us just well-fed enough to comply without giving us the strength and independence to resist and make fundamental change.

Food sovereignty is political power. Otherwise, the U.S. wouldn’t have worked so hard to wipe out buffalo and adopt the policy of “total war” on Indigenous peoples, who they struggled to defeat on the field of battle. The cascade of land cessions Indigenous communities made has more to do with the U.S. military and militia destroying Indigenous people’s ability to feed themselves than so-called “superior weaponry.”

Likewise, the institution of slavery and Jim Crow fails if Black folks have the same access to land that white folks have enjoyed. Whether it’s Black farmers (still) being shut out of the collective agricultural resources that the U.S. government has developed or the explicit denial of Black people to the Homestead Act of 1862, the architects of USian society have known that if Black and Indigenous people can feed themselves outside of their influence, white supremacist power evaporates.

Pigs matter in the struggle for food sovereignty because there are few organisms on this planet whose energy output-to-input ratios are skewed to the former. Their ability to put on fat makes pigs a valuable livestock species. Fat is the most efficient storage molecule for the energy that humans and many other organisms need. When eating salmon to put on fat for winter hibernation, bears will often only eat the roe and sperm sacs of fish they catch and discard the rest to catch more gravid fish.

Pork fat is wonderful because there are so many things you can do with the multiple varieties pigs produce, and they make almost every dish or meal taste better. Fat can preserve food, be shelf-stable, and be used for things other than cooking. Before pigs were introduced to this continent, bears were prized and harvested primarily because they could put on large amounts of fat. Through my years of learning to cook and my training as an ecologist, I’ve come to think of bears as big pigs.

Two other qualities of pigs make them ideal for producing calories efficiently: 1) they’ll eat anything, and 2) they don’t travel long distances. Whatever leftovers you may have a pig is willing to eat and as long as you’re keeping them fed, they are happy to stay right where they are.

Lastly, pigs can be massive. I was just in North Carolina for a hog killing, and the boar the folks down there harvested was over 600 pounds. I took home a sow that weighed 400 pounds when she was alive (I’ve got about 275 lbs of pork in my freezer now). That’s a lot of damn meat!

So you can imagine why Fannie Lou Hamer and so many other Black folks trying to survive in the U.S., where the government was actively working against their independence and freedom, would have pigs as a central component of a survival and resistance strategy.

This aspect of history—still alive and well in the present—has always fascinated me, but as of January 20, 2025, I’ve come to understand this legacy differently.

How to resist.

It goes without saying that despite their rhetoric, the Trump administration’s primary goal is empoverishing the populous to gain, solidify, and maintain their power. Doing so with the white majority of the population is primarily centered around keeping said white people ignorant and convincing them that their real enemy is everyone except rich white men. The second tactic for those unwilling to facilitate their destruction is firmly rooted in skewing our energy equation.

Who knew Trump was an ecologist?

It is tough to resist oppression when you’re hungry. It’s hard to do much of anything when you don’t have enough to eat, which is to say, you don’t have enough energy. Every oppressive human regime throughout modern history has had to control the masses' access to food lest their regime crumble.

Enter Trump’s tariffs and what I think is the primary goal of the economic shitstorm that should have arrived by the time you read this; to erode our ability to feed ourselves and thus make us more willing to accept this administration’s authority.

But did I mention that I have 275 lbs of pork in my freezer? Did I also mention that if it came to it, I would have the tools and enough knowledge to go out and harvest animal relatives to feed my family and friends? This isn’t a brag (have you read about my hunting failures?), but a call for more of us to put our limited time and energy into being more directly involved with our food.

I recently attended an event in Detroit with a bunch of Black folks and people of color who were interested in hunting, fishing, and wildcraft. It was one of the best events I've been to, and I was surprised to be one of the most experienced hunters in the group. Everyone there was interested in doing more hunting and fishing. And like the politically savvy people we’ve always been, everyone there articulated their interest in wild food as a tactic to combat what this administration has planned for us.

Marching, writing letters to representatives, and speaking out are all essential aspects of our resistance and eventual rebuilding. We need all tactics for what they have done to us and what they have planned. Let’s also make sure we can feed ourselves and take steps, however small, to shed the dependencies this bankrupt system has baked in.

Anybody interested in homemade bacon, cuz I have tons of it!

CONSIDER THIS

Merino Wool is the truth!

I will write about this later this year, but suffice it to say I’m all in on my new Merino wool clothing. I wore the same shirt for eight days without washing it, and it held up amazingly well. Moreover, it was incredibly comfortable, warm, and breathable.

These clothes are an investment, but they are worth the price and then some!

Thanks for reading!

-Jonathan