I call BS on NPR.
Fried chicken was NEVER a popular slave food. It doesn’t even come up. Okra, potatoes, and corn meal were a staple.
Watermelon and black-eyed peas came over from the slave trade and were popular on colonial dinner tables for whites and blacks by 1775. So it wasn’t exclusive.
Didn’t you have to have a really high income to eat meat even occasionally in Colonial America through maybe 1920? I don’t think meat was served very often to anybody.
“Fried chicken was NEVER a popular slave food”
Yep, chickens were expensive back then. All the old old movies always show blacks stealing chickens is how the conotation was arrived.