Welcome to River Cafe, Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios.
When I met Darren Walker just a few months ago, a friend took me across a crowded room with the words, talk to this man about food, Ruthie. He is passionate. So I did as told and put away all my questions about the dynamic, social, radical philanthropic work he does. President of the Ford Foundation, a member on the Council of Formulations, a Fellow of the Institute for Urban Design, vice chairman at New York City Ballet, and more So, here we are ready to carry on our conversation about
food memories and his extraordinary work. You've chosen a recipe. Would you like to read it?
I'd be delighted.
Thank you.
Prosciutto and fig serves six. Ideally use purple basol and ripe black figs or green basil and ripe green figs. Twelve slices presciutto San Daniel, nine ripe black or green figs, one bunch fresh mint, one bunch fresh purple or green basil, one bunch rocket juice of one lemon, four to six tablespoons extra virgin olive oil. Cut the figs in half. Pick the young tender leaves from the mint and select the smaller basil leaves. Pick over the rocket leaves, removing
the larger stems. Then wash and dry. Mix the lemon juice with the olive oil. Season generously toss the figs with the herb and rocket leaves, and the dressing. Place on individual plates, combining the presciutto slices into the salad. As you do so sounds.
Divine beautifully read thank you? Why did you choose this recipe?
I chose this recipe because I love figs. I'm from the American South, and in Louisiana and Texas, figs are plentiful and so I had them and just about everything, and they were both sweet and tasty and healthy. So I love them as a child.
So it would be sweet as in a tart or in a jam.
Well, we in the South didn't have things like tarts. We had pies, eyes which is, and cobblers. So I remember my grandmother making cobblers. She made fig cobblers, peach cobblers, strawberry cobblers, but my favorite were the figs.
And would you pick them from the trees or would she go to a shop to buy them.
Did you have always, always in the yard? Always in the South, people have in their backyards before organic farming became chic, regular old working class Southerners would have figs in their backyard, fig trees, pecan trees, all sorts of trees. I remember picking things from mulberries. It was a magical place in spite of the fact that we were poor, because there were certain occasions when there were foods that absolutely repulsed me that my family, especially my elders eight.
So I think it's interesting to talk about regional food in the United States, because if I were to talk about Italy right now, I would say that the food of Italy isn't even region to region. It's town to town, city to city, sometimes home to home, sister to brother. And when I think about food in the United States, the regional food that we talk mostly about, I think
is Southern food. And then if you divided Southern food into Southern food of African Americans and the history of that food, whether a lot of that food came from Africa, whether I was reading that apparently some owners of plantations would send for food from Africa, some seeds that people are doing really interesting research about how African Americans really contribute to the food of the United States.
Do you agree there would be no great American food without the food of African Americans, both the foods that we brought with us on the passage to America, the rice that is a part of our tradition that is now so deeply embedded in American food, especially Southern food. And when I think about the South and regional cuisine, it's important to understand the role of class and race and the status of African Americans. For example, I detest what I call slave food. What is that slave food?
Are the remnants of the cow, for example, that the owners discarded. For example, this would include the intestines which are called pigs feet, chicken neck, the things that the enslaved people really had to eat because they were not allowed to experience the bounty of the very produce and poultry and meats that they cultivated themselves. And so I have a really hard time and I think it's a psychological issue of the complexity of being black in America.
The contradictions of our culture plays out in food and and for me, part of it I think is just my own Uh. The psychology, the trauma of being poor in America and saying whatever is associated with that, I'll reject it. And I'm not sure it's really fair because there are lots of people who love Chitlin's and pigs feet. I mean, my French friends love.
Is the sausage of it exactly.
What we what we call in rural Louisiana Buddha.
Yeah, the blood sausage.
Blood sausage.
It's all amazing when you when you toast it and put uh hot sauce and all the those kinds of spices on it. And then we talk about the food of the Creole community. So this is the complexity of the American South. It's very much region by region because where I'm from in Louisiana, the food is very much a function of seafood. So gumbos at two phase. These are the sorts of things that I grew up on. My mother, who is Creole, is a master chef when it comes to good old fashioned Creole foods.
Can we just go back one minute, because you, in one hand said that enslaved people were forced to eat the remnants in the most appalling way of the owners. But you also said that they brought food with them from Africa. Were they allowed to eat the food that they brought with them or were they totally only allowed to eat the food that was chosen for them by the owners.
Actually, what happened was that they were able to bring seeds and certain kinds of foods that ultimately became appropriated by the owners. And it's why rice is so plentiful in creole foods in a lot of southern dishes, because that was a clear and important staple food. But for the most part, the things that the enslaved people brought with them they were not allowed.
And can you just define what creole food is there?
So Creole people are the people of Louisiana, the southern part of Louisiana, and Creole is a result of the mix of African enslaved women, primarily who were impregnated by their owners, and in places like Martinique, Haiti, countries like this were in some ways the origins of Creole culture. But New Orleans became the center of the Creole world, and it was this amalgamation of French.
That's what I was going to say, is French, because Creoles sounds so French. To figure out where the French came well.
And it's important to understand that the Louisiana purchase, which was owned by France, and of course Jefferson, facilitated the purchase of that massive part of America that France owned where French culture was already established. French foods were established, but the arrivals of large numbers of enslaved people really changed the texture of the food. It became more spicy, richer than other parts of the United States where the spices were really not a part of.
The food tradition.
So it's both a part of the racial history of the country, the American South. My mother herself a very light skinned black woman with long hair like yours, is a result of the kinds of mixing, if you will. And when you visit a city like New Orleans, you see many, many people who are black with light skin, straight hair, who also call themselves creole.
And so going back back, tell me about the family you were born into.
Well, I was born in a small town in Louisiana August twenty eighth, nineteen fifty nine. Place of birth charity hospital lot.
It wasn't proper charity, I mean, do people contribute it to it?
It was a state run, it was hospital. It was a really challenging place. I was born to a single mother. I never knew my father, but in many ways it made me resilient. I remember one person saying to my mother, what ails your boy? Something ails your boy? And of course what ailed me was that I was a little queer boy, and that was for some just an anathma. And that my mother seemed to be so comfortable and
supportive of me was also an oddity. And my mother worked a lot, and she always did her very best, took and when she wanted to really treat us, she cook my favorite jambalaya, shrimp and dewey sausage, chicken and a real deep black woo that's made in an old skillet and with bell peppers and onions.
It was just divine.
Where would she buy the ingredients? Would you find shrimp and fish markets?
Absolutely in every town there is plentiful along the Gulf coast, and we weren't far from the Golf coast. You could find shrimp and crawfish and catfish, all the things that I used to love. And then you, just as I said, put a macailany hot sauce on it. On everything, and it was beyond delicious.
This was all in our head.
My mother to this day intuitively knows how to make a great gumbo, great corn bread stuffing for the turkey at Thanksgiving, just intuitively. And did she teach you well, Ruthie, I live the New Yorker life that I always wanted to live, which means which means I.
Eat out every night.
I when you live in New York City, the combination of dinner parties, galas and great restaurants means that you can choose to simply not cook.
I have.
I think they're apartments without kitchens.
Now, oh, well there are apartments.
I lived in a lovely apartment with a tin burner wolf range. My mother came to visit. She said, son, I think something's wrong with your stove.
And I said, oh my gosh.
Really, so I called down to the porter and he comes to the apartment and he goes into the kitchen and I'm standing there with him and my mother and he says, you never turn the pilot light on when you moved in.
Oh, how long had you been living there?
Well, it was August because my mother was in town for my birthday. We moved in January, and of course I said, what's a pilot light?
We've talked about the cooking of your mother family at home. What was your first restaurant experience.
Well, my first restaurant experience was at the age of thirteen when I worked as a.
Bus boy thirteen.
Indeed, I worked at a bus boy at a place that was a very nice seafood restaurant. And when you're a bus boy, you sit at the bottom of the organization, along with the dishwasher, and you your job is to be as discreet and invisible as you can as you proceed around the room, taking away the things that people
no longer want. And that experience was profound because it was the first time that I truly understood what it felt like to be invisible, because people simply did not acknowledge my very existence.
What was the restaurant like? Was it a fancy restaurant?
Well, I mean, for.
You know, Baytown, Texas in nineteen seventy two, it was. It was it was a nice, middle class restaurant that took credit cards, arts, and the professionals who worked in the all refineries in those sorts of places dined there, all white, kind tale and primarily back of the house were black and Latinos.
Was it legal to employ a thirteen year old?
Oh of course it wasn't legal.
It wasn't no.
Silling me.
I broke the law at age thirteen.
Oh no, you didn't employer broke the law.
What it did for me was instantiate a sense of what it feels like to be marginalized. And I think about that today. How many people feel invisible.
I went to.
College, and where did you go?
I went to the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, which, for me, coming from my background and community like going to Paris, and there I was introduced to an entirely new world of.
Yes food.
But the reality of race and class really plays out in college, at least for me it did. I lived in a dorm with people from all over Texas, white almost exclusively. Because the University of Texas at that time had over forty thousand students, less than one thousand were African Americans, and half of them were athletes. So it was from that perspective, a very lonely place. But I'm an extrovert by nature, and I found my way. I was very engaged. I was the leader of the student union.
I was very much engaged in campus life, but in the process I made friends with some interesting people. And I recalled a debutante party where Frank Sinatra was the talent, another where the Temptations and earth Wind and Fire. Because there's nothing like Texas debutants. They give the best parties, their parents spend extravagantly and caviar. I was introduced to at one of these parties. In retrospect, it was good caviar.
It wasn't great caviar, but I knew that I was tasting something that was really good because it was with champagne. And to me, there's literally nothing better.
So you were in university and then you went to I came to New York, New York.
I came to New York because I was enamored of the idea of New York, like so many people who feel alien in their own community, So I went to New York. I went to New York because also I wanted to make money, and I'm unapologetic about that, because when you grow up poor in America, black in America, the thing you don't want to ever be again is poor in America. And so I was lucky. I went to first a big law firm and then to a large bank and had a great run on Wall Street.
I enjoyed it. I didn't love it, but it provided me with some level of financial security that was necessary.
When you go to a restaurant, what do you look for? Do you look for the food, the atmosphere, the people, the energy.
I look for the vibe. The vibe, and the vibe to me includes what does it smell like, What does the menu look like? What does the design of the menu look like? What is the decor? Is it consistent with the vibe or is there discontinuity of some sort. I mean, for me, I really like energy. Some people, for example, say, oh, this restaurant's too loud.
I don't know. I like a loud restaurant.
If I want an intimate dinner, yes, I'll choose something that is quiet with very little background noise. But if I want to have a great evening, I'll book a table aboutos R or it's loud, it's boristerous. It feels like New yuk on steroids. That's why I live in New York. To drink New York from the fire hose. And when you walk into a restaurant. You understand the vibe, you understand the menu, you understand the people. By just looking around and taking it all in.
You went to Harlem.
It's hard to imagine now that there was a time when Harlem wasn't a desirable neighborhood. I remember when I moved to New York in the mid nineteen eighties. No one really wanted to live in Harlem.
Weather clubs, so there were great sat.
By that time, clubs were all gone. The Apollo was the only thing left. The Renaissance Ballroom, the Small's Paradise, all of those great places, the Cotton Club, they were all gone, and what had replaced them was massive disinvestment.
I met the most brilliant man called Reverend Calvin Buttz, who is the pastor of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and he and another member of the church, Karen Phillips, had a dream of vision to redevelop Harlem, to create an in geo, a nonprofit that would take many of the literally thousands of vacant properties in Harlem and redeveloped them.
And so that's what I did. For eight years.
I worked for him, developing over a thousand units of affordable housing. We helped develop the main commercial street in Harlem, one hundred and twenty fifth Street.
I know that in areas of poverty, the access to fresh food is actually very, very limited. I know there's been a strong movement to try and get food that isn't package, that isn't fast food, that isn't bad for your health into areas of poverty.
When I moved to Harlem in nineteen ninety five, it was a food desert. There was no supermarket. There were no fresh foods to be found other than at the local bodegas, which were stocked primarily with brown things. Brown let us brown vegetables, and things close to their expiration date, whether it be dairy or other products. And so this is why we fought so hard for a supermarket that would bring fresh produce. And so that supermarket came, but
along with it came higher income people. And the risk is always that gentrification means that the winners are the new residents and the losers are the people who have been there, pushed out and pushed out. Today, when I visit Harlem and you come on the subway, come off the subway on one twenty fifth street and you come up and you see on the one side you see Whole Foods, Starbucks.
H and M.
I mean it is I mean there used to be nothing there but literally abandoned buildings. It's been transformed, and Ruthie, there's both good and bad associated with that transformation. And what we at the Ford Foundation have worked on over many years is helping to address the issue of food deserts to finance supermarkets, food shops, other forms of cooperatives that bring fresh food from farms and other places.
It is incredible work that you're doing at the Ford Foundation with your experience having lived in poverty. Were you hungry as a child or were you just limited in your choices?
I was never hungry as a child, but I was limited. And as I look back and reflect on some of the things we ate, it's not a surprise to remember the levels of diabetes. For example, I recall visiting my family back in Rayne, Louisiana after we moved to Texas.
We'd spend weeks in the summer there and I recall walking on this dirt road past various little shotgun shacks where people lived, and seeing people without their limbs sitting on the porches, especially large, often overweight men and women without a leg or with their leg missing from the knee, and someone would whisper, oh, that's diabetes. And then I
think about what we would have for lunch. Sometimes we'd have a slice of bread, a slice of balogne, and what my great aunt would call sweetened water.
What was that?
Just water and.
Chull And she'd take an old mason jar and just put water in from the faucet and then just pour sugar saturated with sugar, shake it and then pour it into our little plastic cups that we have.
I think that we look at food, as you've just described it, as an equal kind of insecure. We look at it as unfair, but we also look at it as great pleasure. We look at it as deliciousness, and we should celebrate it.
Joy of food, it's no matter where we are. Food is joy and the way in which it signifies culture, generosity, a sense of grace, and an extension of human dignity to another. Only food can do that.
It conveys, doesn't it. Food conveys as you say, love, conveys generosity. It also conveys comfort. And so I was wondering what would be your comfort food, my comfort meal, okay, a meal fried chicken, old fashioned potato salad, collared greens cooked in hamhock, and my mother's corn bread. Delicious, comforting, full of memories and love. Thank you, thank you very very much. Well, let's go have lunch.
I love the Idlet's have lunch.
I'm starving. Let's go have lunch. Thank you. To visit the online shop of the River Cafe, go to shop the River Cafe dot co dot Uque.
River Cafe Table four is a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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