The series serves its viewers dreams, nightmares, and dishes with one main ingredient: the Afro-Surreal.
Part 1: Appetizer - Lemon Pepper Wings to Whet The Appetite
The role of food in Donald Glover and Hiro Murai’s Atlanta has been perceptively penetrating viewers’ reality since the show’s premiere in 2016. It is abundant in rich, ponderous stories that stand out against more conventional television. This weighty narrative allows us to experience food culture in an intimate, yet incongruous way.
Murai, who is also the Executive Producer of The Bear, establishes subjective absurdism in his show’s foodscape and subverts the eager expectations of viewers. We experience this absurdism early in the season-one episode “Streets on Lock,” when characters Alfred and Darius open up a box of the infamous J.R. Cricket Lemon Pepper wet wings. As the wings glow intensely with an animated vitality, the audience immediately understands the crunchy, zesty, bliss that the duo is about to devour.
Screenshot of Atlanta Season One. Darius opening a box of J.R. Cricket Lemon Pepper Wet Wings.
Many articles have commented on Atlanta’s distinct political messaging and not-so-subtle jabs at society. The show's usage of food to illustrate racist stereotypes and injustices remains at the forefront throughout the series. First We Feast provided a list of highly honorable food mentions from the first and second seasons, like the “Coconut Crunch O's” fictional cereal commercial that quickly escalated to a commentary on police brutality. Mike Jordan of Eater Atlanta takes the review further, pointing out that food in Atlanta is “speaking in a larger context, becoming a touchstone threaded through the lives of the characters.”
But there is more to the Emmy-award-winning dramedy than trippy messaging and surrealist food tactics. “The thesis behind the show was to make people feel Black,” Glover remarked. Indie Wire quoted Glover saying “You can’t write that down. You have to feel it. The tonal aspect was really important to me. I want people to feel scared, because that’s what it feels like to be Black.”
Television, like cafés and kitchen spaces, has become a key social space. Hulu, HBO Max, Prime Video, and other streaming platforms are now the entertainment dealers to the modern salon. The screen is where we consciously and unconsciously ponder today's biggest issues, and where we create space for discussion and debate. Television is a place where new and emerging thoughts can be deeply explored and widely shared, where creators can set foundations for social mobilization.
In addition, food is pervasive; it’s a life force. We all have a very intimate connection to food, whether we realize it or not. When you take something as universally prevalent as food and pair it with our modern obsession with television shows, it becomes the perfect recipe for amplifying some of our most urgent social messages.
Bringing food into a scene allows for an immense amount of information and emotion to be conveyed in a single frame, no less in an entire show. Professor of Food Studies at NYU, Fabio Parasecoli explores the intersections of food, media, and politics around the world. As he puts it, looking at the symbolism in culinary traditions allows for the much-deserved attention to food's role in pop culture. This is why placing food into the medium is critical to communicating pertinent messaging.
Atlanta uses food to exemplify the works in the emerging genre of “Afro-Surrealist Food Media.” The genre began with Henry Dumas, a revolutionary who merged the ideas of Black identity and power into expressionism. Dumas used surreal techniques to question the bizarreness of having to cope with a racist society. Amiri Baraka, an American writer and political activist, coined Dumas’ work as Afro-surrealism.
What makes something surreal is allowing the unconscious mind to be free in its expression. Leopold Senghor, poet, and African Surrealist makes the following distinction, “European Surrealism [is] empirical. African Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical,” as quoted from D. Scott Millers work Black is the New Black. Afro-surrealists take this concept of liberated expression further by harnessing its introspective nature. The art chooses to observe Blackness internally in order to reckon with the outward harsh realities, while also being a space for intentional liberation through imagination.
Envisioning a life outside of struggle and survival was far-fetched for many Black folks in the ’50s, yet to “behold the invisible, and see unknown wonders,” as Ralph Ellison put it, was unshackling in its own right. Things get weird, it goes there. And one of the most effective and pointed ways to get there is through food.
A key component of Afro-Surrealism is reality itself. Creating from actual lived experiences is the root of the art form. Food is commonly seen in reality with a universally familiar presence. Afro-Surrealist food media uses food as a tool to become central to the narrative and facilitate the creation of an entirely different world, organically connected to our own.
Atlanta makes intentional use of food to portray threats to and responses from Black culture, particularly through these Afro-Surrealist techniques. For example, in season one, episode nine episode titled “Juneteenth,” Earn and Van are invited to a holiday celebration where the vibe feels off—not just off but increasingly ridiculous. The host Monique, played by Cassandra Freeman, and her White husband Craig, played by Rick Holmes, throw a gaudy Juneteenth party with the snobbiest of guests in their mansion maintained by an all-Black waitstaff. Van and Earn are welcomed to embrace “the culture” while they conceal their reality as separated parents and Earn’s profession as the manager of a rapper.
Screenshot of the Atlanta “Juneteenth” episode displaying the themed cocktail menu.
Later, in Craig’s study, Earn finds himself surrounded by African memorabilia and pictures of Craig’s “pilgrimage to pay respects.” Craig sips on Henessy and asks Earn why he hasn’t been to Africa yet? Craig’s patronizing “White liberal” persona, as well as his love-to-hate “wokeness,” simmers down to a shameless White-saviorism complex. But Earn provides a composed response, “This spooky thing called 'slavery' happened and my entire ethnic identity was erased."
The perturbing tone of the episode is complemented by a slavery-themed drink menu and a buffet table decorated to look like a slave ship. The bartender offers a fixed menu for the evening consisting of “Emancipation Eggnog,” “Underground RumRoad,” and “Forty Acres and a Moscow Mule.” Who doesn't love a themed party right? Yet, instead of these drinks evoking liberation, celebration, and Black joy, they elicit tasteless American History 101. This further exacerbates the textbook conflict of a limited history providing a limited future for Black people.
The drinks become a metaphor for the heavy deficiencies in Black American history preservation summed up to key phrases: not allowed to venture, wander, and explore new stories and flavors. Earn patiently resigns, ordering the “Plantation Master Poison.” Earn makes a pointed decision, now steadfast in his internal rage that any drink will do, but especially one that puts a tiny bit of imagined power back into his hands.
In Atlanta, Glover and Murai are painstakingly self-aware that they have come together to create unconventional art that asks the audience to surrender to the screen for brief dreamlike entertainment. Food is an artistic and revolutionary language used to tell impactful stories. Exploring and sharing stories through our screens amplifies the reach and wonderment tenfold. Parasecolli explains the tools of media as “picturing, projecting, and prompting.” These are the agents for social mobilization in visual media realms that seek progress and reform.
In this 3 part essay series, I hope to further explore food as a radical element of change in the works of Glover, Murai, and Janine Nabers. I will continue to examine how Afro-Surreal food media techniques are utilized in the portrayal of culture.
Khori Eubanks is currently in her 2nd semester in the Food Studies Program. Her passion for learning about food is tethered to celebrations of life and prioritizing radical forms of love. She thinks food is a beautiful language to speak and has known in each moment of developing her food career that she was in the right place surrounded by people who realize the power of food. She started cooking in high school and consumed a lot of food media growing up, Alton Brown was a constant fav. After attending The CIA and studying Culinary Science and Food Studies, she worked as a Food Technologist formulating plant-based food products in Southern California. Now her pursuits are to use food to tell stories for change by creating and analyzing food media and its role in policy and activism.
IG @khorianderr