The series serves its viewers dreams, nightmares, and dishes with one main ingredient: the Afro-Surreal.
Part Two: Main Course - A Big Bowl of Mom’s Spaghetti
Food can easily slip between the conscious and the unconscious, and become a part of our identity. This is what makes food an ideal tool for the metaphorical and mystical traits that contribute to such visceral explorations. If the food we interact with is a part of who we are, then the threat of that food being taken away, abused, and put at risk, therefore puts our sense of self in danger. As I demonstrated with my last piece, the lemon pepper wings can transport us, but now I will further show how the creators, Donald Glover, Hiro Murai, and Janine Nabers continue to use food to construct the weird.
To be stripped of one's food identity is to be invaded, to imagine that your cultural sustainability at risk, and your sense of self in danger In the first episode of season three of Atlanta, “Three Slaps” (or as I like to call it, “Spaghetti and Capers,”) the power of food is exemplified in every shot. This episode breaks away from the main characters of Atlanta to share a haunting view of how Black youth experience identity and mobility. Loquareeous is a young Black boy who has found himself in the role of class clown, a reality constructed by his classmates who see him as such. After a peer-pressure-induced disruptive performance, Loquareeous is disciplined by his grandfather with three methodic slaps across his cheeks in front of the school counselor.
Later that evening, Loquareeous finds himself back in his mother's home, rummaging through the fridge to find yet another bowl of leftover spaghetti. This spaghetti is not Angelini Osteria Bolognese by any means. This is $1.29 boxed noodles, paired with bland Prego and chewy chunks of greasy ground beef—a meal that gives you just enough fuel to do your homework, chores, and keep it moving. Most importantly, it's easy, fast, and affordable—a working mother’s bliss. Despite some complaints under his breath, Loqaureeous heats the dried, refrigerated spaghetti in the microwave and turns on cartoons to have a brief moment of reprieve.
A Screenshot of Season Three, Episode One of Atlanta, Loqaureeous eats a bowl of spaghetti while watching cartoons.
That is, until Child Protective Services arrives, apparently in response to the three slaps. Before he can even finish the bowl of pasta, Loqaureeous is taken away and adopted by a white lesbian couple living in the Georgian woodlands.
Loqaureeous was forcibly taken from his home and placed in a stranger's care that was supposed to provide a “better” quality of life for him and his three new foster siblings, all also Black. A new strange world, one that is eerie and foreign, unfolds. This construction of the weird is a key element of Afro-Surrealist techniques to bring into life what it’s like to be young, Black, and completely lacking agency. Loquareeous enters the home timidly and immediately notes the “gross smell” of homemade kombucha brewing throughout the house. Before he goes to get settled he's offered, “capers or sprouts?” to go with the, “fried chicken dinner,” that his new foster mother has prepared.
The punchline, of course, is that those options are not options at all. They are completely unknown specimens that are as good as boogers to the kid who’s never seen these foreign green toppings before. These supposedly generous options place Loquareeous in a position to choose bad or worse, and the power to provide either is completely one-sided. His lack of power is even clearer in the next scene. The welcome meal is served, and the plate rim is lined with pale pink juices running from the pasty, undercooked chicken leg. It is, at best, a chicken that was doused in flour and microwaved for eight and a half minutes to gummy grotesqueness. The capers and avocado slices lay pathetically next to the bewildering piece of poultry.
Screenshot taken from season three, episode one of Atlanta. Frame displaying dinner plate of pale chicken leg, sliced avocado underneath a few capers on plate with pink liquid running around the rim.
“This food is nasty,'' Loquareeous complains rightfully.
“No, honey, it's just better for you,'' one of his new moms replies, explaining that the kind of food he’s “used to eating” has simply always been made with too much salt and sugar.
Yet, the meal presented is clearly absurd. This microwave-fried chicken isn’t just uncomfortable, it is a violation. Being stripped of one's food identity is an invasion. We see now that when one’s cultural sustainability is at risk, one's sense of self becomes endangered.
Loquareeous eventually makes it back to his original home; the first thing he does is eat a bowl of his mom’s spaghetti. Atlanta makes its viewers experience this danger of being Black and “saved” by white people. It makes you look at the way that a “healthy meal” can be dangerous, and $2 spaghetti can become salvation.
Later in season three, we grab lunch with the most eccentric and fascinating character, Darius, in the episode, “White Fashion,” or as I like to call it, “Jollof Gentrification.” Darius introduces a local European woman, Sharon, to the wonderful world of Nigerian food. The establishment, Eko Chops, is decorated with red painted walls adorned with safari prints, colorful framed images, and a large Nigerian flag pinned high up on the wall. They are greeted warmly by Mimi, the waiter who banters familiarly with Darius. Before Mimi can return to explain the menu, Darius confidently orders the “Moin Moin, with egg, or some liver.” The liver, an obscure choice revealing his Naija heritage, triggers the Auntie’s welcomed interrogation, “When was the last time you went [to Nigeria]?”
Screenshot of Eko Chops, the fictional restaurant from Atlanta season three, episode six .
This fictional restaurant is more than a local joint. It is a tether for people to share connections to the West African diaspora—a connection that transcends time and space, created by food. The camera pans to others in the restaurant, showing a mother feeding her infant the crown jewel of the menu, okra stew, with a quick long stream of the viscous juices running from mouth to bowl. By the end of the episode, we return to the location of Eko Chops to find it permanently closed. The camera pans from the closed doors to a food truck on the curb. Now chef and owner, Sharon, finishes up an order for “Brown jollof, shaved carrots, and golden raisin with one Malibu and one cheesy jollof.” Darius looks in terrified disbelief as Sharon explains plainly that Eko Chops is “Naija Bowl now.”
Screenshot of, episode six of Atlanta. Darius comes back to find Eko Chops replaced by the food truck Naija Bowl.
Sharon's negligence is the most surreal part, and yet the realest part, of this scenario. This act of aloof saviourism brutally displaces not just Mimi, but also entire traditions and food memories that were actively serving the community in an irreplaceable way. Mobility is addressed again in the context of removal from a space. Food here is being utilized as both a symbol of trust and shared identity, as well as one of betrayal and exploitation. The erasure of Black folks from our cuisine is a clear, global, and imminent threat to Black folks’ identities. Food in Atlanta is surreal simply by reflecting everyday experiences.
As the series came to a close we saw just how important food's role was in telling pivotal stories in the show. In the finale, Earn and Van commit Alfred to supporting Atlanta's first Black-owned Japanese fusion restaurant, which is perhaps a nod to the creators, Hiro Murai being Japanese, and Glover being Black. The fictional Chef Kenny and Owner Demarcus serve up risky dishes like Blowfish cheek, known to be “extremely poisonous” putting their crafts on the line while heavily dependent upon patronage from “Black people hopped up on nationalism.”
This episode highlights the strife between the Black-owned restaurant, and the familiar “Fast Food Franchise,” that glosses over its racist past while simultaneously profiting off of Black America. This moment is what strikes fear in the audience and in the characters. It's a guttural and instinctive reaction when one's food identity is poked at, prodded, and exposed.
The group is scolded by the owner Demarcus for their lack of loyalty to Black-owned establishments as Alfred pleads, “Okay, I get it,” but the situation quickly escalates to Demarcus instructing to “Lock the doors…If you get it then eat it…eat my poison fish, brother.” Demarcus laughs maniacally, offering hot sauce. Hot sauce to bring a familiar flavor, to soothe the fear inevitably doused over a potentially poisonous food. Regular viewers of the show can clearly see the series finale serving as a metaphor for the entire show. Like Atlanta, a cultural phenomenon of mixed reception, the sushi restaurant was similarly experimental. It was imaginative, attempted to be “woke,” and broke boundaries in an unapologetic way that actively threatened the systems in place.
Just as the protagonists subject themselves to the risk of dining at Atlanta's fictional first Black-owned sushi restaurant, the viewer is asked to take that risk, explore, and surrender to Atlanta and the entire experience.
These stories, told using Afro-Surrealist Food Media, exemplify the ways that Atlanta tethers and twists viewers’ perception of reality and of food itself, ultimately connecting to larger issues that Black people face constantly. Atlanta obliges the audience to grasp society's perception of the food portrayed, and then carry that piece of information with us as we observe how the characters respond and how their real-life analogs resist the theft of food identity. Atlanta allows us to wonder and imagine: the first step of mobility.
In true Afro-Surrealist Food Media fashion, the episodes never try to further the plot but continue on journeys of experiencing time, place, and essence through Black bodies, and thus constant and very real imminent dangers lurk. With mobility comes the power to confront fear with curiosity and harness our imaginations to see beyond this reality. Afro-Surrealist Food Media asks us instead how we can shape more just futures with food as a critical tool.
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