Are You a Soul Food Junkie? Support Byron Hurt's Film @ Kickstarter

"Is African American Culture a Culture of Soul Food Junkies?"

Food traditions are hard to change, especially when they're passed on from generation to generation. In this PBS documentary, award-winning filmmaker Byron Hurt shares his journey to learn more about the African American cuisine known as soul food.

Baffled by his dad's unwillingness to change his traditional soul food diet in the face of a health crisis, Hurt sets out to learn more about this rich culinary tradition and its relevance to black cultural identity. He discovers that the love affair that his dad and his community have with soul food is deep-rooted, complex, and in some tragic cases, deadly.

Through candid interviews with soul food cooks, historians, and scholars, as well as doctors, family members, and everyday people, Soul Food Junkies blends history, humor, and heartwarming stories to place this culinary tradition under the microscope. Both the consequences and the benefits of soul food are carefully addressed. So too is the issue of low access to quality food in black communities, which makes it difficult for some black people to eat healthy. In the end, Hurt determines whether or not black people are addicted to this food tradition that has its origins in West Africa and the black south, yet is loved all over the world.

Byron Hurt is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, published writer, anti-sexist activist, and lecturer. Hurt is also the host of the Emmy-nominated series, "REEL WORKS with BYRON HURT." The Independent named him one of the "Top 10 Filmmakers to Watch" in 2011. His most popular documentary, "Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes" (BBR), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was later broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens. In 2010, MSNBC's TheGrio.com named BBR one of the "Top 10 Most Important African-American Themed Films of the Decade." Byron's writing have been published in several anthologies and in the media he has been covered by The New York Times, O Magazine, AllHipHop.com, NPR, CNN, Access Hollywood, MTV, BET, ABC News World Tonight, and many other outlets. Byron's latest film, Soul Food Junkies, is scheduled to be released in 2012.

Support Byron Hurt's Soul Food Junkies @ Kickstarter





Byron Hurt on Left of Black | January 2011

Film Teaser: Byron Hurt's 'Soul Food Junkies'

Filmmaker Byron Hurt explores the health advantages and disadvantages of Soul Food, a quintessential American cuisine. Soul food will also be used as the lens to investigate the dark side of the food industry and the growing food justice movement that has been born in its wake.

'Left of Black': Episode #16 featuring Byron Hurt and Blair L. M. Kelley

Left of Black #16—January 10, 2011
w/Mark Anthony Neal

Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by filmmaker and activist Byron Hurt in a discussion of his recent film Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes and his in-progress film Soul Food Junkies. Neal is also joined in-studio by North Carolina State University historian and critic Blair L.M. Kelley in a wide ranging conversation about social protest in the early 20th Century, social media and contemporary Hip-Hop.

Byron Hurt is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, a published writer, and an anti-sexist activist. His films include the award-winning Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes and I AM A MAN: Black Masculinity in America. Hurt is currently completing his next film Soul Food Junkies, which explores the health advantages and disadvantages of Soul Food.

Blair L. M. Kelley is the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (UNC Press, 2010) and is Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University.