And one of those fairly true stereotypes, in my area. I can’t get a motherfucking Coke Zero (Diet Coke, yes; Coke Zero, no) at most of the places I frequent in Black neighborhoods, but there’s a vast array of fruit flavored pop I never knew existed. Pineapple, yo! They make pineapple pop! And it’s amazingly delicious!
Geography matters. Round these parts, grits is Black people food. Polenta is White people food. Go figure.
I’ve owned a copy of Ernest Matthew Mickler’s WHITE TRASH COOKING since it first came out in the 1980s. It was an eye-opener for me. A lot of things I considered “Soul Food” turn out to be the cuisine of the Southeastern Proletariat. Class rather than ethnicity. Poor people’s food, regardless of race.
White and black folks in Brooklyn (ME and MOST black folks anyway) like to swap tips and recipes from cultural backgrounds. I talk curries with West Indians, what beans to cook with what rice with Trinidadians and Jamaicans, potato salads and the place of fried bologna on the breakfast table with elderly Great Migration survivors.
Here, polenta is fancy Yankee food for hipsters, goor-mays, and ethnic Italians. Grits is poor people food. The stoneground grits in my freezer were a gift from a white South Carolina lady truck farmer.
Can confirm that, in a previous discussion a video was found where Jim Jones himself showed to a reporter before the mass suicide their storage sheds and inside one bin there it was the Kool-Aid next to the Flavor Aid too.
It is one of the few curious cases where the ones debunking common ignorance get it usually half wrong.
Maybe they USED to be poor people food (and I’m not even sure of that), but as a Southerner its my experience that it is no longer poor people food. The folks down here don’t eat it because its cheap. They eat it because they like it.
And I’ll through this out. If you have had grits before and you didn’t like it, there is a fair chance it is because you had shitty grits ™, not good grits made properly.
Poor people eat the stuff they can afford (and often not even enough of that). If you still like the cheap crap and you can afford better, then its not poor people food. Obviously, this is an aggregate statistics kind of definition/problem.
IME in the south, I’d say Kool-Aide is probably as much a poor people beverage as it is a black folks beverage. Throw in the fact more black people are poor and there you go.
However, for the most part, once a poor white or black or whatever southerner gets to choose between Kool-Aide and a decent cola or actual fruit juice because price isn’t an issue, they will ditch the Aide most of the time.
I’m an upright, always-ten-minutes-early white guy married to an Indian woman who embodies the IST stereotype. When we had one car, I had to stop ride sharing with her and start taking the bus, because the concept of getting to work on time was just a mystery to her.
Anyway, I had not heard the Kool-Aid stereotype before either. I grew up around a fair number of racists, but that stereotype slipped past my notice.
Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. A version of Jello salad was served at every church potluck, luncheon and Army wives group function through my entire youth and young adulthood. It has its charms.
Fruity soda is a Hispanic thing. As your cite notes, Crush is sold extensively through out Latin America. IIRC I usually see a variety of fruit soda in the LA/Mexican aisle of my grocery store.
The stereotypical black drink I am aware of is anything Grape flavored. Maybe it’s morphed from Grape Kool-Aid to Kool-Aid in general, though I am dubious.
As far as Grape flavored, I’d say it is not so much that black/poor people like grape kool aide as it is that of all the kool aide flavors, grape is probably the most tolerable of the flavors, if you get what I mean.