Although central to American literary naturalism, the black experience often becomes obscured by a critical emphasis on white-authored writings and social Darwinist discourse.  Many associate naturalist narratives with images of physically fit white men asserting their racial and sexual superiority; however, a dedication to social reformism and the immigrant experience also guided this group of authors, as exemplified by Upton Sinclair’s muckraking fiction and Jack London’s socialism.  Recently scholars like Jennifer Fleissner, June Howard, Donald Pizer, Jeanne Reesman, and others have drawn attention to representations of racial otherness in naturalist novels.  They focus also on the role of women writers, such as Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose contributions to literary naturalism have been overlooked historically by critics.  My work on Richard Wright contributes to these critical conversations about marginalized identity.  This paper is interested particularly in the presence of black voices within literary naturalism, a movement often viewed as masculine and white.  Through an ecocritical analysis of culinary culture in Wright’s African American narratives, I participate in recent efforts to rethink naturalism in terms of race, gender, the body, ethnicity, and class.