Shauna Anderson is a restaurateur, author, historian, and business woman. Her work, preserving the history and tradition of chitlins, was inducted into the Smithsonian's Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History on April 22, 2003, as part of its collection of materials about African American celebrations and foods. Her autobiography Offal Great: Memoirs of The Chitlin Queen is in the Smithsonian Anacostia Library and the Maryland Historical Society Library. Shauna Anderson recently received the historical gift of a 300 year old cast iron chitlin cooker and washer used by the slaves.
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Shauna had a successful accounting business at the time she decided to revive the chitlin business in the early 90's. She knew that families were losing the tradition of cooking chitlins because high quality cleaned pork chitterlings were not readily available. As a seasoned business woman, Shauna was able to tackle the marketing, supply, distribution, and advertising single handedly to establish Shauna's Hand Cleaned Pork Chitterlings. She was soon selling them online across the country and now has over 10,000 customers. She was crowned "The Chitlin Queen" by media fans and the name has stuck. Saveur Magazine named Shauna "the" source for Chitlins in 2007.[1]
Chitlins (or chitterlings) are the small intestines of a pig which are boiled or fried and are historically regarded as southern cuisine, with African American ties to slavery. Anderson developed her own guidelines to cleaning chitlins when she discovered that Maryland Health Department and the U.S. Department of Agriculture had no regulations for the cleaning process. Chitlins are a food that Shauna refers to as "trash to treasure". What slaves were given was Offal - parts of the meat discarded by a butcher. Slaves turned chitlins and other Offal into something delectable and it became a symbol of survival, pride, and family tradition. But chitlins have also become a strange racial reference for comedians and politicians and racists. Shauna maintains that chitlins are just good food. Based on high demand from people in the area Shauna Anderson planned to open her third restaurant in 2006 but Prince Georges County, Maryland politicians did not think that a chitlin restaurant was fitting for their new development.
Shauna invested in a run down house on Ager Road in Hyattsville, Maryland and turned it into a sunny, charming restaurant space, renovated to restaurant code on every detail. Then an army of inspectors, excessive bills, tickets, vandalism, and harassment threatened to shut her down. Shauna persevered. While waiting for final approvals, the town officials made their intentions known.
A 2007 news article from The Hill states the chitlins store became a prop for ABC’s "stereotype of a poor, dangerous black neighborhood", Shapiro (a city official) is quoted as saying. Prince George’s County Executive Jack Johnson denounced the show in a statement: "When the president [in] the show gets out of a car and is in front of a restaurant that advertises chitlins and pork chops in today’s America, what any right-thinking American knows is we are harking back to an age-old inability of this country to celebrate the leadership and achievement of African-Americans and other diverse people in this country".
Shauna could not understand how a beloved food could become a lightning rod for city development politicking. Shauna fought as long as she could but after investing almost a half million dollars in her new venture, the city rezoned her property residential. Shauna sold her property at a residential price and lost her investment.
Her legal case was dismissed by a local judge and is being investigated by Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski's office.
Shauna continues to sell chitlins online and directly to restaurants.
She is a successful African-American entrepreneur providing a food product that the Hyattsville community have supported since 1995. She has given back to her community over the past decade by employing and training workers coming off public assistance and with my youth mentoring programs and business seminars for women.
Shauna's work and story have been featured in Saveur Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Jet Magazine and featured on CNN.
The Chitlin Queen, previously of Hyattsville, MD, is planning to produce a documentary based on her short lived business experience on Ager Road and the depiction of her business as “demeaning to the community”. Shauna's business was the real life Chitlin restaurant depicted in the ABC "Commander in Chief" episode. Now that Jack Johnson if facing sentencing, Shauna Anderson plans to tell the full story of how she was run off of Ager Road in Hyattsville. Shauna purchased a property and invested over $400,000 in her Chitlin Market which she planned to open in 2006. The Johnson administration continuously harassed Miss Anderson with excessive zoning renovation requirements, ticketing of her Mobile Unit (while Taco Trucks sat unticketed), inflated water bills, and denials for public events. Shauna’s Chitlin Market was rezoned residential in 2006 causing her to sell the property. She is now requesting stories from other small businesses that were victimized by the Johnson administration. Shauna looks forward to Hyattsville succeeding with development plans and preventing the kind of political corruption that she was subjected to on Ager Road.