Reviewed by Sonia Keiner, Chesapeake Foodshed Network, HCG Associate

I had the great opportunity to listen to culinary historian and chef, Michael W. Twitty’s keynote speech at the Future Harvest Chesapeake Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture conference this past January in College Park, Maryland. His words, energy, emotions, and passion had me rapt and I immediately ordered his book, “The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South,” (he sold all the copies he brought and signed before I could get my hands on one.) I highly recommend this comprehensive book (416 pages with notes, an extensive bibliography, peppered with recipes) for anyone interested in the intersections of African, indigenous, and southern culinary history, slavery, liberation, genetic exploration, and the complexity of identity.

“Race is an illusion. Food is real.” Hundreds of farmers and food system workers erupted in applause with Twitty’s statement. Twitty wove genetics, sociology, history, and personal story into his well-received keynote. My mother drew a genetic framework for my whiteness at an early age and that has always stood as a foundation for my academic exploration of race and identity in the United States. When there was absolutely no talk of race in my high school curriculum (a diverse school setting in the County next to Twitty’s home in suburban Maryland) my mother had already taught me that whiteness was an evolutionary genetic mutation and it wasn’t until grad school that I was able to explore these incredibly important intersections in a formal curriculum.

Twitty begins his thorough search into the past by first researching his own genetic constitution as an entry point to find his ancestors, no easy feat for peoples with a history of slavery in ancestral lines where families were torn apart and records aren’t always meticulous. “All I ever really wanted was a recipe of who I am and where I come from.” In this respect Twitty’s story can read a bit at times like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s classic, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Similarly there is a magical realism that seeps through the pages from Twitty’s deep spirituality and connection to his ancestors, the land, and foods that sustained them.  “This is personal,” Twitty says, a self identified African American, Jewish, gay man, descended from African slaves, white slaveholders and “a trickle of others, including Southeastern indigenous nations.”  “I didn’t know who I was, where I came from, what our names were, why we’re here at all.  I have used food my whole life as the pathway into our collective and my distinct familial past.  We are here for a reason —-to make our way back and forge a path forward.”

This book (and Twitty’s meticulous preparation of ancestral foods) is a labor of love and pain, scholarly investigation, and redemption.  He is at the center of this story, starting as a child where he did everything he could to avoid “slave” food, to his painful coming out story in his family’s kitchen, “the kitchen no longer felt safe if I couldn’t use it to tell the truth,” through his vast travels to his ancestral lands across the ocean (both African and European) and onto the final pages of the book, “where food becomes a tool to repair the walls of black identities.” A man who picks cotton to feel what his ancestors experienced while listening to slave songs on his ipod is a man on a spiritual mission. “…the black journey in the Americas is founded on a human sense-the sense of taste.  Slavery began with food.” We must remember that cacao, coffee, rice, arrowroot, peanuts, corn, wheat, spices, and many other foods produced by slaves in the Americas and other locations in the Global South fed “the consumption of colonialism and white, western consumers.”

Twitty’s is a profound and poetic voice. He does not suffer fools (at all) but also presents an open heart that does not discriminate. His stories of disgraceful oppression are dovetailed with stories like that of a white student of his, seeking understanding and redemption for the history of slaveholding in his family. His frameworks are complex, as they should be.  We “Americans,” we of these lands of the United States are a heterogeneous tangle of genes, identities, conflict, oppression and love.  Our food is no different and we must pay homage to our African ancestors who essentially made southern food what it is.  They were agricultural experts (targeted for their know-how in Africa) when they were forced here on the middle passage and endured, survived, and in many ways thrive today DESPITE continued oppression.

“The kitchen was, perhaps more than any other space during slavery, the site of rape after rape, sexual violations that led to one of the more unique aspects of African American identity, our almost inextricable blood connection to white Southerners.” In fact, most African Americans average about 10-18% European admixture. I’m reminded of words I heard from the mouth of bell hooks once that stay with me, “we struggle within the spaces of our own contradictions.”  This is the sort of complex, nuanced, contradictory conversation we must continue to have to move forward. “Black folks have a gift for complicating the stories that Americans like to tell about themselves,” says scholar, John Edwin Mason. We see what happens in our culture when we simplify our story (and it is indeed OUR story); oppression continues, racism soars, walls are built.

The birth of southern cuisine could have only happened within the intersection of African, European, and Native American foodways. Beans and rice, rice pudding, okra and tomatoes, gumbo, greens, spicy stews, greens, black eyed pea caviar…all signs of the Africanizing presence in cuisine. Many English words for these foods are adapted from African words; Okra (okwuru from Igbo) and Gumbo (kingumbo) to name just a couple. “Who owns Southern food and who created Southern food is a question that has mostly been in the mouths of those whose perspective has been one of privilege by position, authority by default and a history written by the victors in the centering of white supremacy…The privilege of living now is that I can seat myself at the master’s table-the table of my white ancestor, a slaveholder-and interpret his world, and he has no say.”

Twitty ponders whether the White people who know they share DNA actually see him as family.  He asks some important questions. “Would we be better off if we embraced this complexity and deal with our pain and shame?  Would we finally be Americans or Southerners or both if we truly understood how impenetrably connected we actually are? Is it too late? Maybe I’ll just invite everybody to dinner one day and find out…It is not enough to be white at the table. It is not enough to be black at the table. It is not enough to be “just human” at the table. Complexity must come with us – in fact it will invite itself whether we like it or not. We can choose to acknowledge the presence of history, economics, class, cultural forces, and the idea of race in shaping our experience, or we can languish in circuitous arguments over what it all means and get nowhere. I present my journey to you as a means out of the whirlwind, an attempt to tell as much truth as time will allow.”

I have so much more to tell you that I learned from Twitty, about cottons’ role in creating a killer diet, and West Africa and Twitty’s great-great-great-grandmother, the 2^nd Middle Passage and the Great Migration, persimmon wine and culinary justice, and barbeque. But perhaps it would be better for you to hear Twitty’s voice for yourself.

Photo by Sonia Keiner, Future Harvest Casa Conference, 1/18

We watch environmental disasters at home and abroad regularly. Our hearts went out to victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and to the hundreds of thousands of people lost in extreme weather events in Asia. We ache for people dying in extreme heat in the Middle East and we watch in anguish as people are swept away in massive floods in the Midwest. We fret over California’s drought situation because we know the future of food is on shaky ground. We know these aren’t just regular weather events anymore. We learn new meteorological terms; derecho, micro burst, convective storm cells. Those of us who read the scientific literature know that humans are fueling the fire for environmental destruction; burning fossil fuels, deforesting, building more and more impermeable surfaces, destroying protective wet lands, supporting an extractive economy which unravels our natural defenses and resiliency in the face of weather disasters. We see record-breaking heat yearly now. We’ve known for decades that warming would produce more extreme weather.

Some of us joined the clean-up efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and studied the intersection of climate change, poor ecological and community design, destruction of wetlands, storm water management, over-development, racism and classism and believed surely a disaster of this magnitude would force our culture to take a fresh look at who we are and who we need to become. Did it?

After watching my favorite little town, Ellicott City (EC), ‘ruined’ by a flash flood Saturday, July 30, 2016, it hit too close to home.  The term 1000-year-storm used by the media can be misleading. What they should report is that in any given year, there is a 1/1000 or 0.1% probability that a weather event of such a magnitude will occur. I grew up about 15 minutes from downtown EC and always thought I would settle down there. As an aspiring photographer in high school, I (and everyone else) honed photography skills around picturesque downtown, along the train tracks and through the forests. You could have found me and my friends dancing upstairs at The Phoenix on any given Saturday night.

The devastation is heart breaking. Two lives lost, homes and businesses destroyed; climate change and over-development refugees picking up the pieces and moving forward however they can. Of course blessings can be found in the worst pain. Every-day heroes emerge, communities come together in incredible ways to support each other. Unbelievable acts of kindness and selflessness make the tough times a bit easier to swallow.

Downtown Ellicott City is no stranger to flooding. An old mill town, it is situated over the Patapsco River at the bottom of a number of hills. It receives the entire areas storm water runoff. This was not a river flood, it was a flash flood, and as the lowest point in the area it received an unprecedented amount of water; 6 inches fell in just a few hours. Ellicott City is the fastest growing area in Maryland. There has been a 34% increase in population in the last 10 years. More houses, roads, parking, etc…all exacerbating storm water run-off problems in the face of extreme weather events that are becoming the new normal.

Ellicott City won’t be the same… and it can’t and shouldn’t be the same. Things must change and I hope Howard County government officials, community groups and citizens take the time to really think, collaborate and use thoughtful design processes as they rebuild. Tragedies like this force us to dig deep and grow, so, how do we improve ourselves and our communities to withstand future inevitable disasters. How do we rebuild? Do we rebuild in the same locations? How do we build resilience in the face of climate change and adaptation? How do we envision a different way and MAKE that vision come to fruition? We will need some serious cultural, technical and socio-political shifts to create resilient communities capable of shifting the paradigm. Here is one concerned idealist’s non-exhaustive list about what it might take to build sustainable, resilient communities.

Cultural Shifts:

• We are happy with less stuff. We simplify our lives. We find true joy in few possessions. We value quality over quantity or size.
• We are ultra conscious about energy, how we use it and where it comes from. Same goes for our food, food waste and WATER. We don’t buy products with petroleum in them. We’ve gone natural, we buy local. We eat more organic food and less meat. We start a kitchen garden and support local farmers using sustainable methods. We compost. We realize we don’t really need that SUV. Our lawns are more bio-diverse, attracting native pollinators, and we no longer worship chemically-treated grass.
• We become much more thoughtful about community and ecological design. We apply permaculture concepts to everything we design. And we do it in a community-centered, collaborate process; design charrettes-galore with community input. We don’t leave the big decisions up to the developers and government officials making back room deals for money and power.
• We seriously think about (AND DO) smart growth and storm water management. Developers stop chopping down forests and developing every damn green space there is. Governments stop letting them do this and at the very least make them integrate smart solutions into their design plans.
• We weigh the externalized costs of destroyed ecosystems, low-wage labor, oppression and exploitation in our economic analysis and tune into our moral compass.
• Neighbors lean on each other, they don’t hide in their homes in front of the boob tube. They barter stuff, time, energy, childcare, etc…
• Our education system is updated to reflect the challenges and opportunities of this century. Students are taught to be critical thinking problem solvers in the real world rather than rote regurgitators of information for tests.

Technical Shifts:

• We don’t just go with the cheapest option. We explore and implement more sustainable options, renewable energies and resources that will be more affordable in the end.
• We make all kinds of great products out of recycled materials.
• Permaculture design and bioswales are commonplace.
• Rain gardens and rooftop gardens are ubiquitous.
• We collect rain water and store it. We reuse greywater.
• Wetland restoration and conservation efforts are fully funded.
• Communities have terrific public transit systems and are bike-able.
• There are less cars on the road and more people drive smaller hybrid and electric cars running on renewable energy.
• Antiquated storm water management systems that release raw sewage into our waterways every time it rains hard are updated. Raw sewage flowing in our waterways becomes a silly thing of the past.
• Communities become Transition Towns, towns dedicated to working together to reduce fossil fuel consumption.
• Governments support the transition!

Socio-Political Shifts:

• We understand we cannot rebuild and become resilient with the same oppressive frameworks that got us to this exploitive place. Racism, sexism, classism, etc… break down as we enter a new paradigm where we live more in concert with nature and each other.
• As we rebuild communities and become more resilient, we are more conscious of the realities of gentrification and disaster capitalism and make sure low-income folks and people of color are always part of the process. We become aware of the voices that are and aren’t in the room and we work to make sure a diversity of voices are heard.
• Governments no longer spend our hard-earned money on BS wars and stuff the American pubic does not support. Corporations pay their fair share. We are a true DEMOCRACY, not an oligarchy anymore; a government by the people for the people. The people are involved, writing letters, calling legislators, protesting, showing up at court, etc….
• Governments invest in renewables, a green workforce, and the physical and mental health of constituents. They realize big ag. is destroying the land and our health and instead subsidize smaller sustainable farms feeding their communities.
• Governments use our taxes thoughtfully to deal with our waste products. There is money to be made! They start municipal compost programs. They commit to rebuilding the eroding topsoil and do remediation.
• With all this real work to do, there is no place to worry about legislating peoples private parts and where they choose to pee, who they have sex with or marry, what higher power they worship or don’t worship, etc… There is no room for oppression of any variety. Everyone is needed, valued and supported for who they are.