Wow this guy is amazing uhhhhhh uhhhhhh such awesome work
-blogger at Afroculinaria.com
“Twitty is deeply engrossed in both the African American and Jewish food traditions. “Blacks and Jews are the only peoples I know who use food to talk about their past while they eat it,” says Twitty, 38.”
“From Richmond it was a short jaunt to Colonial Williamsburg, where Twitty spent the week lecturing, conducting training sessions and cooking in period costume at three of the living history museum’s venues. In all his talks, Twitty emphasized the impact of chefs and cooks of African descent on shaping American and Southern cuisines in colonial times and after.”
“At a conference he met the scholar Robert Farris Thompson, author of “Flash of the Spirit,” a book about the influence of African religions on African American art that helped him see that “soul food” was, among other things, a spiritual term describing a mystical connection between humans and the animals and plants they eat.”
“He cooked and he gardened. He studied heirloom seed varieties, some that had been brought from Africa and some that had been carried from the New World to Africa and then, on slave ships, back to North America, among them okra, black-eyed peas, kidney and lima beans, Scotch bonnet peppers, peanuts, millet, sorghum, watermelon, yams and sesame. He called those seeds “the repositories of our history” and wrote about them in a monograph published by Landreth Seed in its 2009 catalogue.”
“Twitty’s embrace of all the various parts of himself — African, African American, European, black, white, gay, Jewish — sometimes raises hackles, as does his habit of speaking his mind. An article he wrote in the Guardian on July 4, 2015, suggesting that American barbecue “is as African as it is Native American and European, though enslaved Africans have largely been erased” from its story, elicited scorn and worse: Many commenters were outraged by his idea of barbecue as cultural appropriation.”
omg i’m SO EXCITED to see Michael Twitty on my dash!! do you guys know about Michael Twitty? He is a gay black Jewish culinary historian, writer and chef whom I met when he was one of the best speakers on a truly great panel I got to attend last year.
It’s especially cool that he should show up when we were just talking about the power of Shabbat – he really believes in and practices the power of sharing meals, and not as a sort of meaningless get-over-it platitude.
“It’s in the dead quiet after the laughter than I know I’ve made the dent,” he said. “Food is lovely and nice, it gets us to a new place of understanding, but then you must deal with the serious stuff. I guess my model, again, is Passover. It’s a riot, right? Kids doing little plays, wine, and songs. But the best Seders are when, in-between, you get a lofty discussion of freedom and slavery and what they mean, what oppression does and how self-liberation takes place. That’s what I try to capture in how I teach and how I cook.”
Also, he takes no shit.
The cure is to not lie or obfuscate. The cure is to bear witness, to be real, to be truthful. The way to change our fate is to change the names we give and take, to re-arrange our place, to change our deeds, to pray yes, but also to give back and to cry out. (I thank the Rabbis of antiquity for this formula.) My path is not one of quiet acceptance but of a heritage born of the ring shout, forged in blood, sweat and tears in the slave quarter. This is why I cook.
[…] I disagree with some of your supporters when they assume that the spotlight put on your search for inspiration and ideas is on an “overgrown path”—when African, African American and Afro-Caribbean and Latino culinarians have been writing about these connections and celebrating them without you—and without any media coverage for quite some time. Pierre Thiam’s Yolele and my Fighting Old Nep pre-dated your trip to Senegal—but nobody lauded us for making the connection—nobody said we were exploring “unchartered territory,” nobody said we were going where nobody had ever thought to go.
His Paula Deen takedown went viral. But this food scholar isn’t done yet.
326 Miles 