Book Review: The Cooking Gene (Michael Twitty)

 CW: enslavement/trauma

Cross-posted at Reb's Reading Rants and Raves

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A "journey" is an apropos description for this book. I won't even attempt to quantify the percentages of history, memoir, documentary, and food writing. Twitty manages to intertwine his personal story with a history of foodways and people that inextricably connects ancestry, personhood, and food in ways that left me contemplating my own complicated feelings about food and culture. As an adoptee, with two parents who have died, I've not cared to search too much into my own genealogy--I suspect in fear that somehow the cultures and stories into which I was adopted will become "less than." If fear is in the mix, I am even more humbled because this book is at times gritty reckoning with both Twitty's own ancestral history, and this country's foundational story of exploitation and abuse. There are many passages in the book that make it obvious that our narratives about food, crops, and foodways are never isolated. Culinary history is American history. Or African history. Or European history. You get the idea.

"Instead, cotton ensured the growing and complete racialization of what it meant to be of African descent. African ethnic groups became the early Afro-Creole culture that began African America. If King Cotton had never reigned, we African Americans might be like an other ethnic group --stories might be passed down; names remembered; song, words, religions, prayers, perhaps, even on might say, a sense of pride. Instead, names were changed again and again and again, as people were sold, further commoditized, dehumanized, and abused." (357-8)

Twitty tells us: "My food is my flag" and his quest to to "regain...a heritage denied" is filled with pain, joy, curiosity, and tremendous beauty. There are multitudes of lessons here, and at some point I will give it a re-read, because I'm certain I'd find even more layers. One of my biggest takeaways, however--and this is coming from my historian's soul--comes from this passage on the last page:

"I mistook the past for a landscape to be managed by the learned mind but I was wrong. The past is not to be conquered or conveniently cinched in neat lessons and sound bites. It is a territory that will absorb you almost against your will." (425)

If you aren't interested in culinary history or genealogy...READ THIS BOOK. You owe it to yourself. Michael Twitty allows us to glimpse this "journey" and understand the true meaning and depth of that Carl Sagan quote that is too often blithely offered as inspiration instead of an invitation for reflection and exploration: "We are, each of us, a multitude."