#RolandMartinUnfiltered - 11.28 #RMU: Chef Michael Twitty talks "The Cooking Gene" and Black culinary history in the South

Episode Date: December 5, 2019

Author Chef Michael Twitty talks about his book, "The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History In The South." Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Thank you. Let's get right to it. First of all, it's very interesting. This book is called The Cooking Gene, a journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South. Of course, we just had I just had about 20 family members in in Virginia for Christmas holidays. And so I needed I needed them black people to leave because it was way too much food being cooked. Yes. Because my because my dad was a was the lead chef for my grandmother's catering business and then my brother's an executive chef and so they do they were planning meals and I mean literally you talk about it was I

was plus nine pounds over the Christmas I mean was just too much I was like y'all I leave Texas from And it's Virginia folks, which means it's going to be like me. No, no, no. We're from Texas. From Texas. Oh, that's even worse. From Texas. And then, of course, my maternal grandparents are from Louisiana. Oh, man. Okay.

How many gumbos were there? There were two. So we had a 40-quart pot that we did Christmas Eve, and then we did a 16-quart pot on New Year's Eve. Can't deal. So it was just crazy. So let's talk about this year uh... uh... many folks saw you in the skip gates uh... documentary uh... in so wouldn't you begin this

during we see you know what i i i want to document is i want to put this thing in book form well i was a young kid my father to the williamsburg virginia and i saw my first historic cooking demonstration, but no black people. There were black people all over the place.

At one point, at Living History Museums, it was all black folks doing the work. But it was done in such a way that you never thought they had skills or abilities or knowledge. And by the time I came around, there was a program to talk about how enslaved people lived and worked, but there was also historic skills and foodways totally detached from us. So when I grew up, became more interested in living history, I started to cook in the

fashion of our ancestors. I'm not a reenactor. I don't reenact slavery. Got it. I'm an interpreter of slavery. I'm a 21st century person who dresses in the manner WHO DRESSES IN THE MANNER, KNOWS THE SKILLS, KNOWS THE WORK, KNOWS THE MATERIALS. BUT MY THING WAS, BLACK COOKS WERE THE BEST COOKS FOR THE FIRST 250 YEARS OF AMERICAN

HISTORY. WHERE DID THAT GO TO? WHERE DID WE START? WHAT MADE US THE BEST COOKS? AND SO, GOING FROM PLANTATION TO PLANTATION, FROM STATE state to state, I was able to pick up interviews with elders and go in the woods and go in the water and just learn from the ground up the cooking tradition that is the roots of soul food. JUAN GONZÁLEZ- I mean, it's sort of like, if you're trying to have a conversation

about the history of music— KEN HARTMANN- Right. JUAN GONZÁLEZ- —you have to deal with black people. KEN HARTMAN music. Right. You have to deal with black people. Right. And you can't deal with that unless you actually go to the Mississippi Delta, unless you understand. You have to encounter.

And even where that came from. Right. The role that music played came from different parts of Africa. Right. And so, to me, it's basic. music played came from different parts of Africa. And so, to me, it's basic. It's kind of basic that if you want to understand how this thing evolved, then you've got to go to the foundation of it. Then the next level for me was DNA,

because now we live in a time where Alex Haley couldn't even have dreamed of, where we have access to our DNA relatives from West Africa. And so, for me, it was like, OK, grandmom and them came from Sierra Leone, and grandpa and them came from Ghana, and so-and-so came from Nigeria. What are they bringing to the pot? What did they pass down that I received in my own kitchen? And how does that work for every other black American, especially now that we're coming up on the 400th anniversary of our arrival in British North

America? And when we talk about, we talk about this idea of being the best cooks, it's interesting, the moment you said that, you know, I thought about where we are now, that when, if you ask that question, well, when you have these conversations, and so it's, oh, it's MasterChef, it's Bobby Flay, it's Emeril. It's Paula Deen. It's Paula Deen. And you go, so you now all of a sudden, you go through this whole marketing of food as if black folks didn't exist.

I mean, even when it was some show I was watching, even when it's, oh, you know, who's the best grill master and who makes the best barbecue don't look like us. Right. I mean, it is as if we, to me, it's sort of like having a conversation of music and then you go, oh, it's the Beatles. It's Elvis. You go, hold on. Y'all missing a few people. It's all, the TV makes it look like it's all about the Bubbas and not the brothers. And that's—we are the root of barbecue. We're the root of barbecue culture.

I get in trouble all the time for making these arguments, because it's a different—it's an alternative key to an alternative history. But that alternative history is the real history. That is where we come from. Food impacted every single aspect of every part of the African American journey, from when your and mine ancestors were chosen to be exiled through war, to when they arrived, to how long they lived when they got here, to what they passed down health-wise to their children and their grandchildren and their grandchildren's grandchildren.

Food impacted every part of the journey, and and still impacts every part of our identity today. Every part of our identity. Well, first, it's the one thing that if you have a get-together, it's amazing. You could have the greatest basement, the greatest party room. People are going to gravitate to the kitchen. That's right. I mean, the reality is our— I mean, again, as I said, all my family,

they were planning the menus a month before, a month and two months out. And I'm like, because we're on a family group and I'm going, what the hell y'all talking about? I'm like,

y'all ain't here for two more months, dude. They were literally planning the menus out in advance. Because the hearth is the heart. The heart of the household. You know, going to West Africa, you know, multiple times, and going back in March, taking a group of black chefs who had never been to the continent to go learn traditions of Benin in Togo, to learn how the spirituality and the health aspect, the food healing aspect,

goes alongside with the traditional cooking methods. And every time you go into the kitchens in the villages, the first place to take you to is the hearth. Why? Because that is where the earth goddesses, that's where the creator, earth goddess, meet. That's where your ancestors are buried, beneath the kitchen. And so all these parts of the different parts of our ancestry, our story, all fit together. We're connected to food in a way that other people just aren't.

And I just taste better, quite frankly. And was that a result of being forced to be creative? Not having everything at your disposal? Was it a matter of constant experimentation? Was it a matter of, I mean, what? All of the above. We were already the kind of people who went, okay, I kind of like that over there.

Let me borrow that. Let me make it my own. Let me blackify. Let me do this. Let me take this. Okay, I don't have much of this. What can I substitute with it? How can I still make it taste good?

I think one of the biggest misconceptions is soul food is what was thrown down to us, and that's not the way it works. Soul food is really what happens after slavery, after emancipation, after Reconstruction. But the roots of that cuisine are what happened when we, the enslaved, enslaved the palate of the enslaver, to the point where he and she doesn't know where they began and we end and vice versa. In other words, we Africanize the power of this country, especially the American South.

White Texans eat okra. White Texans eat black IP. Right. The Klan had to go to a black restaurant in North Carolina to get their catering for their big Clucks meeting. What does that tell you? You know, Robert E. Lee said that the savior of the Confederacy was the black IP. His favorite meal was fried chicken and cornbread made by his mammy.

Come on, now. They can't live without us. They can't exist without us. But it's another story—and this book is not about them. It's about how we were creative, how we loved each other through food, how we sustained our traditions and resisted slavery and maintained our African identity through food. So when I go to Nigeria and I say, oh, yeah, we got okra, and they go, what? And I say, oh, yeah, okra, hot pepper, fried chicken, barbecue, fried fish, cooked grilled

fish, we got the whole—and they just don't know what to do. But the thing that got me the best was, when I was cooking with some of the women in Ghana, I was tasting the food, and I went like this. I put the spoon in the pot, put it in the back of my hand, licked it off. Everybody went wild. Because it wasn't the association with the food, it was the fact that they knew that somebody's mama

was at Cape Coast Castle, and she survived to teach her daughter, teach her daughter, teach her daughter, teach her children. So what you did, that was passed down. That's right. And they knew that was the African way of how to taste the food. And everybody just, it was like drums and whistles and everybody went off because they knew that tradition had been part of us this whole time.

Yeah. So the idea, so the folks you mentioned, the idea of tasting something and putting it on the back of your hand. Yeah, if you saw your grandmother do that, your mother, you still do it. That is as African as you get. Yeah, that among many other things we did. You know, that grease pot we had in the kitchen, the fried, the chicken grease, the fish grease, the bacon grease, a whole everything. Basil by the front door.

Saw basil all over West Africa by the front door of the kitchen, or the household, for good luck and for seasoning the food. I mean, all these little things that my grandmother from Alabama, my grandmother from Virginia taught me, and my grandfather from South Carolina taught me, I saw them, and I keep seeing them. And this is why it's so important for us to realize that also our cuisine is not a pathology. You know, we're taught all our lives that black English is bad English, black music is a source of violence, black dance is too sexual, you're this. Everything in our culture is considered a pathology by outsiders.

And then we absorb that respectability of politics. And we've had a lot of articles talking about, soul food will kill you. Soul food is not junk food. Soul food is not fast food. Soul food, the real soul food, is food from the earth. It's plant-based with meat as celebration food, with the sweets and all the good stuff as signs we love each other. But those were foods that were only available at certain times seasonally and proportionate to the family. So, first of all, define soul food. So, what is soul food? What are the specific meals or specific food groups? What would you call soul food?

Hey, I would call soul food—I'd even say soul food embraces Creole food, because really, they're part of the same family. It's that cotton, tobacco, and sugar belt, you know, that was from the Chesapeake to Louisiana, from Texas to Florida, Missouri to Alabama. And it was shaped by enslaved people who were the cooks, who were the chefs, who were the caterers, who were the best. You know, James Hemings, you know, the best chef in America was a black man who was enslaved by Thomas Jefferson. And those DNA lines, he was his wife's half-brother. They were all connected. But he infused European food with African ingredients to create a gourmet Southern cuisine that everybody envied.

And it wasn't just him. These professional cooks were sent to Europe, but the main thing was they were still drawn an African background. So over time, we had foods that were based on our gardens, foods that were based on fishing, foods based on gathering. We've lost a lot of that, because we had to move for the sake of our lives in the Great Migration. People forget that.

We were forced out of our secondary home, because we had to make money, because we had to not get lynched, because we had to survive. And we lost a lot of our indigenous foods that were part of the soul food tradition. So now people think that soul food is just a meat and three, the candied yams, fried okra, greens with a lot of pork in them. Nothing can be further from the truth. Mac and cheese. Mac and cheese.

Those are all really well and good celebration foods, fried chicken, but they're not the standard canon. The standard canon is actually beans and cornbread, sautéed greens, fresh—whatever fresh soup or stew you can get from the various parts of your garden. And yeah, there was pork in that pot, and there was—but if you're working a 16-hour day—I've picked cotton 16 hours. I do that every single year to remind me why I'm grateful for where I live now and who I am now. But that work requires calories.

Well, it's just like I was reading a story several years ago. Yeah. And they were talking about the evolution of breakfast. Right. And they said what folks didn't understand was we were an industrial nation. Right. And so these men, they were largely men, would eat these massive breakfasts because they were going to work in plants.

He said, and then they wouldn't have their next meal until it was lunchtime, and that was 45 minutes or whatever. He said, that's where these big breakfasts come from. So, yeah, so when they had pancakes or biscuits and grits and eggs and sausage or bacon and all of that. There's a reason for that. Yeah, because you were leaving home and you were burning off a hell of a lot of calories. It wasn't just they were not eating huge breakfasts and then coming to sit in an office. Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right.

But, you know, for us, our story is that hypertension begins both with the stress of racism and enslavement, but also the fact that those Africans who made it alive across the ocean during the Middle Passage and being seasoned in the castles were the ones who could retain the most sodium. So the very things that cause us, you know, chronic health issues are the result of the adjustment to a system we were not used to. I mean, diabetes, certain cancers are because we were biologically clustered. I mean, every African was handpicked to be an enslaved person.

And that's the scary thing. We're the largest group of genetically modified humans on Earth, because somebody had to pick every single one of us who became our ancestors, right? But the chronic illness factor comes from the fact that we didn't have gluten for 70,000 years. And all of a sudden somebody goes, here's a biscuit, here's pizza, here's a sandwich. Those foods are very convenient and easy, but we're the lowest gluten tolerance—we're

the lowest gluten tolerance of any human population on Earth, the sub-Saharan Africans. So we have a lot to think about in terms of how we restructure our diet, our lives. There's no reason why you can't enjoy those foods. But for me personally, it's like switching out the Kool-Aid for the hibiscus, you know, the cola for the unsweetened tea. You know, the fried chicken becomes—it's special because I make it great, but the problem is it smells of your house for three weeks, people eat it in two seconds, and it's a delicacy.

Why would you want to make that every week? So I kind of emphasize that, but also the fact that no one has to tell black people about plant-based food, healthy food. That's part of our heritage. And that's why we're taking black chefs—the second wing of this project is taking black chefs back to the continent to say, OK, this is your heritage you never learned about in culinary school, because they never taught you. They never thought it was relevant.

But this is the root of Brazilian cooking, Haitian cooking, Jamaican cooking, American cooking, other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. But that also goes back to, again, this notion of white is right, the white standard. Because earlier when you talked about Thomas Jefferson's cook, how he fused what came from Europe with what he knew from Africa, it's the same thing. If you had this conversation, it's, oh, no, the French are the best chefs. And it's, ooh, French cuisine. And then if you want to delve into why is it that very few black artists or virtually no black artists have paintings that sell for 30 and 40 and 50 million dollars because, oh no, it's Rembrandt, it's Picasso. And so, when you begin to identify all these things that are great—not us—but then,

when you do visit African nations and you see these art pieces and you see these sculptures, you're like, oh, my God, that blows away anything. There would be no Picasso without them. There would be no modern art without them. And there wouldn't be a vernacular cuisine of the Americas without us. I remember going to the Southern Foodways Alliance and having to explain to a crowd of mostly white Southern food enthusiasts that corn had been with us as Africans for 200 years before there was an American South.

So we had 200 years to play with this plant, to think about how we were going to incorporate it into our diets, to sort of really get used to it. And it was no wonder when we came to America we made corn sing, cornbread, cornmeal on the catfish, you know, corn pudding. You can keep going. Even though it was a Native American crop, we were masters at being amateur botanists and zoologists. We just kind of figured things out. We came to this country, looked around, and said,

how are we going to make these plants? That plant looks familiar, looks familiar, like what somebody had back home. That persimmon looks like the ebony fruit from back home. How are we going to make that work? How are we going to use it to heal ourselves? How are we going to use that to endure exile, to give something to our grandchildren? That was the thinking of our ancestors. And for me, for a lot of people, there's this internalized shame about enslavement.

I'm proud of the picture in my book. I'm proud of it, because this was taken outside the kitchen at Somerset Place Plantation, North Carolina. Dorothy Sproer Redford spent years researching her family history. And why do you want to look like a slave? I said, no, I don't want to look like a slave. I don't want to look like a slave. I'm dressing like an enslaved person.

And I'm dressing like the greatest generation in American history, the survivors of American chattel slavery, with whom we would not be here and With whom there would not be in America So how do you talk about taking those chefs back in? And so how do you or how are you? Getting them to understand that for lack of a better phrase, the white standard is not the standard. Because what I mean by that, my brother's an executive chef, and he's had all these certifications and

whatever. That's a white standard. No, no, no. You have to have these things in order to be deemed an esteemed chef. As if all these things that you've had to research, as if these things are really relevant. That's not, because I think we know some great chefs who have absolutely no credentials, who don't have any paperwork, there's nothing on the wall, they don't need to wear a jacket with a name on it. I mean, they don't need

anybody else to validate their greatness. Well, see, the thing is, now we recognize this. The problem is, is at the same time the civil rights came in, we told our children, don't

cook. Don't cook for Ms. Charlie and Ms. Anne no more. Wait a minute. At the same time, white chefs turned cooking into a, oh, that's that old black man and an old black woman cooking in the back of the kitchen into, I'm young, I'm white, I'm professional, I have a degree. And you need a degree. You need to be like us.

You need money. You got to go to school. You got to be like us. You need money. You got to go to school. You got to go to CIA. You got to go to these other institutions. And that left a lot of us out. So between us going, we don't want that anymore. So it was just two ways.

It was a two-way street. And then those of us who were left said, I'm going to do sushi. And then somebody would say, no, you're going to do soul food. But no, but I'm really good at sushi or French cuisine. No, but you're black. You've got to do this. You've got to do Korean food. And then others went, why do I have to do that when I want to do my own cuisine?

No, you should really do French cuisine because that's the only way to prove yourself. See, it's interesting as you say that because what immediately jumped into me as you were talking, when I read The Education of of blacks in the South, 1860 to 1935 by James D. Anderson, how that was this massive fight with the creation of Hampton University, because the free slaves that, yo, we don't want our kids planting stuff. They wanted, they wanted their children to be doctors and lawyers and engineers. And so that was this huge battle. And then, but you had Armstrong who was basically wanted black folks just to keep being focused on agriculture because white folks need it. His greatest student, Booker T. Washington, goes to Tuskegee.

And so he's talking about that in Anderson's book. He lays out how the students at Tuskegee were essentially illiterate. They could build stuff. They could farm the land but couldn't necessarily read and do math. And that was his battle. That was his battle for 30 years at Hampton because they fought, don't want our kids just doing agriculture. So then when you made that particular point, oh, no, no, we don't want y'all cooking, so

then you had black folks who, because this was all we could do, no, we want our kids to do be doctors and lawyers and engineers. No, no, no, no, we were coming out of oppression and did not want the next generation to do the very things that we did to get through. And as opposed to it should have been, wait a minute, we can do both. Right. And then we got passed over to other folks. They turned it into this art. And that's why they get to be on TV and do all this stuff. And that's how I came out of the scene, talking about appropriators, talking about Paula Deen,

talking about the fact that, you know, we're talking about Paula Deen and N-Word. We're really just talking about why are you letting Paula Deen say, my grandma made a hoecake and get away with it on TV? Why do you have shows on while she goes to her granddaddy's plantation with hundreds of enslaved people? Come on now. You know, what's the problem here? Why are we not able to engage with our history? But not only that, but, you know, understanding that it ain't about here.

It's about our 70,000-year journey as people in West Africa before we even get here. So for these chefs who are coming from the Caribbean, from America, we're like, we go with Roots to Glory tour company. And what we do is we craft these tours so that we can go make the palm oil, bring the fishing nets in, go to the farm, see how the cutting grass rat is eating. I did not eat the cutting grass rat. I wasn't ready for all that.

But the bottom line was— First of all, what is a cutting grass rat? Cutting grass rat is a huge bush rodent that is very popular in West Africa. It looks like a possum and a beaver did something they shouldn't have. And it is the most—people love it. They just love it. It's tender and it's crazy. I love it. They eat itaver did something they shouldn't have. And it is the most, people love it. They just love it. And it's tender. I love it. They eat it. Oh, they eat it up. Their whole restaurant said the only thing they can do is this

huge cutting grass bush rat. And you said, I'm going to draw the line. I'm going to draw the line. It smelled good. I ain't going to lie. That sauce Ms. Mabel put together was banging. But you just said I'm going to draw the line of eating rats. I have to draw the line of eating this rat. But it's just ingenuity. So we didn't come here and learn to eat a

possum. We already knew. Okay, cool. It looks like something from back home. Let's do it. Okay, hold on. So Shannon Sharper and I were talking about this. And Shannon Sharper grew up in South Carolina. And Shannon would talk about

eating possum and all this sort of stuff. He's like, man, look, I grew up in the country. So what you're saying is we will say, oh, my God, what are you doing in this country? But no. That's our heritage. It was folks took what was happening in African nations. And to your point, oh, that looks like this, substitute.

Right. Switch it out. So, for these chefs to see that and go, oh, my God, my grandfather did that, or we're from—say, oh, from the West Indies, we do that the same way, or we're from wherever, put the pieces together. They want to know where they come from. I have one chef who is coming to Benin who has worked with Native American chefs, like my friend Sean Sherman, who wants Native American communities to become better and healthier

by eating indigenous food. We've worked with him for several years now. He's like, well, I got to come back to my home thing. I want to know how we do this on a level with African culture and African American culture. JUAN GONZÁLEZ- So, with this this—and again, I made that point earlier about white validation. Yes. With this, are you essentially trying to get this next generation of black chefs to come come to the point of saying, stop being so focused on what they, what they say you need in order to ascend to be a great chef. Focus on what we have always created. And then what comes out of that is a whole new culinary standard.

Absolutely. I'm sorry, a new culinary standard that is actually old. Yes. You know, when I was in Senegal, we were sitting down to have okra soup, okra stew with people in the hotel, the chefs at the hotel. And they were really hospitable. It was a big part of Senegalese culture. And my new cousin, Fanta, she said to me, you know, Michael, you are—we are your new family, but we're your old family, and you're always welcome at our table.

And that's the kind of thing that I want to engender in us. I mean, this book was not only hard work, but it became the first book by a black American to win Book of the Year, the James Beard Awards. You know, I was told when I started this project and started to market it to different publishers, America's not ready for you. You're not the American story. Literally, I mean, I'm quoting them.

Your voice shouldn't be the lead voice talking about the South. What about so-and-so and so-and-so? And they were all white authors. So people resisted the idea of us taking our DNA, our family history, our food history, melding them together and saying, no, no, no, these are my credentials. Right. Some clubs you can join in, others you got to be born in. And that's what I say. And I say, that is—until you go through this process, you can't tell me who I am.

Now I know who I am. I know the names the Klan people came from in the continent, what ethnic groups they were. I've been to the villages. I've had that moment of going from the castle on the coast of Ghana to the port in Yorktown, where they arrived. And from now on, I want other black chefs of multiple generations to look at their food and go, you know what?

We own this. We got this. And if we want to play with French cuisine and Japanese cuisine, great. If we want to meld them together, great. We want to end these diaspora wars and do Caribbean meets West African meets Brazilian, fantastic, because that is our collective family heritage as black people in the Atlantic world. And at the end of the day, and just using your example about the big rat, was it cutting

grass rat? Cutting grass. Cutting grass rat. At the end of the day, even though you didn't eat it, at the end of the day, you said, oh my God, that smelled great. Right. Eating it, it smelled great. At the end of the day, with food,

how does it taste? I mean, you could say, look, I have one of my aunts, my mom's aunts, my mom actually baked cakes for 30 years. Wow. So she did wedding cakes, every kind of cake possible.

The reason I don't like icing today, because I had to taste all that icing when I was a kid. She's like, okay, taste this. All right, damn, too bitter, too sweet, too. But I had one aunt. Her cakes fell apart. You literally had, you couldn't cut a cake. You had to get a damn spoon. Okay.

It didn't look good. Right. It fell apart, but damn sure tasted good at the end of the day food is a how does it taste right that you can have all the greens you want to right but if it don't taste good that's right end of conversation well that's the answer the appropriation conversation right there is that you know yeah you can make chicken. You're not going to make it well. You're not going to make it as good as. You can call it that.

You can call it that, but it's not the same thing. Nice try. And that's because we need the source code. You know, I tell people on Twitter and at Culture Soul, you need the source code. Black folks, we need to maintain and upkeep our source code. Because without the source code, nobody has anything else. Which is why I think for people who don't cook, people go, but what did you put in it?

It's like my mom makes this pineapple cream cheese cake. Oh, man. I mean, literally, it's not an icing. It's like my mom makes this pineapple cream cheese cake. Oh, man. I mean, literally, it's not an icing. It's like the top of the cake, the frosting, the icing literally is pineapple cream cheese. Wow. And, dude, the cake is ridiculous. And my brother's tried to make it.

He can't. He's an executive chef. It's some things that people, but what do you do? It's something that you can't replicate. It's that special thing. It doesn't matter what culture or what background you come from. Here's the same rules. I give lectures on how to teach people how to, like, do family recipes. But at the end of the lecture, I remind them something.

You are not your mom and daddy. You will never be them. You are only half and half. And not even really that. Your children are not your parents or their grandparents or great-grandparents. They are little pieces of you. Their children are going to be little pieces of them. Same thing works with food. Yes, my grandmother was fantastic and my mother was the best but

I do things a little differently like okay cool my people will do something a little bit different after I'm gone just like DNA food and DNA are one of the same each generation changes up a little bit. We can't be afraid of the fact that life is dynamic, spirit is dynamic, non-static. Just like food, it changes. So if the pineapple cream cheesecake doesn't stay the same in three generations, that's cool as long as it's still there. And that's the point I try to make people, the generation pass along. First of all, because the new generation didn't taste the old one so they they ain't got

nothing to compare it they don't know they don't know you just keep your mouth shut right it's all good right it's all good so let me ask you a question so when you were so I was going through you talked about picking cotton for 16 yeah the iPod in my ear. Wow. You know why? Because this damn spiritual didn't work. They were too slow. So I turned on the folk music from Alan Lomax from the prisons

in Texas and Louisiana. And you know what? I picked me some cotton. I learned, and I broke down. I had an emotional breakdown because I realized I'm here by myself alone in this huge field, endless, this blinding me with the light I broke down, I had an emotional breakdown, because I realized I'm here by myself alone in this huge field, endless,

this blinding me with the light hitting the land, the cotton, and I'm realizing something. I'm realizing this is why we created a music, a community, a religion, around keeping each other awake and alive. You couldn't do, you can't do this—you can't be—you can't do this by yourself. You need your people. And all of it hit me, all at once.

It's not—you know, one enslaved person couldn't do it. It took a whole community of people constantly striving to be free and resist slavery to exist. JUAN GONZÁLEZ- When you were making this rice, explain that process. Because the photo says, Pounding Carolina Gold Rice. Yeah. A Middleton Plantation, Charleston, South Carolina. And that is before I knew, before I knew that my mother, a blessed memory,

her direct maternal ancestor was Mende from Sierra Leone. And I knew that her furthest back grandmother was born in Charleston. So I didn't even realize that I was doing something that my family had been part of their life for several thousand years. Rice goes back in West Africa 3,500 years, indigenous. And these women were brought specifically during the middle of the 18th century to cultivate rice. So when I talk to black folks about using their DNA and using their family history and

kind of combining narratives, I go, where are your people from? They'll say, I'm from this state and this state. OK, great. So who came from where? We work out the details. Then they get, did you get your DNA done? Yeah, I'm Yoruba. OK, great.

There were only six ships that came to Virginia. Only so many ships came to South Carolina. These came from Louisiana. And I go, how many generations can you go back? Oh, this state. I say, OK, that was when the slave ship came in. And they go, what? I say, OK, it's like you keep digging.

You find something, let me know. Nine times out of ten, I'm right. Because for me, that exact moment, everybody else glorifies when their people came to Ellis Island. We didn't have no damn Ellis Island. My name ain't no damn Twitty. My name is Keta. My name is N'Jai, the Lion Clan. I take great pride in that. But that's because we have these scientific and cultural miracles going on that our ancestors

never could have dreamed of. But when you pound that rice, you learn a couple things. Number one, these women had the strongest arms and upper bodies known to man. And then the second part is they would never break the rights, which is hard to do. When you broke the rights, you made an inferior product. So these women, who were brought in from Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Senegal and Gambia, were so valuable that they made that generation of South Carolina and Georgia planters the richest white men on earth.

They were millionaires within two successful seasons of rice planting. All that came from black men moving the land and black women harvesting and growing and processing the rice. Without that knowledge base, of the 12 richest men in the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 10 were South Carolina rice planters, the richest man was a Maryland tobacco planter, the second richest man was a New England ship captain who shipped enslaved people, including rum and molasses. So, without us, no America, ever.

Which is why, when we talk about the book the other have never told the reality is there was no capitalism we actually created the very system that America right still thrives on today right because because that without the slave trade without that driving the economics, without it driving not just the South but also the North—I mean, the 13 colonies had no economic system. Nope. We were it. We were the cattlemen.

We were the rice growers. We were the tobacco growers. We were all of that. We were also—I like to think of it this way. What if we had been given our emancipation right then, in the revolution? With that African know-how, with our American, European and Native American understandings, we could have been the greatest doctors. We could have healed so many diseases, you know, to the point where white supremacy screws

itself, where, you know, you go, a point where white supremacy screws itself, where, you know, you go, okay, well, the potential for us to be, have done all these things was lost by keeping us down, you know? Well, when I interviewed the white supremacist racist Richard Spencer, when he goes, oh, well, you know, his opposition to slavery, he says, no, no, no, he says says why people are so smart. We would have figured all these things out He said he said we would have figured out how to pick cotton We would have figured out all these different. He said we would have he said we're so smart We would have figured all these things out

And I see it from the general me I said people but you didn't but you didn't I said, but you didn't You search the world for spices and then't even use it in your own food. Come on now. Come on now. Let's rethink this process. No. You know, for us, for me, it's like, let's go beyond the survival aspect and go into one of those things that your mother and grandmother and even your daddy did, well, for me, it

was, you know, every Southern black boy learns to barbecue from his daddy and granddaddy. What is that, what kind of emotions does that engender? I grew up hating soul food when I was a little kid, because I grew up in the late 70s, early 80s, when KFC was considered what? Women's liberation. Pizza Hut was the greatest thing in the world. McDonald's had playgrounds, right?

So we were, we didn't like that food at home. It had the bones in it and the pieces of fat and all kinds of weird stuff. But then, you know, my grandparents, my mother took me in the kitchen and my dad took me out and said, okay, let's go barbecue. I learned how to pick the greens and pick through them, learn the process and owning it. And our children, if they only had that process, could really soar with our food. I do have to ask you, you just jumped out. What is it about black men and grilling and barbecuing? It's like it is a rites of passage thing.

Yep. Go to the continent, Cameroon, the first meal we had, poulet brasser, barbecue chicken. Poisson brasser, grilled fish. Ghana, every single corner has a barbecue man. Nigeria, every single corner has a suyam man. Take the little bit of meat, put red pepper on it, throw it on a stick, put it on the grill. Take big slabs of ribs, with the sauce piment, the hot sauce all over it. Every country I've been to so far has a barbecue man on every single corner. And hot sauce.

And it's like, okay, I can't get over this. I can't. I tell people all the time, going to the con, it will make you understand how black you are, but didn't know it. Right. You know, but it'll also teach you some of the fundamental differences, but also some things we lost, you know, because cooking is not just cooking, right? You barbecue that animal.

The process of slaughtering the animal is very, not in our places, but in most places, very deep and, deep and meaningful thing. A kid doesn't learn that that's just meat. A kid learns that's a living thing. Right. And that living thing has a spirit. And they have to do it a certain way. Or else, it's going to be bad.

Bad energy, bad food, bad everything. So for me, it was like every time I go, I pick up a little bit new part of the puzzle. And hopefully when we go to Benin, we're going to be, I should probably say this, we're doing a GoFundMe because we're bringing our first cinematographer with us. So we're able to document what the chefs see. So you've been doing all this stuff? You haven't been shooting this? We haven't been shooting anything.

Are you serious? Yes. Yes. We've been looking for black folks with cameras who have the talent who are able to do this. Wow. I mean, surely I was like, oh, I know y'all got all kind of stuff. We are just starting that process. We're just starting that process. We at least just going to strap a GoPro to your head and then just wherever you look is recording it.

I mean, that was because I was like, oh, man, I know you've got hours and hundreds of hours of stuff. Wow. The so I talked about how do we how do we not turn this page, but how do we sort of go back to the future? Right. Somebody is watching right now. Look, they haven't been to these various countries. They haven't been to different continents. But they may now realize, you know what, I should stop running away from. What is ours? So what are you telling where to start?

How to start? I'm going to tell you something very special to me. When I was a freshman at Howard University, I met an extremely important playwright and writer, August Wilson. August Wilson was a really nice man. He was very congenial. And I asked the first question of this thing, this big to-do. And then later that night, I brought my little books together, my plays.

I came to see him. And I lined out the door. He pulled me. I said, you're the young man who asked me that question. I said, yes, sir. So he pulled me aside. We talked for like 10 minutes. I knew I was taking up his time. And August Wilson said to me, I

said to him, sir, what do I need to do to be a great writer? What do I need to do? He said, looked me dead in the face. He says, I want you to go back to the South and find Africa for your grandmother. Okay. Okay. Big hug. Sign my books. Enjoy. August Wilson. Never saw the man again in his life. He said, go back to the South for an advocate for your grandmother. We have to be rich to remember that our stories, our parents' stories, our grandparents' stories are the first to be rescued, and our children to recognize that their life and their times are just as valuable.

We forget that we forget our own narrative to start to record them. We need to sit down with our parents and go, Mom and Daddy, how did you meet? Where did we come from? What do you know? Talk to anybody who—they don't have to be just grandparents, collateral relatives. Go through that process. least get get there go to the go to your family's home place don't just go there for a home going or a homecoming go there and spend a week go to the cemetery go to the church go

to the land find out where your people were enslaved or where they owned land. Sit there and meditate. Get your DNA done. I'm not going to go into that whole wasp nest of should we or should we not. You know where I sit on this puzzle. Go to African ancestry. Go to a black-owned company. It will tell you where you're from.

Okay? Do your other DNA. Do your autosomal DNA. Find out where all the different parts of your identity come from. I talk about being part European, being part Native American, etc. But start there. And then, if you're ready, if and when you're ready,

you can book that ticket. Go to the continent. See something. Bring family with you. And then bring something back. Bring back not just pride in where we come from, who we are, but remember that first moment when you get off the plane in Ghana,

when they say, welcome home, what that feels like. 2008, July 2008, when I went to Ghana. So we landed, and I took a picture real quick of my feet touching the ground. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And the cats with machine guns were like, no photos. And I took a picture real quick of my feet touching the ground. Yes, yes, yes. And the cats with machine guns were like, no photos. And I was like, damn, y'all and these guns.

I'm taking this photo. And literally, it was getting off the plane, stepping on the tarmac. I took a picture. It was very intentional. Right. One, I took a photo of when we descended. And my first, I took a picture literally as we through the clouds, so my first view of Africa. Yep.

As we were descending across Ghana. But yeah, got off the plane, they were like, no photos. I was like, damn all of y'all. It was like, click. It was like, and I had some sandals and linen on, but that was it. I was like, I don't care, y'all can have a machine gun all you want.

See, now it's different because they know they're getting something out of it. So now it's like, oh my brother, where's that dash at? I always ask this question, and this will be the last question. You probably already answered this, but every author I interview, I ask them,

what was your wow moment when you were writing this book and researching it? What was that? I don't know all the things, but that one, that or the first one where you just went, wow. Okay. So I'll put it down to three.

One was fine. I was related to Sarah Palin. That sucked. I was like, okay. That's a wow moment. Yeah. But it balanced stuff out with Samuel L. Jackson. So if you're watching Samuel L. Jackson, what's in your wallet?

But other than that, it was for me realizing that, you know, when I went to Howard and learned Yoruba, and I went to Nigeria, and then I came back and found I had four Yoruba cousins. And the ancestors were talking to me through the Ifaod board going, we're really proud of you. You need to know that. And I lost it, because I didn't have my mother anymore to say that to me. And here they were talking to me and saying,

yeah, you're back home. You have a name now. You've got to come back. You've got to do your thing. And just that feeling of intuitiveness, the fact that things had have been passed down. One of the most important narratives I have is that my grandmother's father's family actually passed down the knowledge that his ancestor came from Ghana. And when my family did the

African ancestry test, they found out, bam, 100% correct. And then we found the relatives. So, you know, being part of a black family that for 250 years said, we're Ashanti, we're from the Gold Coast, that's who we are. Then to be able to verify that, then go to Ghana and see my people. That was my biggest wow moment.

The book is folks, the book is The Cooking Gene, A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South. Michael W. Twitty, I appreciate it. Yes, sir. Thank you very much. All right. You want to check out Roland Martin Unfiltered?

YouTube.com forward slash Roland S. Martin. And subscribe to our YouTube channel. There's only one daily digital show out here that keeps it black and keep it real. It's Roland Martin Unfiltered. See that name right there? Roland Martin Unfiltered. Like, share, subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's youtube.com forward slash Roland S. Martin. And don't forget to turn on your notifications so when we go live, you'll know it. Teksting av Nicolai Winther this is an iHeart podcast