#michael twitty

The Bring Your Own Book Club is now streaming, wherever you get your podcasts!

I dare to believe all Southerners are a family. We are not merely Native, European, and African. We are Middle Eastern and South Asian and East Asian and Latin American, now. We are a dysfunctional family, but we are still a family. We are unwitting inheritors of a story with many sins that bears the fruit of the possibility of ten times the redemption. One way is through reconnection with the culinary culture of the enslaved, our common ancestors, and restoring their names on the roots of the Southern tree and the table those roots support.

Jewish food and black food crisscross each other throughout history.  They are both cuisines where homeland and exile inter-play.  Ideas and emotions are ingredients - satire, irony, longing, resistance - and you have to eat the food to extract that meaning.  The foods of both diasporas depends on memory.  One memory is the sweep of the people's journey, and the other is the little bits and pieces of individual lives shaped by ancient paths and patterns.  The food is an archive, a keeper of secrets.

Speaking of homosexual, the kitchen is also the place I once cut myself badly with a knife trying to discover what my G.I. Joe and He-Man looked like "under there"... What a fucking disappointment and waste of blood.