Southern Foodways, Enslaved Agency, and Michael W. Twitty’s "The Cooking Gene"

Michael W. Twitty & “The Cooking Gene”

• Culinary historian, lecturer, and live‐history interpreter focused on Southern foodways.
• New book released “today”: The Cooking Gene.
  • Investigates Southern cuisine by centering the enslaved Africans who physically built – and culturally seeded – the region’s food culture.
  • Intends to place food, genealogy, race, and memory in one coherent narrative.

Residency at Colonial Williamsburg (Virginia)

• One-year appointment as a historical foodways resident.
• Location receives about 500,000 tourists annually.
• Twitty’s kitchen conditions deliberately period-accurate:
  • No modern knives or air-conditioning.
  • Wood fires; dense smoke; long hours – invites guests to confront the uncomfortable realities of 18th-century labor.

Food as History & Identity

• Twitty’s central thesis: “Our story is told through our plates.”
  • Food works as a universal marker of identity – what “we” eat vs. what “they” eat.
• Using cooking to make abstract historical pain tangible.
  • Demonstrations require physical discomfort: smoke-filled eyes, heat, repetitive tasks like shucking corn.
• Audience engagement strategy:
  • Encourages visitors (often conservative, white, nostalgic) to feel dissonance between romanticized “Old South” and the brutal labor that created its cuisine.
  • Positions himself in “a place of subversion” – wearing period clothes that trigger nostalgia and then overturning expectations with historical truth.

Power, Stereotypes & Empowerment Through Food

• Chickens, guinea fowl, small garden plots were allowed property for enslaved Africans when hogs and cattle were forbidden.
  • These animals not only fueled stereotypes (e.g., “Black people and fried chicken”) but also represented economic agency.
  • Women famously “sold chickens and vegetables so they could buy their husband’s freedom.”
• Lesson: seemingly minor culinary items can hide deep stories of resistance, entrepreneurship, and family preservation.

Inclusive Pedagogy: “Everybody at the Same Table”

• Book and demonstrations aim at multiple audiences simultaneously:
  • African Americans seeking ancestral reconnection.
  • Curious white Americans willing to respect the tradition.
  • Casual food lovers drawn by flavor alone.
• Goal: foster cross-cultural dialogue, shared curiosity, and respect through a single, shared plate.

Day-in-the-Garden & Mise-en-Place Scene

• Morning harvest: hot peppers (“Can’t have pepper pot without hot pepper”), rosemary, assorted vegetables.
• Emphasizes field-to-table continuity that enslaved cooks maintained out of necessity.
• Example of Pepper Pot: A West Indian/African-influenced soup featuring greens, meat, and plenty of spice.

Dexter Thomas’ Participatory Experience

• Required “price of admission” to eat: labor in the kitchen.
• Dressed in reproduction enslaved garb; immediate visceral discomfort.
• Tasks performed:
  • Tossing vegetables into boiling pot.
  • Managing open flames and intense smoke.
  • Shucking corn while singing a work song (“Gonna shuck that corn …”).
• Twitty’s gentle but firm guidance: balancing hospitality with confrontation of past realities.

Demonstrated / Sample Dishes

• Black-eyed-pea fritters
  • Visitor remark: “kinda like falafel.” Highlights African ➝ Middle-Eastern ➝ Global parallel.
• 18th-century style fried chicken
  • Visitor praise: “Not my grandmother’s fried chicken, but it’s close.”
• Vegetable-rich pepper pot & garden stew (implied through harvest scene).

Southern Cuisine as a Global Fusion

• Twitty: “First American cuisine to really draw from the whole planet.”
  • Southeast Asian spices (e.g., ginger, black pepper, hot chilies).
  • Middle-Eastern ingredients (sesame, okra via North Africa).
  • European staples (wheat, pork techniques).
  • West, Central, East African vegetables, legumes (black-eyed peas, sorghum, leafy greens).
• Demonstrates early globalization long before modern “fusion” labels.

Ethical, Philosophical & Practical Takeaways

• Gastronomy can be a portal to reparative history.
• Embodied pedagogy: physically cooking in historic conditions produces empathy and insight unattainable from textbooks alone.
• Negotiating nostalgia:
  • Twitty embraces the aesthetic trigger (costume, hearth) but weaponizes it to reveal buried truths.
• Food sovereignty & micro-economies: enslaved people used permitted livestock and produce to accumulate resources for freedom – an early example of entrepreneurial resistance.

Key Numeric Points (in LaTeX compliance)

• Annual visitors to Colonial Williamsburg: 500,000.
• Length of Twitty’s residency: 1\text{ year}.

Connections to Wider Curriculum / Previous Lectures

• Genealogy & DNA: Twitty’s past work involves genetic testing to trace African lineages – bridging biology and culinary anthropology.
• Atlantic World studies: reinforces themes of forced migration, cultural syncretism, and commodity chains (sugar, rice, cotton).
• Critical media literacy: challenges sanitized depictions in living-history museums and food TV nostalgia.

Potential Exam Prompts & Study Questions

• Explain how small livestock (chickens, guinea fowl) functioned both as a stereotype and as a liberation tool for enslaved Africans.
• Discuss Twitty’s strategy of “subversion through nostalgia” in public history spaces.
• Identify at least four geographic regions whose ingredients influenced early Southern cuisine and provide one example ingredient from each.
• Reflect on the statement: “Our story is told through our plates.” How does Twitty transform culinary curiosity into historical reckoning?