Culinary Injustice | Michael Twitty, Culinary Historian

Wow Buffett I know the 10 shoes in the room got to joke I think Rene probably brought me here because he wanted to up the black gay Jewish population of Denmark by a new high but having said that I want to take a minute to be very serious and say thank you to Rene - Marc - Miley to everybody in man for bringing me here first because 60 years ago my grandfather lived here for a couple of weeks and this was the first place on earth he was never called a this was the first place on earth where he sat equal to a white man on a bus or a streetcar and I want to thank you from my grandfather blessed memory who was born and raised in a sweltering oppression of Birmingham Alabama thank you for restoring his dignity and seventy years ago of course and I taught this for 12 years in Hebrew school about the the boats of the Danish people during the show I to the credit of this nation and that more people survived than were killed during World War two pulled out about Todd as well and of course the fact that you guys the first in same-sex unions the first in a marriage equality and all the different parts that make up me that I can't really bring together anywhere else this is a wild place to be and just thank you for all of that that makes sense here I guess so the images that you're seeing that are kind of going to loop and I'm not really going to go into them you can ask you about them later are really part of what my partner and I call the southern discomfort or and instead of comfort food just comfort food and the cooking gene product is about it's an ongoing thing to sort of tease out where I come from my own personal terroir my own personal sort of like on the micro cellular level who I am as a cook as a historic chef whatever you want to call me to really understand where I come from I watch all the same food programs you do where people you know speak with beaming pride about where they come from but if you come from a people who were deliberately orphaned where do you really come from who are you what earth is yours what really belongs to you and so this process is about my DNA it's about my ancestors it's about young people today of all walks of life but especially those living in food deserts who are children of color who have no sense of where they come from and they know that where they're going is either one of three places then early grave jail or a dead-end future and so by using history I think we can transform their future but not only that but we can transform how we look at those young people and how we look at ourselves a couple of months ago I wrote a little letter to Paula Dean and I invited her to dinner at a plantation no better place and I asked her that because of all this hullabaloo and certain words were said and things really alleged and having this dinner at this plantation in North Carolina where over 900 people were enslaved over 200 years using food and produce from farmers of color from North Carolina using local wild resources in the shadow of slave cabins that were built in the 1840s and that's where it starts the great playwright african-american playwright August Wilson called the slave quarter the self defining ground on which he wrote and it's a self-defining ground in which I cook my authority is from my blood and the land my ancestors came from white black and red and on that basis I invited Paula Deen to dinner to kind of work out her issues and my issues and say that she's a cousin she's not a combatant and that's the power that this food and this food tradition can have we can bridge pseudo boundaries of race and bring everyone together so what is this history I'm aspiring to be the first colonial Antebellum black chef in 150 years there's nobody living who can teach me how to do that I can learn from you as culinary professionals about best practices but remember I'm stuck in the 19th and 18th centuries to that end I research I write and I perform the day-to-day labor of an enslaved person so when you see me pick cotton and working tobacco and working rice and we're cutting pain I'll do that because that's the other part of the story they never tell you about there's all this bragging about how beautiful and how bout full South was and how wonderful it was and should we just skip on back to the past without ever recognizing those Kooks were forced into the field themselves and they had informed that labor plus a 24/7 labor of taking care of a white family and what did that mean what did that look like how did that feel so in master lease historic recipes I'm hoping to restore the most important ingredient in the food that I think is their the emotional and ethical tone of what goes into the pot and what you create we're talking about millions of enslaved Africans brought to all areas of the Americas and I challenge you to find anybody in the history of the world who was enslaved who revolutionized the food the sex lives the religion the dance the music the aesthetics of the people who enslaved them like Africans in the Americas the man and the woman who became enslaved enslaved the palate of those who enslaved them from feijoada to Jim Malaya we flipped it on them and we keep flipping it off so I'm gonna give you a crash course okay so in flight people come here they have no rights there they're told here I'm still in Virginia you know they come to the Americas that have no rights but they have a flexible adaptable culinary tradition they're chosen for their skills and abilities they're not you know when I was a kid that we were always taught in American schools but the black man and woman were unskilled labor do you really bring unskilled labor to bring you build your country they grew the rice the khat they knew all that stuff from West Africa they brought that here the cooking ability they brought that here and then even leaving slavery they became the first generation of culinary aristocracy they were the best caterers in America were free people of color we were at the top not the bottom we cooked for the White House for our embassies we cooked for the highest society and our children don't know that and we didn't carry seeds in her hair like some people remember but that's a deeper meaning because as a cerebral 'i transported cuisine brought from across the Atlantic in only did we bring African to over 20 different African crops and animals with us on those slave ships but we were at the center of a cornucopia unknown anywhere else in the world where food from Eurasia meant fruit from the Americas meant fruit from the Middle East and meant food from Southeast Asia there was no place in the world like pre colonial Africa on the eve of the slave trade so let's put into context in 1720 let's say a woman comes from Senegal a wolf woman a sailor woman she's just entering marriage and she becomes a renowned cook and market woman when a war ensues and she is captured and sold into slavery at the island of Gouri she shipped to Maryland where she is forced to cook on her two and a half month journey and then she sold to tobacco plantation which she becomes a cook and she learns to adapt the botanical cognates around her from a new environment and adapts herself to anglo-american food ways in her own way she meets women from what is now Ghana in Nigeria and Angola and they exchange recipes in their own new Africa Oh pidgin English they work out the differences between them and what results is not like anything they cooked before but as the essential truth of all the parts she will go on to teach her white charges in the big house how to eat her wool of food and when they're young she will tap on the table encourage them to eat and she'll use a wall of word and she'll go yum yum and that little white child's gonna hear that word over time he's gonna go yum yum yummy you see when you look in the dictionary and says orange not knowing they're talking about black people 17:50 her grandchildren are born and they have a new majority that's the first time that we have the real African American food because the majority of black children are born in America not in Africa and they begin to lose that taste for guts as you know in western South Africa everything is used which but they're seeing mass and his family in a different way they don't want what they have they want what they have and they forget that those guts contain the spirit the soul the essence of this animal that was usually sacrificed and then eaten and we begin to lose these ingredients to mystical the mythological the metaphysical the magical and you know what the thing is those chitlins y'all know what I mean by chitlins the small intestine of the animal they contain the soul why do you think we call it soul food so her children and great-grandchildren they don't want the slave food but at the same point in time their food ways are influencing the people who own them and they're learn to eat African even though they're leading to eat European and by 1820 she's long gone her great-great grandchildren have been separated from their families and souls south of the black belt of Alabama and the largest force of migration in American history their gardening their hunting their fishing their forging and traditional nog becomes the part that it's still a part of their culture and they have long forgotten where great-great granny came from or while she was brought here but they know she carried those seeds in her hair and when they cook they use spirituals to time the food so you have to know this stuff when you cook it in open heart as you cook like enslave people cooked you can't look at a clock you use your sense of smell you use your sense of temperature by your hands on those hot pots you develop very nice sensitive hands and you Tom yourself by singing a certain singing spirituals but number of times it takes a singing spirituals number time it takes to bake the bread to cook the greens to roast the meat and you learned you this over and over and over again until you get your timing right you have to know when the possum is right the hunt you don't hunt possum any old table here you hunt in the wintertime when it's fattening up you have to know when pokeweed is ready to pick and it's not poisonous anymore because enhan in it knows all this folk knowledge is library of early african-american folk knowledge which will die if it is not remembered taught and passed on and so you think about it her great-great-great grandchildren are born and leave slavery and go into freedom where meat mill and molasses consigned them to dietary Hill and this is what was passed down to us so it's my job using imagination body archaeology ethnography everything gastronomy Living History to honor and restore DNA to my ancestors you know if a certain young man had been carrying an heirloom tomato and not a bag of Skittles and had this racial animus been working at a long time ago we'd be in a very different state in my country culinary and justice of what happens when the descendants of historically oppressed people have no sovereignty over their coherent traditions and essentially go from a state of sustainable production and ownership to a state of dependency Malheur under nutrition and food injustice coloring culinary and justice is the shame we often feel for being under history Bootheel and the distance place within and without between ourselves and the full ownership of our past in light of our future culinary injustice is placing said people into a tertiary and passive rather than primary and active role in the establishment of track of or transformation of culinary traditions from which fortunes have been made for others repeat that from which fortunes have been made for others rice in South Carolina made ten out of the first twelve millionaires who were involved in Declaration of Independence in the Constitution it took two seasons and freshly brought Africans to make the rice planters of Charleston millionaires not one single Gullah Geechee person who are losing their land has a single damn rice field in Charleston South Carolina today and you can buy Charleston gold rights of fourteen dollars a bag that's food injustice an East Charleston and st. John's Island you have black children who have no idea that they can go to Sullivan's Island the Ellis Island of black America where one out of every four enslaved persons was brought to the United States they have no claim over their heritage they have not a single field of heirloom vegetables that they brought here but if you are your American and well-off you can sell that bag of rice and talk all about your glorious heritage from the good old days of slavery in Charleston that's culinary injustice culinary and justice means robbing those of us were the least of ease of our proprietorship over our ancestral traditions their maintenance under guidance the stewardship it's not a black-white problem it's all over the world it's spam colonizing Oceania it's the Korean traditions being usurped during the Japanese occupation it's the zero history of the Columbian Exchange let's suppose that American aboriginals exchange recipes with settlers as they shivered under small-plot smallpox blankets and dodged musket balls but yet they gave them the first thing it's given that's culinary injustice culinary justice however is a respect for truth and honesty and telling the stories and traditions that came to the experience of the oppressed culinary justice is reconciliation not blame in his hope not guilt culinary justice is the power of working together not avoiding one of nother because the pastic grievances and perpetuating the status quo culinary justices when children of color have access to the land traditional ecosystems resources clean water and legal protections by which they can grow the heirlooms and heritage breed animals of their ancestors and do so in a way they will come back to a greater connection with nature with spirit with their ancestors and can learn to eat and live better it means they will become entrepreneurs producers and providers or products unique to their cultural heritage and their part thereby lifts communities out of poverty from want and from lack of opportunity it's about giving our children a tradition not a trend food sovereignty food justice culinary justice my job is to integrate the brands of exclusion created in the world of southern and American food by reintroducing people to the African ancestors of American cooking and by extension restoring respect and dignity for what they gave in a world where oppressed communities inside and outside of the states are struggling with food security in economic inequalities advancing culinary justice is essential to a better and more sustainable future for the global community culinary justice begins by respecting and reviving the culinary knowledge of the oppressed and having the guts to insist that the chef's the chef's must act as a keeper of those traditions and an advocate for the Tawaf memory the chef must not only act with ecological integrity but with ethnographic and historical respect coupled with contemporary awareness and a sense of urgency equipped with a dialogue based on our respect for truth acknowledged debt and a commitment to renewing our culinary heritage we can move forward from the past in our search for culinary reconciliation and healing and a better life you

Channel: MAD

Views: 27,075

Keywords: food, michael twitty, slavery, mad symposium, restaurants, Culinary Art (Profession), Cooking, Kitchen

Id: yFK0UfEFQpE

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 02 2013