The Cooking Gene

Drawing on models left behind by the Roman latifundia, the idea and cultural presence of the plantation was born in the Mediterranean basin. These plantations were worked by a number of “slaves,” a word most people are familiar with that may be traced to the word “Slav,” of the ethnic-linguistic nations of eastern Europe. Slavs weren’t black, but the workers on these early sugar plantations were often a mixture of Slavs, Africans, Middle Easterners, and local peasants. Slavery did not yet have a racial context.

It didn’t feel natural that over the course of three and a half decades of pondering race that I never considered that black families could be linked through white bodies.

To know who you are you often have to be able to see outside yourself. To look beyond the bubble you were born in doesn’t come easy to all of us.

I had books and I felt like my engagement with them and my knowledge was my masculinity

I still have the Madam C. J. Walker–invented hot comb that my grandmother bought in the 1930s and my mother used for a lifetime after her. I swear to you that I still keep it in the kitchen. Although I have no long hair to straighten, I bring it out every now and then and smell it and immediately I’m brought back to my childhood—presumably in the same way that one hears the ocean in a seashell. You really don’t experience the same sensations—you just imagine you do, and that’s enough.

Grammy’s lemonade was special. The juice was mixed with sugar cubes to make lemon simple syrup, we added a pinch of soda or salt, the water was chilled with the lemon shells giving off their oils, and then finally the two were combined, and we would stir and sing

But not until Judgment Day on G-d’s command will I ever eat a chitterling or do the infamous chitlin strut, as the Carolinians do.

I just think there is a measure of gravitas in black people looking at the same food culture and not only learning important general information but being able to see themselves. This is greater than the intrinsic value of knowing where our food comes from and rescuing endangered foods. That Lost Ark-meets-Noah’s-ark mentality is intellectually thrilling and highly motivational, but it pales in comparison to the task of providing economic opportunity, cultural and spiritual reconnection, improved health and quality of life, and creative and cultural capital to the people who not only used to grow that food for themselves and others, but have historically been suppressed from benefiting from their ancestral legacy.

“What’s the best thing you ever cooked?” I asked my mother.

“A little black boy named Michael; I cooked him long and slow,” she replied.