Michael W. Twitty on Honoring His Ancestors Through Food

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TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Michael, welcome to Time Sensitive.

MICHAEL W. TWITTY: Hi, Spencer, how are you?

SB: Doing well. It’s great to have you here in the studio. I thought we’d begin, naturally enough, with the subject of time—

MT: Sure.

SB: … and specifically how you think about time and temporality and the work you do as a chef—specifically as a historic chef—and as a living-history interpreter. Do you often feel that, in some sense, you’re living outside of time or across time?

MT: I think both. It’s important to understand time in the global African sense. People often joke about “CPT”—colored people’s time, or African time—and I think part of it is about natural rhythms, but also it’s about the fact that we don’t see time in a linear manner. That’s supposed to be some great push forward for civilization for Westerners: linearity, going forward, but I think that even people in Western culture are beginning to understand that there’s more than one way to look at time and interactions.

For me, that whole concentric circle model makes complete sense, because I am both, as you said, inside and outside of the cycles of time. Being intersectional and being multicultural means that I am working with different models of communication, different models of time, all the time. So it’s yes, linearity, but also concentric circles, but also a spiral, but also a zigzag, and it’s this temporal glossolalia that enables me to do my work better.

For those of you [wondering]— What is that big word he just used? Glossolalia is a saying… It’s basically talking in tongues, it’s being multilingual. We’re talking about multitemporal. Ooh, multitemporal, I like that. It’s the name of my new alternative band. [Laughs] It’s about all of that, because you gotta go into the mind, heart, and the soul of your ancestors, and you also have to think about what the legacy’s going to be for the future people who you’ll never meet and also think about where you are right now. There really is no present. I don’t think the present is an actual thing, I think it’s always making the past or making the future. Now is a very difficult concept for me.

SB: Yeah, I mean, I like this idea of “temporal entanglement” that Saidiya Hartman has written a lot about. We can’t have a conversation talking about this temporal glossolalia without talking about the South. How would you define time when it comes to the South? You’ve written that the South might not be a place as much as a series of moments.

MT: Yeah, and verbs and other good stuff. That’s not just clever play on words; it’s really an understanding of who and where you are. Southerners who were raised with Southern fundamentalism and an evangelical spirit, the old school, not this new school, really did think of themselves as characters in the Bible. That’s different from any other community that ever existed when it comes to that whole worldview. That enabled Zora Neale Hurston to write books about Moses, and also products like Their Eyes Were Watching God and Mules and Men, because the people saw themselves in these archetypes that existed long before them and light years away from them in a spatial sense.

For Southern people, there is that sense of tradition, that sense [that] doing what one grandfather did and one grandmother did is far more important than laying down tracks for someone else, except when it comes to the agrarian spirit, ’cause we do plant our trees in a certain way, we do cultivate our land and our soil in a certain way. That is important, but that’s not everybody. That’s not somebody living in uptown Charlotte. That’s not somebody living in Treme or the Fifth Ward in Houston, that is a very specific mentality that I’ve glommed onto. 

My grandfather, Gonze Lee Twitty—a blessed memory, lived to be 99—was one of the founding members of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, saw the world in ways that I really admired and loved, what my father gave to me, what my grandparents gave to me. All those things are a very different and very specific way of looking at being Southern and holding dear those parts of the South that are about you: the land, the air, the water, nature, growing things and being in connection with that. I mean, that’s what I laud. I mean, there are other selves, there are other mentalities, other ways of being, but for me that is the ultimate.

SB: We kind of skipped over it, but how do you think about it from this historic chef perspective when you’re placing yourself almost in, you’ve called it period drag basically, and you are technically in the now, but also channeling the distant past?

MT: Right, because I’m not a reenactor, I’m not a first-person interpreter, but at the same point in time you have to be able to think in two modes. One is contemporary, one is historical. So when I’m cooking on an open hearth, my mind has to shift from my cell phone and digital to really, really, really, really super analog. What that means is how much time is it going to take to cook? Gathering the wood, starting the fire, or, if the fire’s already there, what are you doing? Lining things up in my head. If I’m making a six-, seven-course meal, which is half of what people would have if you were an elite planner, then how am I going to arrange that down to the last coal getting cold?

You have to dress a certain way, because— Not just for the illusion of the past, but also because modern clothes, with all of [their] synthetic fibers, burn in nasty ways with an open hearth fire, so that’s also a good reason why. You’re much better off with linen and cotton and wool than you are with anything with a smidge of polyester, nylon, or rayon. 

People ask you techniques, that’s really crazy, because… Or if it’s authentic, and I’m like, no, unless you have the exact weather conditions like the chemicals… I’m not a scientist, but I know enough to know that the chemicals that we put in our air and our soil and our water and are already a part of our bodies, unfortunately, totally reconstruct everything, so no, that automatically means you’re not going to be in the same culture space, physical space, taste space as the ancestors. You can approximate, but your goal really should be to experience. You get me?

I think a lot of people think that, Oh, if I just follow the recipe, I’ll be magically transported. Mm-hmm. But if you work through it enough times and you feel through it and you cook with certain conditions, and you also try to line up other factors, you might just have a very accurate approximation. What happens is you start to feel and see what they felt. It’s not magical; this is basically going, Ooh, now I get it. When they said this or made this note or talked about this, or someone said an oral history interview… Okay, now we get each other. All of a sudden, you are in fingertip reach of the spirits of the dead, or the ones who are old enough to remember the way things once were.

Why is this important for me? Because I’m African American, and I think people are used to us being amnesia Americans, and that’s only because they know the value of oral history; they know the value of aural history to us. Oral and aural—to say it, but also to hear it. To come from a generation where you saw and you heard before you read and you wrote. So for us, recapturing that is a huge not only cultural healing, but a mental health healing, because it gives us that kind of connection that we supposedly lost, and many cases did lose, but can recover, but through these sensory and sensual actions that give us something closer to what we were than what we have.

SB: It’s interesting, we talk about antiques or things from the past, these physical objects, but so many of them—especially in the African American community—were decimated or destroyed. Of course, there are some incredible artifacts in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C., but those are sort of the preeminent examples of what remains. What you’re doing you’ve described as “edible antiques,” and I love that. I love this idea of being able to create some semblance of something that’s antique through something that’s still very much present through food. I’ve never thought about food as an antique other than when we see an heirloom tomato, right?

MT: Yeah, and that’s fine, too, and that’s one part of it. Also, heirloom flavors and heirloom apples, and we can keep going through all the different pieces, but if you put them all together, something special happens. I never really felt as though I was competent to be anything in my own time, and so, for me, that kind of edible antique vibe gives me access to something I know and I can feel and I can approach.

I got really tired, as a nerd, of interfacing with people who really got a attitude. You start to have intellectual curiosity, and they’d push back and basically let you know in a million ways to Sunday, “You don’t know shit. You don’t really know anything; you don’t know as much as I know.” So, I said, Fine. I’m gonna chill out here with these ancestors. I didn’t do it because I wanted to be them. I wanted to be the person who said, “You don’t know what I know.” I wanted to open up a conversation and a feeling and a world, and I knew that, in many ways, I couldn’t do it otherwise.

Also, there’s this stigma about Blackness. To be Black and to be the others, to be cool, to be fun, tantalizing, interesting. I remember the story about Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and the briar patch. I think of myself as dwelling in the briar patch. There’s too many thorns for y’all to hurt me, ’cause the vulnerable, I appreciate it. What is it about koalas and eucalyptus leaves and something? I don’t know, some kind of weird factoid I learned through Instagram or TikTok or something. But it was just like, yeah, I eat eucalyptus leaves, and no, my digestive system is not great—thanks, God. But I can do this, because I’m in this unique environment and I’m acclimated to where I’m at.

That’s how I like to feel about this history and this food and this culture. It’s because it gives me … what do the kids say? A safe space? It gives me a place where I feel comfortable where I can apprehend and control things, and not get mowed over by people who just want to let me know how uncool I am. No, no, for me, this is the root of Blackness. Africa to America, enslavement to emancipation, and then from emancipation to transcendence. This is where I find my power, but also my sources, my board of directors, my ancestors keep me busy, so it all works out in the end.

SB: Yeah, and you’ve said food is your flag. Food is the thing that connects to everything else for you.

MT: Mm-hmm. 

SB: When it comes to time and cooking, I wanted to bring up music.

MT: Sure.

SB: You’ve described the culinary accomplishments of African Americans as “edible jazz,” and—

MT: The improvisation, the fun of it— Sometimes jazz is a way to work out your frustrations.

SB: You’ve noted that you have to know a lot of songs to cook the way your ancestors cooked. You call the songs clocks with spells. I love this idea of, you’re cooking with ingredients, but you’re also cooking with time. When you don’t have a clock, what is your clock? It’s a song. Could you speak a bit to that? Because I don’t think a lot of people understand or even know that history.

MT: A couple years ago, I’m randomly watching an episode—I don’t faithfully watch anything—of Master Chef or something like that, and Gordon Ramsey is like, “Wow, you …” This chef was challenged, because they all had to mess up, and so they were like, “Okay, do this egg thing” to keep yourself in good graces and stay in the competition as a queer Black chef from Mississippi, home cook from Mississippi. They were like, “How’d you do it in an omelet, right? And do this …” He said, “My grandmother taught me to sing “Amazing Grace,” and she said, “Sing it twice and you’ll have it.” What got me about that was I hadn’t written a whole ton about that at that point, but the bottom line is that’s still a custom that persists among some people. This is an idea that if you…

First of all, “Amazing Grace,” ladies and gentlemen, is not two minutes, the real “Amazing Grace” is twenty minutes. How? Because you had to repeat all them stanzas. It’s twenty stanzas—it might even be longer than that. Who knows? But I know this much, the real “Amazing Grace” is not short, it’s long, and so I’ll do that in my head often. How long does it take to sing a song? Now we’re not talking about a pop song, we’re talking about sacred songs, work songs. They were timers, they weren’t just things people did to pass the time, and what I love about Black people is that we work at play and play at work. I’m serious about this game. I’m serious about them dominoes. I’m serious about basketball. I’m serious about a trivia game. I’m working at play.

On the other hand, you see in Africa… I’ve been to West Africa eight times—you see people work and there’s the song and then the hand and the whole bridge between them. Here you are, watching these people do the thing, and sort of every now and then smile and jiggle and dance. It’s not this Western way of just like you’re at work, you’re at work, it’s very dramatic, right? No, it’s, I am playing at work, because work can be drudgery and work can be exhausting. In those fields and they got the dude with the drums or the guy on the stringed instrument, and just a couple of minutes and you see this field of grass go to half cut down, because everybody’s working in the line and they’re dancing with it and they’re having fun at it. Then they’re swinging the tools around, and when the tools are supposed to hit, they hit and they cut, and you can just see the land get sculpted with every single swing, and they’re just having a blast. So when we play at work, sometimes that play isn’t necessarily fun fun play, it’s more like, can I line all of my rhythms up?

On top of that, that edible jazz aspect is just the improv—it’s the flourishes, it’s the repetitions for the sake of intensity. The aesthetics do kind of have a line … you can line them up and say, Oh, wow, I see in cooking what somebody else sees in a quilt. Somebody might go, “What do you mean by a quilt?” Our quilts tend to be… the colors and the patterns are not strict, the lines are not strict. In fact, that’s a very important part of the Black quilting tradition is that, much like in West African strip cloth… You’ll notice in strip cloth the lines aren’t lined up, they’re kind of off, offbeat phrasing, right?

You can work with food, but you also have to understand language, you gotta go into fabric arts, you gotta go into music and dance, and then you start to pull out these aesthetic principles and ideas. Then you put it in a jar, mix it all up, put it on the table and see that there is a consistency between all those different parts. If you don’t understand how time works— Again, we talked about how there’s linear Western time against these circles of time, circularity. That’s important, because that’s what it means to be an African American, and even I would dare say an African in the diaspora in the Atlantic world.

We are different people, even though on our best circumstance, we are a rooted people. You see what I’m saying? In the same way that our cousins on the continent are becoming the journey we’ve already gone through, which is lining up these multiple sources of self into something that is functional and works for us in this modern world. So now, all of us are on the same time play, where we’re both acknowledging our ancientness, and, at the same time, confronting the fact that we are in a world that is fast-paced, that moves in a second.

Nobody has cell phones like Africans, okay? Because it’s communication, relationship to your family and your relatives, all that, is summed up in one technological device, one that we didn’t have. We had our talking drums, we had our secret code languages. People don’t even understand the… They used to joke about Snoop Dogg, and it’s not a joke, it’s actually a code language. It’s Black Pig Latin, and it has different dialects. It’s not just one thing—they had to send cops to learn the different dialects of this stuff. My point is that the intricacy of our culture and how we’ve manifested is so brilliant. I don’t think anybody can completely appreciate it. When you hear about the people singing the lullabies or the work songs or the spirituals or gospel songs, or even when someone makes a playlist, that’s just an update of something that’s been going on for a very long time.

SB: I love this. I’ve often framed the ancient cell phone as like the paleolithic hand axe, but I also love the talking drum. I love this idea of the talking drum being the original phone.

MT: Mm-hmm. When you go to Africa and you see how it’s done, it’s wild. I noticed [on my] third or fourth trip, I was like, Oh… Everybody’s talking drum sounds like them, but also there are other musical parts and language. So when you hear Wolof, it sounds like Zabar. [Speaks in Wolof] When you hear Yoruba, it sounds like their talking—dun dun— talking drums, they call it dun dun, which is onomatopoeia. It’s like, okay, so it’s [speaks in Yoruba], which means “I’m cool. I’m cool. I’m all right.” As opposed to Akan, Asante, Fante: Their drums are completely different. Doon, doon, doon, doon, doon, doon, doon, and less tonal, but absolutely the bass, the sound. And so, not being a musicologist, but being somebody who feels it in his gut, that taught me a lot. It also taught me how much, despite the fact that I cling to the things we’ve retained and morphed and developed, also how much we’ve lost.

I don’t think anybody can appreciate—those recipes were originally said in Sango and Umbundu and Sundi and Ga and Hausa—there’s a lot in the language. Languages are powerful. Language is also one of the things I think about all the time, Spencer, is how words… How we say, for example, us English speakers think—sometimes we’re right—have a very efficient language, versus French. La-la-la-la-la (sorry, French speakers), and it just seems to go on forever, or in Spanish. How many words do you need, or in German? Okay. Let’s be efficient, but let’s make these crazy words that have fifty letters in them to express one emotion or whatever, versus when I speak A.V., African-American vernacular English, “Oh, look at the knee baby.” Knee baby? Yes. We’re talking a specific type of toddler and where they are in life. 

Or, oh, back in Old Gullah-speak: “Day clean.” I love the words “day clean,” right? In Sierra Leone, they say do klin, and then you go up and down the coast, and then it’s literally a translation of, “Oh. The dawn is here; the day is fresh and clean.” What an incredible way— Instead of “morning.” You don’t think about what the word morning means, but when you hear “day clean,” there’s something about that. That lines up spiritually. It lines up philosophically, so that’s why I love this. I can’t get enough of it, and I’m also a Jew, right? That’s not my religion. It’s my religion and my peoplehood as well. I’m a Southerner. I’m a queer man. I’m gay. I’m a struggling he-him, or should I say recovering he-him, right? And so, I now have to line all that stuff up. It’s funny and exhausting.

SB: Well, and you’re a Gullah Geechee descendant.

MT: I’m a Gullah Geechee descendant. Yeah, it’s right. I’m an Afro-Latian descendant, and I got everything but Creole. Oh, God. I wish I was part Creole. I think that Louisiana Black culture is the stuff, but I guess I’m kind of grandfathered into it. I guess that’s how that works.

SB: Honorary.

MT: Honorary, yes. I’m an honorary.

SB: Well, so much of what we’re talking about connects to memory, and you’ve described memory as “the most indispensable ingredient,” and I wanted to ask about that. How do you think this notion of memory as an ingredient comes alive or is incorporated into your cooking? 

MT: There are things that you haven’t made in a while because of nostalgia and emotions, and so I decided one day I really wanted some tuna salad. Simple enough, right? But then, I was just like, “Let me look some things up,” and then something told me, “No, no. Just remember. Let your mom in.” All of a sudden, where’s your lemon juice? Where’s the garlic powder? Okay. No, no. That relish. Not that relish. Okay. No, the table grind, the coarse-ground pepper. That’ll work better. And it was wild. I even immediately started Instagramming about it, how I felt like I was channeling. Maybe I was just unlocking it. They say we don’t really forget anything, or that things don’t really leave our brains, so maybe I was just unlocking that door. Sometimes the memory is blood memory. White folks don’t like blood memory. If I was a white person interfacing with Black people, I wouldn’t like blood memory, either. It’s fascinating, and it’s part of those double standards.

It’s fascinating, to me, that people talk to people who have survived the Shoah, the Holocaust, and they have no problem talking about trauma and DNA and things being passed down very quickly and other stuff. But when it comes to Black folks, they’re like, “Oh, no. Y’all are full of shit.” No, uh-uh, uh-uh. And I am saying this as somebody who is Black and who’s Jewish, and who’s queer and has these multiple levels of connection, and I just tell people, “No. If it’s good for one group, it’s good for the other group.” Blood memory in Black people is real. Yes, I know it might be very scary if you have exploitative advances towards my people and my community, that there’s a part of us—that our antenna, we call it the antenna, that goes off and we know some trouble’s about to go down and something nasty is about to happen, or that someone is saying something that the vibe we don’t like, creating a situation we don’t like. We know that. 

So, blood memory is real. Blood memory is why we have OCD—when I say that, with deep respect—about certain practices we have, even in cooking. The washing people are like, “Oh. Why do you wash everything? You wash the chicken and the meat?”

I said, “Because we know better.”

“Oh. No, no, no, community. I’m so sorry, but if you wash that, you’re going to spread more germs around.”

Shut up. Give me my bowl. Give me my chicken. Give me my limes and my lemons and my vinegar and my salt. I’m going to wash my meat off. Thank you so much, because where we’re from, nobody had salmonella, because we cleaned our stuff off. All of our pots and pans were immaculate. They might’ve been half rusty, but they were immaculate. You feel me? 

So, blood memory is really important, and if I was outside of who I am and I didn’t feel like I didn’t have that connection, I’d be scared of that, too, What it does is, Wow, these people have an almost magical relationship with a tip-off in their system that says, “I’m about to do something that’s not cool.” That would scare me too, and I would deny it, too. So, blood memory is really important, on top of just channeling our nostalgia, channeling our best memories, and also thinking about scanning what we saw in our brains. 

SB: Yeah. It’s almost a form of ancestral recall. 

MT: Yeah, I like that! Ancestral recall, exactly.

SB: You write in The Cooking Gene about kitchens, and both their role as a form of power, a form of escape in a way, but then also kind of the place where some of the worst things happened to enslaved people.

MT: That’s right. The kitchen, in my own time and before, was where specific conversations happened. Hair was done. Black households— The kitchens where hair is often done, especially for our sisters, our kids’ haircuts. It’s also a place where, like every other American family, we talk about bills, we talk about relationship matters, we talk about homework. We talk about, in our community, our lynching stories, the bad things that happened to us in a day, venting. I think what white people, in general, think about it is like, “Oh. They go home and it’s like, ‘look what whitey did to me today.’” That’s so funny to me—”whitey”—but this attitude of just blaming everybody else for your problems.

No, it’s a place of self-doubt. It’s a place of healing [and] self-doubt and other energy. Yeah, I remember vividly, father, uncle, aunt, these long moments. You’re sitting in the background as a child, because you were supposed to be seen but not heard, and you’re sitting in the background, hearing them tell these awful stories about how they were treated. Some small part of you understood that was going to be you one day, but they were alive. They didn’t hurt nobody. They didn’t let nobody hurt them as best they could, but it was also where I learned about my family history and my stories, and it wasn’t like Hallmark.

It was very much like, “Grammy, why do you do that?”

“Oh, because my daddy, da da da da da,” and the story would come out. Then, one day she was like, “Yeah, you’re my father. You’re my father. Come back to me,” which if you know West African culture, that’s a very common idea of the ancestors being reborn into their lineage with a new ego.

Then, of course, the kitchen is where you dance. Dance with Mama and Daddy. It’s the place where Luther Vandross sang about his father coming home and giving his mom a smooch. That’s a really precious and important memory: Black love, Black joy. Or it’s where our friends who weren’t Black got used to our cooking, introduced to our cooking and our food. They were always welcome at our kitchen table. I can’t always say it, but the reverse, but they were always welcome at our table. They needed dinner, they got dinner. Okay? Nobody came over and did a project or school or homework without getting fed.

It’s also the place people grieve, where the food comes in during the funeral when nobody’s cooking, if your family and friends are bringing potluck things, and the kitchen piles up with aluminum pans. It’s where I wrote. It’s where my mother taught me. My mother was my best culinary teacher. She’d teach me all the culinary terms and stuff and have me sit down and write things. Yeah, I remember that God-awful, waxy tablecloth we had. It wasn’t red and white, but it was kind of thrifted, thrown out, but it was ours until it fell apart, and it covered our little table that we found. And that’s the thing about it…

I don’t even think about that. I don’t even think about the fact that there were lots of aspects of my life that were covered so that we could do other things. Nobody went to Ikea and bought the table. There was a table. It was thrown out by people, and it was on the curb. We brought in the house, and that was our table until it wasn’t. You know what I’m saying? That’s one aspect of the space. The kitchen in antebellum times, in colonial times was a little different. It was a little scarier. Now, on the one hand, it was a refuge, because typically, the kitchens were not attached to the same building. That’s not always the case, but when it was a detached building, it could be very grand. It could be very small. People often slept upstairs, which probably was a little hutch or attic, a storage area. That was better than having a dirt cabin that you had to share with fifteen other people.

At the same point in time, some of those kitchens were spaces of sexual assault, of violence. In The Cooking Gene, I talk about how, in the course of many years of research, I would often see these things, particularly in the Caribbean, one slave-owning mistress, who has a terrifying wicked grin on her face. She’s like, “Oh. I’m better now.” The guest, basically, says, “What went down?” and she takes him to the oven. She’s rich enough to have a bake oven. She’s throwing the cook in there; she took the cook in there alive, but other enslaved people do it on pain of death. Can you imagine that? Being forced to murder your friend, your family? Then, she said it calmly. He said she said it calmly, like in the most psychopathic way. It’s just like, Well, this doesn’t make me feel happy and joyful and celebrate the joys of the kitchen. This is scary. This is scary.

I immediately start to feel like—you talk about time… I realized something that this work does for me and other things. My mom—a blessed memory—got very ill and chronic. I remember my mom saying to me one time when she was in between states, talking about how my grandfather, who could be really grumpy and nasty, was harassing her because of her health. I’m like, “This sounds, this tracks,” but she said to me that I came to the rescue, but I’m like, “I did?” She’s like, “Yeah. Little-boy you.”

It was the first time I realized that it’s very possible that, in the spiritual realm, our multiple selves are still running around: teenage you, old man you who was probably already here, baby you—and they’re all doing their thing. That gave me the chills, because I realized I had felt that. I’d felt the presence of little me, puberty, me, et cetera. You know what I’m saying? Still out there, somewhere, doing our thing. And so, if that’s the case, right? And our ancestors are real and they play a role in—as we say, in African civilization and beyond, then we’ve really got to kind of apprehend and take by the horns this existence that we have.

To be in those kitchen spaces where I came out, right? I talked about that in the book, but also where I recognize that I got these straight hairs on my arms, and I got this color—that’s a lot to have to take in and be vulnerable about. I just want people to understand, as they’re hearing this, just how much it takes to do all this and still keep a straight face, and walk calmly down the street, and go about your life with this baggage, that if I give it up, I’m no longer myself.

SB: Do you see the research, I suppose, on some level—you’ve described that as being a way of channeling the grief. The research, specifically into your family, the DNA research, the genealogy—you’ll never uncover the full truth, as you’ve pointed out. It’s like a mosaic or the kintsugi-of-the-pot type of thing. The pot’s broken. You’ve got to patch it back together.

MT: I’m so impressed. You’ve read this better with more attention than anybody else I’ve ever spoken to. Wow. I’m like, “I forgot I’ve written some of this stuff.”

SB: There’s so much in that book that speaks to the work that you’ve done processing what is, no doubt, a really complicated history to process. We haven’t mentioned it yet, but you’re about a quarter white in your lineage?

MT: Almost, yeah. I think when we got down to brass tacks, about a fifth, a fifth to a quarter. It depends on which test you look at. European. Whiteness, like Blackness, is more of a—it sounds cliché now—social construct, because I don’t have any of the benefits or privileges of being a white person, but it’s unquestionable that I’m between a fifth and a quarter European.

What’s wild is that, when you leap over that antebellum wall, colonial wall, this is what I mean by it. I went to Denmark as a guest of René Redzepi for The MAD Symposium, and I was able to go to the National Museum. They happened to have an exhibit about Vikings. So many times I’ve been to African art museums, and before I knew a thing, and felt like I’m like wandering around, kind of doing a fake Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost and trying to see if I can feel my way through it. Sometimes it actually did pan out. It’s really weird. Then I’m in this European museum, these European historical figures, and the exhibit was very dark, and I don’t know why, it just felt very cold and very dark. I’m looking around, and I’m acknowledging to myself that somewhere, somehow, among these artifacts is something that hands that were in my lineage touched.

It’s a very bizarre feeling—and that these were not the white people who beat us, sold us, and made us work in their field. These are the white people who didn’t even know they were white, who tramped across Europe and did their thing, and sold things and fought and enslaved other people, and thought that going to die in battle was the fastest way to heaven, their concept of heaven. The consistent message, in my brain and my heart as I went through this exhibit, was, “These are your people, too.”

When I was in third grade, my third grade teacher, Mrs. Phillipen, she would play classical musicians every morning, and one morning she played Edvard Grieg. I said, quick as a flash, “Mrs. Phillipen, I’m part Norwegian.” To which she goes, “That’s very nice. Thank you for your contribution.” Then, many years later— And then telling my parents, “We’re from Norway.” “Ha ha. No, we’re not.” Then, when I get my first big DNA test, my largest European DNA comes from Scandinavia.

SB: Yeah, Finland.

MT: Finland, but also Norway, Sweden, Iceland. There’s even a small part of me that’s Iceland, Norway, one percent, but that’s very specific, but the rest of it’s generic Scandinavia, because they went to England, they went to Ireland. They spread their DNA, right? They forced these women to marry them. They had children. They had settlements. Why is that not my history? I may not be one of the Olsen family from Little House on the Prairie, but it doesn’t mean that those things aren’t present in my life and my history.

We say right now the word timelines, so we need to get used to white people having African people as part of their timeline, Black people having Europeans, particularly Northern Europeans, as part of their timeline. This is what makes us up. We couldn’t be exactly the mixture where we are—and I’m not obsessed with genes and blood. No, because that’s somebody else’s story. That’s that old-school, racial purity nonsense. I’m talking about what it means to be a human.

SB: There’s a quote I wanted to mention here, that I’m going to pull from The Cooking Gene. I want to bring it up because it feels as relevant now as ever. “We can choose to acknowledge the presence of history, economics, class, cultural forces, and the idea of race in shaping our experience, or we can languish in circuitous arguments over what it all means and get nowhere.” In the context of why you’re writing the book, you write, “I present my journey to you as a means out of the whirlwind, an attempt to tell as much as time will allow.” I was thinking about that. You wrote this about ten years ago, coming up on it, anyway. What does that bring to mind for you in this moment or confluence of time, let’s call it?

MT: People are addicted to the whirlwind. On one end, I call it the “racialist hamster wheel.” We’re not free of it, either. Listen, we’re still talking about colorism in a non-constructive way. We know it exists. We know it’s been part of us, but now we’re finding ways to morph into new things so we can stay titillated by colorism.

Colorism, y’all, is when… Particularly when different shades of Black become weaponized against each other. Notice I didn’t just say light-skinned people. Notice I didn’t just say dark-skinned people. Notice, I say people in the middle and in between. I’m talking about that kind of thing about who gets to be really Black, authentically Black, who gets to have the power and the privilege depending upon what… For the most part in America, it’s been people who didn’t quite pass but held that hierarchy over others. We were still in the hamster wheel of racism and racialism because we are still… You can’t say a single thing without somebody throwing that verbal intellectual Molotov cocktail at you.

Okay, so let me get down to one moment, during this whole regime situation, it was someone who was … had an Asian phenotype, but grew up in the South, but commenting on social media and someone going… Basically “Go back to your country,” Hey, making fun of the way that they thought that person spoke because they were commenting on Jeff Sessions or somebody else. They said they thought they took it personally like, “How dare you make fun of me as a Southern white man, you Asian,” whatever. Turns out that Asian person is three generations in the South, born and raised in the deep South. Learning to speak English in a way that most Southerners, particularly White Southerners, would completely understand. 

But people love to throw insults. They love to stay stuck in the past, and it’s very funny to me, “He’s stuck in the past.” But I’m not stuck in the past. The past for me is a vehicle, it’s a tool. It is a masquerade. It’s all of those things, but I’m not sitting across from this situation going, “Hey, colonist. Hey, slaveholder,” or whatever. It’s unnecessary unless you act that way. And then, we have a problem, and I think a lot of people don’t understand it. It’s not being a white person, it’s not being of European descent. It’s replicating the mistakes of the past, because they give you the dopamine of having privilege and power. If you have that dopamine part of you from that racialism, then all bets are off. I’m not talking to a friend, I’m not talking to a good person. I’m talking to someone who actually knows and understands that if you bring that nonsense back up, that it’s a weapon. It’s a tool.

It’s scary, because, like, going to the Museum of Natural History, and going to the Melanesian part of the exhibit and seeing all these incredibly beautiful but scary looking clubs and swords, right? Because they have shark’s teeth on them and it’s like, you ain’t making it out alive with that thing. That’s what some people do. I don’t feel particularly powerful, so I’m going to resurrect some 1840 nonsense so I can hurt you. That’s not Christian. That’s not holy. Why doesn’t it have to be Christian? I’m not Christian. But that whole idea of Christians is that they’re supposed to be holy, they’re religious. It’s not nice. It’s not cool. I don’t like that hamster wheel. 

I spent a lot of money and a lot of time so I could know who I am… So I would never look in the eyes of any person and ever be able to not say, “This is who I am” with confidence. I know this about me. I don’t know every ancestor—I would love to. I would love to be able to know every ancestor’s name, where they came from and their story and their journey and their… Just complete different parts of the mosaic. It’ll never happen and I gotta be okay with that. What I know now, sir, after my journeys, after all I’ve done, what I know now is far more than the past six generations have been privy to. I’m so grateful that I feel ever restored in that. 

When I started to work on Recipes From the American South, I noticed that I had never given myself the chance to understand my worth as an independent scholar and my worth as a writer. Because, here I am going, “Oh, but this person did this and that person did this.”Hold up, bruh. You have been to the U.K. now six times. You’ve been to Ireland, you have been to France multiple times.You have been to Scandinavia, you have been to Italy, you’ve been to Germanic Europe. You have a lot of learning under your belt. You’ve done this work. Anybody who goes on a two, three hour train out to Somerset from London is doing the damn work, right? And then, you go to West Africa and you do the thing and you start doing culinary tours there and all this stuff. Then you’re like, “Oh,” and then you’ve been all around the South, because of the Southern Discomfort Tour, which led to The Cooking Gene and it’s like, “Oh,” and it’s like, I never gave myself the credit but I did the work that one needs to do to truly say, I love this with all of my heart, and I want you to understand where we come from and who we are.

SB: Yeah, it’s not about being stuck in the past; it’s about respect for the past. I wanted to ask, because it feels like this whirlpool, how the hell do we get out of it? One way that seems to me to be a way forward that would make sense… It’s a bit of a pipe dream, because I have no idea how every living person would do this or every living American anyway. But I guess, to reframe it, if I were to ask you as a question, in what ways do you think the world or America would be different if we all paid more attention to the past—our pasts—and spent more time with our ancestors? If we did the work you did, to know who we are, where we come from, then we might have a better idea of where we’re going and not be stuck in this whirlpool.

MT: Right, because at that point… The first thing is to put yourself under the microscope.

SB: Yeah.

MT: Why do I believe the things that I believe? Why do I think the way I think? Why do I see certain things? Why have I had certain issues? For a lot of us, it’s this self-doubt, this imposter syndrome. There is, am I smart enough? Am I beautiful enough? Also, knowing our neighbors and knowing other cultures that are around. You’re a New Yorker, you live around hundreds of different cultures, and if you can intimately approach them, then it also helps you see yourself, because there’s certain things you’ll say automatically are universals. There are certain things that you’ll see that are just not … but help you understand your gestalt a lot better, your worldview a lot better. You get out of it because you want to… You have to personally say, “I don’t like this anymore. I don’t like these chains. They don’t fit me. I hate these chains. They’re heavy. They don’t fit me and I can take them off any time I want and I can really understand who I am and where I’m going and what I need to do.” 

Also, understand the things that my ancestors were not able to fix or help or heal. One for me is a lot of times, health struggles. It doesn’t have to be my destiny. I can change behaviors, diet, other stuff. Another thing is just things I know people have held on to. There are certain traumas in my family and I have been there for quite some time. Very specific trauma, not just generic, very specific stuff. So how do I get up from underneath that? Also, they’re good role models. The answers for joy and happiness and discovering yourself. “Oh, they did that.” ​
For example, my great-grandfather—my maternal grandmother’s father [Joseph Todd]—didn’t have a lot, but my great-grandfather, he used to build trucks and toys for his kids and stilts and other things. And he never laid a hand on them. He fake-beat them, and he never laid a hand on them. He had real joy in watching his wife feel safe and protected. He felt real joy in watching his children play. He felt real joy in reprogramming his children to be like, “Yeah, I know, I like doing this work, or this work, but let Daddy see you smile.” He was really good at that. He was also very proud and very strong and very brave. When my grandmother was like, “Yeah,” she’d say, “All right, Joe Todd.” That didn’t make me cry until years later when I really understood what she was saying, which I really understood that she was like, “You’re the best parts of my daddy. And I’m seeing that live on.” That’s when I understood how deep that was. 

This man, she used to tell me all the time, and when they told you something more than once, they meant for you to memorize it. And she said… “It was many a night when my daddy wouldn’t eat so we could eat and they would sit up there with a glass of tea. He said, ‘Mother, let’s have tea.’” That meant this is the Depression and we ain’t eating, but our children will eat grits and gravy, because we care. And because they didn’t eat one night a week, I’m here talking to you right now. They don’t have to be Black to have that story. I know many people, Italian American, Jewish American on and on, and on and on, who have those survival stories and their parents didn’t do it because of social pressure; they did it out of complete and utter unconditional love. You can rediscover the unconditional love in your family despite your traumas, despite your dysfunctions. You can rediscover so many good and positive and powerful, loving things between all these other detritus that you figure out. That’s what it’s all about. 

I mean, when I first started working on this, many, many moons ago, I remember this young man who was of Neapolitan heritage from Italy, from eastern Pennsylvania, and he’d read about me and he came up to me after our college presentation. He said, “I want you to know in two days from now I’m leaving for Italy and I’m going to go try to discover what you’ve discovered. I want that. I want to be in conversation with my roots, and I think what you’re doing is great and I think I’m going to go do it.” For me, that was incredible, because he did not see the boundaries in my phenotype, my history. What he saw was, I like that. That’s what I want and I need.

SB: This is the way out of the whirlpool. [Laughs]

MT: That’s the way out of the whirlpool, right? It’s like I’m not swirling around no more, so I grabbed the stick.

SB: Yeah.

MT: I fought my way out. Now I’m trying to get dry. It is going to be great, when I finally get dry and I can tell people about how I escaped the whirlpool.

SB: All right, well, we have to switch to your cookbook. You have a cookbook out, it’s called Recipes From the American South, and in it actually, in the beginning of it, you write about time. So I wanted to bring that up. You note, “The best thing we can do is appreciate the layers of time, people, stories, and meaning more than the grocery lists of Southern ingredients. Instead, we should ask why. The why leads into the future,” which is really what we’re talking about right now. I mean, that “why” was sort of like: Well, I want to find out about where I come from, why I’m here, how I’m here—follow the trail.

Could you just share a bit about what you’ve learned about time or time kind of as this layer cake, I guess, by asking the why and how it ultimately led to this cookbook?

MT: Emily Takoudes, one of the main editors at Phaidon [Takoudes is Phaidon’s executive commissioning editor of food], asked me to find someone who would be willing to do this cookbook. I couldn’t. Then it was, find a partner. I couldn’t. So then it became, “Oh, you, of course,” which is, I was grateful that she thought of me that way, but also understanding how volatile our timelines have been, but also the pressure to erase my people. And also, the pressure to erase anything that didn’t make us reflect. Do you know what? Now, that I think about it between our metaphors, I’m really thinking about it like, Okay, so somebody doesn’t want us to get out of the whirlpool.

It doesn’t benefit them to do that, right? Working on this, I knew I was writing a thesis with recipes and I also understood that I wanted to make sure that it spiked the fact that we’re not published by the same person. The Cooking Gene, Rice, Koshersoul, and Recipes From the American South were different ways of telling a very similar story, about Southern food through my particular lens and my particular way of looking at the world. 

Now, I have this big book that you can knock on. You can literally hear that tuk, tuk, tuk when you knock on the cover with these raised appliqués out of designs, Southern vegetables. And Southern isn’t technique. Southern isn’t… It isn’t the ingredients. Southern is the spirit behind the mentality. I wanted people to understand it: that the historical context is important, but also the contemporary context. I mean, I don’t want people to forget about fast food. I don’t want people to forget about church cookbooks, websites, Southern Living, Ladies’ Home Journal. I don’t want people to forget about civil rights protests. I don’t want people to forget about none of that, because those are all contributors to the river or the flow of this food way, and Southern food is not a monolith and Southern food is seasonal, which is another part of time. It disappoints you every year, and it makes you thrilled every year. This year, I don’t know, over a thousand tomatoes, right? But also— And almost no fish peppers. Damn, I got to wait another year to see this cycle through. Get all the things I want and know that one of them ain’t going to work. Well, that’s part of it. I mean, that is part of the make-do of the Southern kitchen is that, “Whoops, it didn’t work out this year. Maybe next year.”

SB: Yeah, the garden is central.

MT: Then, the fact that you got to save seeds and then you create those edible antiques [with] what you manage to save. It’s a whole system. It’s a whole way of looking at the world. My grandfather loved yellow watermelon. I have a picture of me when I was 6 or 7 with Granddaddy in the field with a tractor, picking one of them yellow watermelons in South Carolina, and I’m so grateful for that, because that is memory, that is nostalgia, that is taste, and taste-memory, and taste-sense.

Does someone from New England really reflect on the nature of their food being a little pureed and a little Indigenous? No, not always. Or Midwestern? Not one Midwesterner has ever told me that hot dish is descendant of the things that they eat in smorgasbord. And it is. It is, but I’ve never heard anyone talk about that history and heritage. In the West coast, Asian Pacific Rim and frontera food, but Borderland food, people don’t have that sort of historical cultural reverence. But in the South, you often do or you can.

SB: Your practice—or your work, really—is giving credence to your ancestors in a lot of ways. Credit and credence.

MT: Because I have to. In African traditions, spiritual tradition, you don’t make any decision without addressing the spirit world. For me, that’s a big part of my work. You gotta be in touch with that. The best artists in that African spiritual tradition are the people who truly know how to lift that veil. I was thrilled when Ryan Coogler put out Sinners, because the word veil is not in my vocabulary, but when I saw that several times in the theater and I was like, “Of course, it’s what we’ve always done.” That’s what I do in an open hearth on an old plantation. I’m just lifting a veil so that that energy can pour through. And it’s an amazing, fascinating feeling when you understand that there’s no border between you and the other side. You can make magic happen with that food, or with that music, or with your words, etc.

SB: Where do you think this came from, this fascination with historic cooking because you wanted to become a historic cook at age 7. It seems like an unusual thing to have as a childhood dream. You don’t hear your average 7-year-old being like, “I want to be a historic chef.” Did you ever imagine one day that you’d be cooking at Colonial Williamsburg or Monticello?

MT: No.

SB: You are someone who can wholeheartedly say you’re now living your childhood dream.

MT: I remember telling my mother and father, “When I grow up, I want to be a chef, a teacher, a writer, and a preacher.” I was 7. People in high school. In my middle school when my grandmother passed, they didn’t know where I was. “What happened to Mike Twitty? Oh, he finally went to Africa.” My whole life, I’m going to write that book. I’m going to write that book. My grandmother, 11 years old: “Grammy. I’m going to write a book about the whole South.” It just so happens that it was published in the year that would’ve been her hundredth birthday year.

It’s terrifying to understand that we have a lot of personal agency and choices in how we design our world and curate our world through our thoughts, but it’s also terrifying to understand that not everybody has that. Some cell phones… To use this analogy, some cell phones are plugged into the wall and they keep charging. You feel me? And others just don’t. Some people are charged, and some people ain’t. Some people, that’s not for them. They don’t want to see that. I really do [think] people get what they want. This is going to sound really out there, but I think some people, if they want that unattached, uncharged life, they get it. There’s no sadness, there’s no … whatever it is. That’s not their thing. They’re here, they live, they pass through, and it’s like this. Others of us, it’s like we wake up again. I’m one of those people.  It is not an easy life, but I know that the things that have happened to me through this point have not been an accident. That can be very daunting. Sometimes we look at that and go, “Well, damn, I would’ve chose…” No, you didn’t. But it’s funny, in Kabbalah and in Jewish mysticism and in Yoruba spirituality, among other traditions, there is the stalwart belief that we choose our path in heaven. I’ll take the unwed couple, Black, “You just say you want Black?” “Yeah, Black. And I want this and I want these struggles, and I want abusive relationships, and I want bullying, and I want struggles with weight and health and whatever. I’m going to be that person.” “Well, what else? I’m going to use him as a bridge to connect the ancestors and the descendants, and I’m going to write books through him. And yeah, Michael Twitty, I’m going to be him.”

When I tell kids that, they get a really weird feeling, and some of them are just like—I’m talking about tweenagers—they’re like, “For real?” And then they’re like, “Yeah.” And they’re quiet. You know it’s hard to make a middle schooler shut the hell up. They get real quiet and they think about, “Whoa, I could have… This is…” Yeah. I knew when I walked through Colonial Williamsburg as a 6, 7-year-old child, I was like… Also, hey everybody. We didn’t have no daggone little digital devices in front of our faces. It was exciting to go someplace, see somebody make a silver cup, or a candle, something out of nothing. Everything we had was from the store. Nobody made anything, and we didn’t have little things to fidget with. So, when I saw that pheasant and that turkey with all the feathers on it, dead—I didn’t have the concept of death yet—on that table. And I saw those people working, the smells and the smoke and the fire and the scents and all of it mixing together. I said, “This is my kind of laboratory. This is my kind of space.”

SB: You’ve written about seeing it on TV. They had commercials in the eighties.

MT: They were very saccharine and golden and enticing. We lived for our little road trips. And then of course, three hours felt like a thousand hours to a 6-year-old, three hours in the car. I remember it was very different. I remember all the horse apples on the ground, and by the way, horse apples, y’all is not a type of fruit. It’s dreck, it’s crap. I remember all those things and going, “Huh.” Right? Mental note. Later on, it becomes the first revolutionary resident of Colonial Williamsburg to learn from a lot of the elders who are starting to pass from there. I’m just reminded that it’s not a game. It’s not a joke. It’s real. If you’re clued in, you’re clued in. If you’re here and it’s just passing through, that’s cool, too. If you want nothing to do with it, that’s okay. I can see that. I can see why some people would come through this place, this sphere, and really not want anything to do with the big questions.

SB: Yeah. It’s facing the hardest questions.

MT: Yeah.

SB: But the meaning you make out of that is alchemical. It’s transformative.

MT: The thing about food is, food is the worst of the temporal things. Right?

SB: What do you mean by that?

MT: Because it doesn’t last—except for honey, and you had nothing to do with that. That’s the bees and God.

SB: [Laughs] Well, we could get really philosophical and say it lasts—it lasts in us.

MT: It does last. It gives us the energy to reproduce or to teach or to write things down and pass them on, or pass them down orally and aurally. But food is like here and then here today, gone today, shit today. There’s nothing poetic about that. One time… Was it the Guggenheim or some other museum? There was an artist who did the most fascinating piece of art, and it was basically a mechanical version of your digestive system and it made synthetic poop. And that was the first time I ever thought to myself, “Oh yeah, that’s it. The answer to it all.” Forget 42, the answer is right there, poop. You know what I’m saying? This is so weird to think, oh, Grandma’s cornbread. It is going to be shit. I guess all I’m doing is redeeming feces is what… I should write a cookbook called Redeeming Feces.

SB: Yeah, full circle. 

MT: Full circle. [Laughter]

SB: Oh, man.

MT: Sorry, y’all.

SB: Well, there are so many different places I wanted to go in this conversation, but one I wanted to ask you about was kind of leaning into this time you spent in these historic places, plantations, Monticello, Colonial Williamsburg. What has that taught you about America, the South, food, yourself, and time? Because that’s a part of it. You’re in this place that’s designed to represent a specific time, in a way, but it’s still in this time. It’s confusing. Again, it’s the layer cake of time.

MT: When I did a taping with Vice about my work there as a consultant and as a transient person as opposed to an employee, which is a very different life. The first words that Dexter says in the video are a sanitized version of the colonial period. And I didn’t feel good about that, even though he told the truth. I didn’t feel good about it because I’m just like, then I realized, Oh yeah, and maybe someday somebody will think that about us. That really bothers me, by the way. I wanted to be part of the world where things got better. But we’ll leave that alone. 

I guess it comes down to they all have different energies. Monticello, James Hemings’s energy, and Fanny Hern and Edith Fossett, and Ursula [Granger], those are the names of some of the great cooks, Black cooks in those spaces.

SB: We’re not far from Gage & Tollner, where a famous Black chef, Edna Lewis—

MT: Right. Edna Lewis. Not far from Gage & Tollner. So her journey, which John Birdsall said is a semi-queer, quasi-queer journey because who was she working with? Who was eating her food? Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, etc. People who helped her get her start. Fashion designers, designers of a place at Bergdorf’s and people who were in the arts. Wild. Those food steps matter: where the food happened, why the food happened, who made the food. All that matters, because it is so quick. We could make our own specialty or whatever in this room right now, and then that would be it—whew—gone out of existence. It’s fascinating to go to these places and understand that, oh, this is one of the first places where people enjoyed vanilla ice cream in a casual way or oh, wow. 

One time, I was at Poplar Forest, which is one of Jefferson’s other plantations, and I think I had a trout or freshwater trout or two, I think I had a rabbit and other stuff. They were like, “Well, what are you going to do with all that?” And I said, “Well, all of these things were mentioned in the archeological record or the actual rations record or whatever of this space.” One of the things that came, too, was this knowledge that part of the reason why they packed up and shifted use was because they were no longer able to guarantee that oaks and hickories would keep colonizing the forest space. It was more and more pine, and you couldn’t cook with that.  You could make buildings out of it. You could make other stuff, but you couldn’t cook with it. And you couldn’t even stoke your fire because it would be resinous and give off…

So, you also understand the land is changing; things are changing around you. Things are not staying the same. You have to work hard. Preservation is hard work, landscape preservation, preservation of foodways and vineyards, and it’s a lot of work to keep things “the same.” 

SB: In quotes. 

MT: Yeah, in quotes. Because, ultimately, the bottom line goes: You can’t keep those places in a bubble forever. I hate to be all seventies Kansas about it, but it is a dust-in-the-wind situation. You ask yourself, “Well, how do people in Africa go through this ritual construct where they bring you back to the beginnings of creation?” Or even more so, the different Aboriginal tribes in Australia reenacting the dream time. I would love to have that window on the universe where I could find out what remains and what doesn’t or how you change it to meet the magic of the situation. But I go to these places to be a pilgrim. I go to these places to bless the ancestors and those who made those places foodscape spots for me and others, and I go to those places just because, you know something, it blows my mind to think, “Oh wow, I’m in Ouidah. Oh, wow, I’m in Cape Coast. Oh, wow, I’m in Charleston. Oh, wow. I’m in Fort Snelling, a.k.a. Bdóte.” Or the first time you go to San Antonio and the Alamo and you’re like, “Oh, this is it.” Or you see that bunch of bricks and you’re like, “Oh, this is Jamestown. I thought it was going to be…” No. This little lonely spot is where things of great consequence happened, and then things of great consequence stopped happening. 

Williamsburg, ladies and gentlemen, was one of those spots. It was a bunch of ruins and dilapidated buildings that Rockefeller resurrected. It wasn’t just sitting there the whole time. And everybody’s like, “Huh, isn’t that great? Patrick Henry spoke down the road.” No, they literally had to create and then block off. And if I may be honest about it, exile the local Black community. Because, guess what? Williamsburg and its heyday as it started off was fifty-two percent Black and another two percent of color. That’s Native people, that’s non-Black people of color—that’s mixed people. Europeans that didn’t fit into any mold, fifty-four percent of color. And if there were billions to make that spot work in a really authentic way, then you would hire mostly Black interpreters. And I’m sure that would make certain people jittery because they’d just be like, “Oh yeah, you’re going back to the original hood. Yeah, welcome. This still ain’t your damn world. How about that?” [Laughter] I’m sure there’d be people who would lose their minds going to that specific space and being like … who was that white girl who was in Paris? She was like, “Oh, I didn’t expect to come to Paris and see all these Black people.” Oh, you didn’t? Good luck. It was a space that was predominated by people of color who happened to be of African descent.

SB: In a way, I feel like your being there is giving space for these stories.

MT: Yeah. Always. I almost wish I could give people a tour of Recipes From the American South through magically taking them to twenty spots, like transporting Star Trek so they could really understand, “Oh, all this comes from this little pan in this hearth and this moment?” Yeah, isn’t that magical?

SB: So much happens in the pan.

MT: Yeah. And some of those pans still exist and are still being used and many others aren’t.

SB: I love that cast iron comes from the universe. By the way, this is a side tangent, but that something as mundane as a cast iron skillet could say so much about the universe: To me, that’s probably one of the most beautiful objects on earth.

MT: A conversation between alloys and metals and earth and liquid and fire and air. I wish I could have been a scientist.

SB: You’re doing good work, man.

MT: The problem is the math. It was always the numbers, the math, the organic chemistry, the biological chemistry, the blah blah… Oh no, not for me.

SB: Well, I wish I could talk to you for hours. It seems like we could. But I want to finish on the fact that I feel like the deeper I got into your work, the more I thought about how, in some sense, what you’re doing is its own form of memorial. That you are using food and, by extension, the historical and interpreter work that you’re doing as memorial-making and you’re creating vessels of memory through cooking and, in the case of publishing or your books, through publishing. Could you talk about this idea? How do you define and think about memorial? Maybe we can make it full-circle and bring it back to that first question because memorial and time are intricately connected.

MT: In Yiddish culture, it’s called a memorbuch, and these were specifically books that were kept—records of the community that were read on Yom Kippur for the dead, especially the dead who were martyred through pogroms, et cetera. Sometimes, the memorbuchs contain other details about the community that eventually would prove for those who found them absolutely invaluable. We need breadcrumbs. We need the little breadcrumbs to lead us back to the trail so we can get away from the witch and the bear and the wolf. We need evidence that we were here, we need evidence that we knew we were here. We need evidence that we knew we were going to still be there. Okay?

For me, I hope that one of the legacies of my work will be, because I have a lot more to do, will be to show people a blueprint for how to keep those breadcrumbs immortal, at least functional enough to make it to the next stop, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, a hundred, two hundred years from now, which any other way to think about it is not only mind-boggling but terrifying. But it’s less terrifying when you’re the one doing the programming and you’ve got it together. That’s power, because you’re defining reality for yourself and for others. We’re doing it in a very gentle, subtle way. We got a lot to do.

SB: If you can say, what’s the next big project?

MT: I’m working on two projects—three projects, actually. One is to make a compendium of every single ingredient that I know of in early African American foodways, every type of vegetable and its varietals—croakers, pawpaws, Ayamase, Diospyros virginiana—so people can understand the medicinal uses, the culinary uses. There’s no faking the fun.

Another one is a project I’m working on that’s called Father Country, and it’s about those European roots of African Americans and connections to particularly the U.K. and Ireland. 

Then, of course, I got to work on my third part of my trilogy, which would be the LGBTQ+ part of my journey with food and particularly others. So, I got Southern Roots, African Roots, The Cooking Gene—Blackness; we got Koshersoul, Blackness and Judaism; and Jewish food, Jewish foods, plural. 

Then we have this other book I gotta write about how queerness affects you in the kitchen, which will, I hope, add more volume to this work, because I believe in people. I believe in human beings. I believe people are made in the image of God almighty. And I think my work with food is to show them just how made in that image they are.

SB: Michael, thank you.

MT: Thank you very much. This has been fantastic.

This interview was recorded in The Slowdown’s New York City studio on October 14, 2025. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Olivia Aylmer, Mimi Hannon, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Paola Wiciak based on a photograph courtesy Michael W. Twitty.