We love food historian Michael Twitty’s Afroculinaria blog. Michael brings out the hidden food history of African Americans, who were the real cooks and gardeners to the reknowned hosts and hostesses of the South. Michael points out that many African Americans can trace their family histories through many generations, and that the food and seeds those families maintained is a big part of that.
Plus, he’s a crazy good cook over an open fire!
Now Michael’s embarking on The Cooking Gene Project: Southern Discomfort Tour. This May through July, he’ll be traveling the South, from Maryland to Louisiana, exploring these culinary traditions. We hope you’ll consider joining us in supporting the project through the fundraising campaign on IndieGoGo.
Michael Twitty sent us some words about the project:
For decades across Europe, human food waste (table scraps, that kind of thing) had been recycled into food for pigs. From a 2013 BBC article: “As recently as the 1990s ‘pig bins,’ into which uneaten food was placed, were a familiar sight in schools and canteens across the UK, but all of that changed when the foot-and-mouth crisis hit in 2001.” Foot-and-mouth disease is a highly contagious and dangerous virus that hit the UK especially hard in the spr
The 53-page report, titled “The impact of disasters on agriculture and food security,” focuses on climate-related disasters in developing countries and finds that the agriculture sector – and thus food security – suffers the most. In general, crop, livestock, fisheries, and forestry bear 25 percent of the negative impacts from such disasters as droughts, floods, and tropical storms. In the case of droughts, more than 80 percent of damage and losses are bo
Wine grapes, unlike table grapes, almost all have seeds in them; if you’re going to be mashing them for juice, the seeds are going to be discarded anyway, so there’s not much point in selectively breeding the seeds out of them. Those seeds actually have a few benefits; they can be pressed to make grapeseed oil, or they can be fed to livestock as a cheap source of pretty decent fats and proteins. But they aren’t really consumed by humans that much. But may
There are times when the beautiful artificial language of academia creates jokes that wouldn’t be anywhere near as funny if written in normal conversational voice. An example, from an essay by Jerry Leath Mills entitled “Equine Gothic: The Dead Mule as Generic Signifier in Southern Literature of the Twentieth Century.” “My survey of around 30 prominent 20th-century southern authors has led me to conclude … that there is indeed a single, simple, litmu