Biographical Readings Week 2, The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty
This week I read Chapter 20 The Old County, Chapter 21 Sankofa, and the author’s note of The Cooking Gene, officially concluding my read-through of this book. Since I spent so long on my biographical writing and I wanted to have time to digest the book as a whole I am going to give some overall post-reading reflections instead of the usual in-depth summaries I would normally do for each chapter. This book has given me a growing list of questions and areas of curiosity that could become hundreds of research projects, but I will try and keep to my main takeaways.
1. Tracking the path of human history and human evolution through food
In my first year doing food studies I remember studying how food, specifically fermented fruit, drove humans to leave the trees therefore pushing human evolution to the next stage of survival. This idea stayed with me and acted as inspiration for my ideas to explore my own history through food, but this concept of tracking humanity as a whole was more thoroughly addressed in this book. Twitty demonstrates how ingredients, tools, and techniques can be traced across the globe in a timeline that demonstrates human migration, progress, and in this case specifically the journey through oppression. Can we tell other stories of history through food? Food alone is not enough, what can we learn from the patterns of the earth and the food parallels across the globe?
2. The global food melting pot
Southern cuisine as we know it is the evolution of African American cooking from the time of slavery, the main goal of which was survival. This cuisine was a mix of pre-existing and passed-down knowledge from their respective regions of Africa and knowledge gained from Native Americans also oppressed by European colonization. This leads me to two avenues of thought. The first includes the idea of our food aging with us, of food being “generational”. Generational knowledge is teachings that are passed down through the generations, but what do we call the evolution and what does it say about the evolution of society and survival? The second thought is on the idea that every country, culture, living community, etc. has its variations on certain dishes. Almost anywhere you go you will be able to find a dumpling of some kind, there will be a chip and dip, a well-known dish that resembles noodles or pasta, the ingredients will vary by region but when put next to each other they would resemble if not siblings, then cousins. How did this happen? How has the presence of these varieties affected one another? Can you paint large pictures of history tracking these variations as you could the change in diet?
3. Food and family
This book forced me to reflect on my family and the people, traditions, places, and memories within. As a part of my fall work I constructed the most comprehensive family tree I believe to exist within our family, and I got to engage in some great conversations with my relatives about the foods I grew up with. As a person who doesn’t want kids, I started to think about what it meant to care about family history and food traditions without the plan to pass them on to my own children. It also made me examine the importance of place in my life, the change from England to America and the age I was at had a profound influence on the foods I now eat and cook.
I loved this book, it taught me so much and I am hoping to write a mini-book review for the CCAS newsletter, which I will post as well if it is done this quarter.
Biographical Writing
My biographical writing is similar to the menu project I worked on last quarter, but instead of trying to write in such detail on one memory surrounding one meal on the menu, I took a closer look at the chapter structure Michael Twitty uses and decided to try and demonstrate an arch of food-related change/progress in regards to my life through shorter vignettes that also try a keep of memoir-like flow of time. Writing about these things takes me quite a long time as I often struggle to stay focused when I begin writing about things that make me emotional. To combat this I began by structuring my writing with bullet points, and free writing for about twenty minutes on each point. Doing this on paper allowed me to feel more comfortable to write my more intimate thoughts, and from this free write I was able to determine a more detailed narrative and a rough draft for each section. I continued to edit this draft until I reached this final version that I am really happy with, and while I am nervous to share it with the world I am excited to put it out there and I think I am setting a high bar for my final portfolio of works at the end of the quarter.
This writing is about my experience with my eating disorder and other mental health issues, food studies and academia, and finding healing through food. Part of finding the inspiration for writing this came from cooking pot roast and eating dinner with my roommate while we talked about how food had changed us over the last few years, so I chose to end it with my pot roast recipe. Let me know if you ever give it a try 🙂
I also attended and supported at Tuesdays workshop on WordPress, I had originally designed a mini workshop of my own to teach but due to scheduling I decided to support while the other workshop was presented and I will use the work I did this week to develop my next workshop.