The Cooking Gene
by Michael W Twitty

Very peculiar book. The cover implied it was about the history of Black American cooking, but there was a whole lot more about the history of Michael W Twitty than about cooking. His family history is fascinating--it's a sample and an example of a lot of other families, people coming from many backgrounds, with many stories, all all being dumped into the same morass of fear and misery in the great United States of America.

He does write--a little--of foods and cooking, only not in the detail I'd expected. Those parts seem mostly general, speaking of tripe or black-eyed peas or hominy grits as a given but not discussing their history or evolution in detail. I was quite disappointed.

One odd conclusion he reached, described in his own words:

If slavery had phased out around 1790 and gradual emancipation had spread, the whole history of America and her foodways would be markedly different. Instead, cotton ensured the growing and complete racialization of what it meant to be of African descent....if King Cotton had never reigned, we African Americans might be like any other ethnic group--stories might be passed down; names remembered; songs, words, religions, prayers, perhaps, even one might say, a sense of pride. Instead, names were changed again and again and again, as people were sold, further commoditized, dehumanized, and abused.

What he's referring to is that slavery was once common and more-or-less evenly spread out over the southern states.  It might very well have been gradually phased out--if it hadn't been for cotton. As soon as planters discovered the profit they could make in growing cotton and selling it to the mills in England, they abandoned the worn-out farms of the southeast and spread out to fresh land in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and other unclaimed areas, taking their slaves--and more slaves--with them. That mass movement in pursuit of quick and easy fortunes didn't leave time for caring for slaves, planting gardens, or encouraging them in eating a sustaining diet so they could reproduce and raise new, healthy infants into slaver. The diet became impoverished and the lot of the enslaved became more and more hopeless. Slavery wasn't going nowhere.