Michael Twitty

In The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South, Michael W. Twitty writes, “Food is an archiver, a keeper of secrets.” Yet Twitty, a culinary historian, scientist, cook, writer and reader, and justice seeker, shares everything, beginning with his Afroculinaria blog. With ancestral lines that span three continents and more than a dozen states and cities, Twitty speaks not about “from” but “of.” He is “of” these places, of parents born and raised “South by Midwest” and of people who liked to tell stories.