Michael W. Twitty

“Your heritage foods are your health and your wealth.”

— Michael W. Twitty

“Jewish food is a matter of text expressed on the table.”

— Michael W. Twitty

“Nothing ever really escapes memory, and even the things we forget often are condemned to it.”

— Michael W. Twitty

“So much was lost—names, faces, ages, ethnic identities—that African Americans must do what no other ethnic group writ large must do: take…

— Michael W. Twitty

“You have to know a lot of songs to cook the way our ancestors cooked. The songs are like clocks with spells.…

— Michael W. Twitty

“It is also clear that structural racism is beating down the black chef. It started with segregation; black chefs in the South…

— Michael W. Twitty

“The Old South is a place where people use food to tell themselves who they are, to tell others who they are,…

— Michael W. Twitty

“Before I officially began the journey to dig deeper into my food and family roots, I was racking up an internal encyclopedia…

— Michael W. Twitty

“My entire cooking life has been about memory. It's my moth indispensable ingredient, so wherever I find it, I hoard it. I…

— Michael W. Twitty

“Jewish food and black food crisscross each other throughout history. They are both cuisines where homeland and exile interplay. Ideas and emotions…

— Michael W. Twitty

“So much was lost - names, faces, ages, ethnic identities - that African Americans must do what no other ethnic group writ…

— Michael W. Twitty

“There is no chef without a homeland. To be a chef today is to center yourself in the traditions of your roots…

— Michael W. Twitty

“Closing down an event with Confederate reenactors is never really easy for a black guy. Let’s face it, the Confederates lost the…

— Michael W. Twitty

“A heritage that is only self-congratulating and masturbatory is not a heritage at all but rather insipid nostalgia. We cannot afford that;…

— Michael W. Twitty

“The privilege of living now is that I can seat myself at the master's table - the table of my white ancestor,…

— Michael W. Twitty

“The body count alone marks the plantation as a sacred place, and yet that's not what hallows the grounds to most. Traditionally,…

— Michael W. Twitty

“Full confession: I am not dispassionate and unbiased. I didn't come to genetic genealogy services to be underwhelmed or go back to…

— Michael W. Twitty

“When I got back home I told my grandmother everything, detail by detail, and she savored it. I had been to the…

— Michael W. Twitty

“Food, racism, power, and justice are linked. What I’m trying to do is dismantle culinary nutritional imperialism and gastronomic white supremacy with…

— Michael W. Twitty

“I have often wondered whether the white people who know we are kin actually see us as family. It's critical for me…

— Michael W. Twitty

“Whatever archive or courthouse we visited in Huntsville left one impression on me above all others. There was a huge mural tracing…

— Michael W. Twitty

“The travels to discovery my heritage revealed to me that the South might not be a place so much as it is…

— Michael W. Twitty

“We have come to this strange cultural moment where food is both tool and weapon. I am grateful for it. My enter…

— Michael W. Twitty

“Today's American food culture is a contested landscape in search of values, new direction, and its own indigenous sense of rightness and…

— Michael W. Twitty