The Cooking Gene

Ambitious and interesting.

A moving account of Michael Twitty's personal journey to explore his ancestry through culinary history, genealogy, population genetics, travel, and his own memories. The book is studded with fascinating (and often disturbing) details about the ingenuity required of enslaved people in the United States to survive, and thrive. The narrative underscored for me and enlightened me in a new way about just how much culture and language from West and Central Africa survived the ravages of persecution and time to remain vital and present in the lives of the descendents of enslaved people today - and the descendents of their ancestors' enslavers - especially in Southern foodways.

A few quibbles: perhaps it's because I bought a mass-market edition, but there were multiple issues that a copyeditor should have caught (creative uses of em-dashes made the structure of some sentences unclear, and required me to re-read them multiple times). The book also could have benefited from an index, but my guess is that the publisher/editor wasn't willing to pay for an indexer.

Still, I absolutely recommend this to anyone interested in culinary history (especially of southern American, West African, and/or Central African cuisines), African American history, and genealogy. Michael Twitty is an excellent writer who goes above and beyond in his efforts to get at a personal truth, and is generous enough to give the reader a window into it.

I am amazed by the information the author found out. There is information about his family, their food, the roots of their food, the spread of their food, the health ramifications of their food, etc. This book is interesting and so full of information! I will have to reread this book again to catch it all.

heavy, but fascinating, but heavy

Great for fans of the not-straight-forward elements of geneology, great for fans of food origin stories, great for fans of southern food.

I read a lot of non-fiction on Very Interesting Topics that find me powering through dry writing because KNOWLEDGE!, and that's what I expected from this - I was totally wrong. The writing straddles conversational and evocative, and the narrative weaves effortlessly back and forth between personal and historical. Beautifully written, emotional and informative.