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MICHAEL TWITTY: The transatlantic slave trade
was a major catalyst in African-American cuisine
and culture.
During this time, enslavement fueled the engine
moving cash crops about the Atlantic world.
But there is a second narrative, one far more empowering.
From roughly 1440 to the middle of the 19th century,
foods along with other important cultural artifacts
traveled with enslaved Africans, ensuring the continuation
of aspects of their cultures.
And Africa, at that time, was home to 2,000, and still is,
home to 2,000-plus indigenous food plants.
Africans would have their own varieties
of peanuts that would arrive in the American South,
not from South America where the peanut began, but from West
Africa on slave ships.
And those slave ships also brought okra, sesame seeds,
watermelon, musk melon, varieties of kola,
and coffee, varieties of plantains and bananas
that had long since been variegated in West Africa.
There was an effort made to bring over yams.
There was an effort made to bring over cocoyam, cassava,
sweet potatoes, other things that
had become part of the diet.
And this slabber-sauce was nothing in comparison
to what they would grow for themselves in the new world.
So in order to get Africans to eat on the way over,
they had to use the foods they were familiar with.
Many Africans chose to starve themselves or to protest,
because the food was awful.
It was low quality.
So what you need to understand is
that these crops were not brought
by the enslaved themselves but were brought in steerage
to feed them on the journey and to be planted
once they arrived in the West Indies, Brazil,
or North America.
And once they were there, they became staples of a diet.
And what's so powerful about this is that,
no matter where these people land,
it didn't matter where the boat dropped them off.
It's where it picked them up from.
The commonality of all these foods in different places
symbolizing a common African Atlantic Black identity.
That is so powerful, because it defines
the majority of the cuisines of the Americas to this day.
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When people think of slavery, they think of cotton,
because that's the American narrative, or at least one
part of the American narrative.
But for most of the history of New World slavery,
we have to talk about sugar.
Sugar was originally domesticated
in the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
On the verge of the Colombian voyages that would open up
the Americas to colonization, settlement, war, displacement,
and enslavement, they were looking
for more room, more spaces to grow this tropical crop that
would become an addiction for the West.
Eventually, sugar will bring millions of enslaved Africans
to the Caribbean and to Brazil.
And in the urge to open up other lands
to grow sugarcane and make a crop that
will make lots of money for people
sugarcane is the entry point for the Western hemisphere
to develop a whole culture around racial chattel slavery.
And in all of this, there's us, the sugar planters, weeders,
cultivators, cutters, boilers, molasses
makers, rum makers that feed a vicious triangular
trade with West Africa by which rum is traded for human beings,
those human beings are brought to sugar cane growing
areas of the tropical Americas, those people
produce molasses, which feeds other enslaved people
and the poor of Western Europe and colonial America,
and some of that molasses is then
turned into rum, which feeds that triangle again.
And we also become these confectioners.
You can't just engage with this plant--
it's a food, plant, right?--
and not become this--
people who have a sweet tooth.
And that's the deep irony of it.
Some people are triggered by the sight of cotton
but don't think twice about sitting down to tables
where sugar is ever present.
That addictive grass that made the transatlantic slave
trade and our unfortunate global history
with race and anti-Blackness possible.
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Corn-- corn was this crop that came from teosinte,
from Indigenous people that lived in Mesoamerica.
And it was a crop that they developed
into one of the world's most important agricultural agents
of change.
So when that crop gets to Africa during that period
of exploration and Africans grow it,
it becomes a major motivator for us
to have more children, because we have more food.
But more children and more food means
more competition means more people means
more people that can be caught up in the transatlantic slave
trade.
For those of us in North America, corn in fact
becomes an important food through nixtamalization,
which is a term from Nahuatl Aztec that
means that the corn has been produced with lye or lime,
so the essential amino acid lysine
is there front and center.
And it becomes a more easily digestible, and it's dehulled.
And that food alone meant that Black people who
came from Africa to North America
had a more sustainable food source and a food source that
was more nutritious when consumed with other vegetables
and proteins than the food that was being ingested by people
in the Caribbean and now Latin America, Brazil and beyond.
That crop was the crop that turned into hominy, turned
into grits, turned into the coating for their chicken,
turned into the corn cakes that they
ate on a daily basis called hoe cakes and ash cakes.
The corn shucks were their mattresses
where they slept and made their children.
The corn husking ritual that happened every fall
was how our great great great great grandmothers
and great great great great grandfathers met each other.
You know, whoever got the red ear of corn
got to kiss the girl of his dreams.
When the girl would go to the-- when the enslaved girl would
go to the dance at the corn shucking,
she would soak her petticoat in the liquid that
came of making the hominy, making the grits that
had starch in it so that when she went to the dance,
and she popped her dress, it made a snapping sound.
All the boys would turn their head and look at her.
That's very different from, when you're reading the books,
the slaves--
they were enslaved.
They were not slaves.
Enslaved is a condition.
Slave is an identity.
My ancestors and many of yours weren't no damn slaves.
They were enslaved.
Let's get that right.
Those enslaved ancestors, when you read about it in the book,
it's like the slaves got corn, pork, and salt fish,
and that was it.
You know, screw the fact that they had lives,
that they loved each other, that when they were sick,
the grandmother would put corn silk in a pipe
and blow it in your ear to cure an ear infection.
Screw the fact that an ear of corn on a piece of string
was a power object, a charm to keep people
from stealing out your field.
Forget the fact that people would take the corn stalks
and suck the sugar out of them for energy
because they were being worked to death.
See, that's why the food stories are so important,
because they give us those elements of life
that we could understand.
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Some of you may come to this space and you're saying,
well, I have all these recipes passed down
from my grandmother, great-grandmother,
from other relatives or ancestors,
or even from my parents, or things
we share with each other in this current generation.
So how do I connect that to my family history
or to our culture?
And the answer is simple but complex.
You have to sort of look at one particular dish
or a family of dishes.
And then you can trace it back to its origin story.
And so for the Mende people of Sierra Leone, from whom I come,
from whom the mothers who produced
my maternal grandmother and mother came from,
rice, specifically made with the tomato and onion and peppers,
is something that you make that's comforting,
that's something that-- a dish that women take pride in.
And for me, every time I make red rice,
I'm reminded that Mama Wovei had a daughter whose name I'll
never know.
And that daughter had a daughter named Nora.
And Nora had a daughter named Hester.
And Hester had a daughter named Josephine.
And Josephine had a daughter named Mary.
And Mary had a daughter named Hazel.
And Hazel had a daughter named Patricia.
And Patricia had a son named Michael,
who she said was the best thing she ever cooked,
because she cooked him for nine months in her belly,
low and slow.
And not only is that how I became an American,
but that's how come I came to love a dish that for me
represents the story of the mothers who created soul food.
But I tell you this story because I
want you to understand that the foods and the things that we
associate with our best and most intimate and most emotional
parts of our family experience often
have these really deep, impressionable roots
that we should take pride in.