African Influences
By 
This very interesting profile of the culinary scholar Michael Twitty reinforces one key point for any reader–that African influences on the United States are basically still ignored. African-American influences on white culture aren’t per se, but specifically African influences on American society as a whole really do not get discussed in meaningful ways.
So how did this self-trained historical cook and unaffiliated scholar — a man who majored in Afro-American studies and anthropology at Howard University but did not have the money to complete the coursework for his degree; who describes himself as outside the mainstream and “four time blessed” (“large of body, gay, African American and Jewish”); who for years supported himself (meagerly) as a Hebrew teacher; who underwrites the cost of his professional travel by crowdsourcing — come to be recognized as an important figure in the world of culinary scholarship?
The easy answer is Paula Deen.
In June 2013, shortly after disclosure of Deen’s past use of the n-word made her the culinary world’s reigning persona non grata, Twitty posted an open letter to her on Africulinaria.com in which he addressed Deen as a fellow Southerner, “a cousin if you will and not a combatant.” Twitty told Deen that far more repugnant to him than her use of the n-word was “the near universal erasure of the black presence from American culinary memory.” He described that phenomenon as a form of “culinary injustice that robbed blacks of a vital form of their history and identity.”
“Your barbecue,” he wrote, “is my West African babbake, your fried chicken, your red rice, your hoecake, your watermelon, your black-eyed peas, your crowder peas, your muskmelon, your tomatoes, your peanuts, your hot peppers, your Brunswick stew and okra soup, benne, jambalaya, hoppin’ john, gumbo, stewed greens and fat meat — have inextricable ties . . . to West and Central Africa.”
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Learning about the derivation of plant varieties through generations of crossbreeding accentuated his longstanding fascination with his own genetic origins. He had a sense that if he overlapped a map showing where Afrocentric Southern foodstuffs and famous Southern recipes first appeared with a map showing where his slave ancestors had landed — where they and their offspring met, married and procreated and where his white ancestors forcibly mingled with his black ones — the two maps would overlap, together telling the story of the African American culinary diaspora.
The erasure of African culture from what it means to be an American–in a way that Irish or Italian or English culture is very much not erased–is part and parcel of the structural racism that flows throughout our society, affecting everything we do. Food culture and the stories we tell about food is just one example of this.