He appeared on Bizarre Foods America with Andrew Zimmerman, Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates, and lectured to more than 200 groups including Yale, Oxford and Carnegie Mellon Universities, the Smithsonian Institution, Colonial Williamsburg, and spoken around the world from the MAD Symposium in Copenhagen to the Barbican Theatre in London to Jerusalem's Jewish Film Festival on culinary justice and the African American impact on Southern foodways and the complexities of his identity as a gay, African American, Jewish man.

Michael created Afroculinaria, the first blog devoted to African American historic foodways and their legacy. Metropolitan area and his interests include food culture, food history, Jewish cultural issues, African American history and cultural politics. He is also a Judaic studies teacher from the Washington D.C. Twitty is a food writer, independent scholar, culinary historian, and historical interpreter personally charged with preparing, preserving and promoting African American foodways and its parent traditions in Africa and her Diaspora and its legacy in the food culture of the American South. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep-the power of food to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together. As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the South's past.

He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and visits Civil War battlefields in Virginia, synagogues in Alabama, and black-owned organic farms in Georgia. Twitty travels from the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields to tell of the struggles his family faced and how food enabled his ancestors' survival across three centuries. Twitty takes listeners to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who 'owns' it is one of the most provocative touchpoints in our ongoing struggles over race.

The cooking gene by michael w twitty