L IFESTYLE /C ULTURE
Food Historian Ties Culinary Pieces Together
FOOD SASHA ROGELBERG | JE STAFF
WHEN FOOD WRITER
and historian Michael Twitty
traveled to Caesarea National
Park in Israel several years ago,
he was struck by the broken
mosaic among the rubble on a
dining room fl oor.

Th ere were thousands of
“pixels” of stones shaped like
lobster, crab, oyster, meat bones
and vegetables — a veritable
nonkosher Roman feast shown
all in fragments to the contem-
porary onlooker.

To Twitty, the author of
James Beard Award-winning
book “Th e Cooking Gene”
and “Rice,” the mosaic was
emblematic of this work
that blended his research in
African and African American
foodways and cooking in the
American South, as well as
his African American, Jewish,
gay and southern identities:
fragmented and incomplete
histories that when combined,
are greater than the sum of
their parts.

Twitty shared his research
and Jewish and African
American food traditions with
WNMAJH Public Programs Manager and event moderator Daniel
Samuels (above) with Michael Twitty
Screenshot by Sasha Rogelberg
Food writer and historian Michael Twitty is the James Beard Award-
winning author of “The Cooking Gene” and “Rice.”
Photo by Noah Fecks
a virtual audience on Dec.

16 as part of the Weitzman
National Museum of American
Jewish History’s Jewish food
series. Th e program was in
partnership with Philadelphia-
based Jews of color advocacy
organization Jews in ALL
Hues. “A lot of our history, a lot
of our culture, a lot of our
food is bricolage,” Twitty said.

“It’s little bits and pieces that
we have, and everybody has
the responsibility of putting it
together for themselves.”
Twitty’s journey to putting
those pieces together began
when he was a child, cooking
in his family kitchen since he
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