When I started Black Culinary History, I was in the midst of a career crisis and needed to find an anchor that would remind me of why I do this work. I had written the following message as an email to about 40 Black food creatives sharing what I was feeling as a chef and how I thought we could begin a dialogue. I called it a manifesto because it was my mission’s anchor, and still resonates over a decade later.
Please look past the overly earnest, wildly naive prose to see the central mission which is to provide a starting point for anyone interested in being a more informed and prepared practitioner of Black Culinary heritage.
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Has it ever occurred to you that there really isn’t a soulful or substantive analysis of Black people in the culinary world? While I am the first to be proud of our inclusion in this field as a given and the fact that race has little to do with our ability as Black people to bring culinary fire wherever and however we like, it occurs to me that it’s dangerous not to look back and pay homage to the fact that it hasn’t always been the case.
I feel a sense of responsibility as a Black culinary professional, being blessed with the ability to freely and profitably lay down my mark on this industry to in some way put something meaningful back out into the culinary universe for my little sisters and brothers to be inspired by. My idea is pretty simple: we all have a verbal family history that has been passed down through great meals and stories from parents and grandparents. I’m sure you’ve felt as starved for pockets of inspiration as I have, so you’ve looked to whatever information you could find. We have visionaries such as chefs Leah Chase, Jefferson Evans, and Edna Lewis, but what I’m talking about is a reference point for all these things in a clear and concise format, as a starting point for our predecessors.
What I want is to know is your background, culinary points of view, and where you draw inspiration from. I want to be voracious about researching our culinary history and sharing my findings with you all. I want to meet, network, and fellowship with all my brothers and sisters in food, and I want to be the muse for the generation of Black chefs coming behind me. I want this project to be a multi-layered confection of all these things and I know that to achieve any of this the starting point is you. I hope I'm on the right track and that I'm not alone in this vision. I hope you'll share information with me and keep current with the information I put out because again this project is for all of us!