Michael W. Twitty

Michael W. Twitty is an African-American Jewish culinary historian, writer and teacher, born in Washington, D.C., of Mende, Akan and Irish descent — his Irish ancestors were slave owners, a discovery he made through genetic testing and archival records and wrote about in the Guardian. He became interested in old cooking as a child after a visit to Colonial Williamsburg, studied African-American studies and anthropology at Howard University, and in 2010 started Afroculinaria, a blog on African and African-American foodways; that year he also assembled for a seed company an African American Heritage Collection of some thirty heirloom plants, among them the fish pepper and the long-handled dipper gourd, that were instrumental to African-American survival.

His Cooking Gene project became the book of that name in 2017, which won the James Beard Foundation award for book of the year in 2018 and the award in its writing category; Koshersoul followed in 2022. Raised nominally Christian, he converted to Judaism at the age of twenty-five, and his work joins the two kitchens and the two histories he carries.