A review by katieoxee
The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty

challenging emotional informative reflective slow-paced

2.5

This book could have been something amazing. But it suffers from ineffective editing. The author has true moments of wit, humor, insight, and enlightenment, but these moments are overshadowed by endless pages of DNA report summaries and the repetition of fruits and vegetables that enslaved people grew throughout the south. His voice shined most brilliantly when discussing his ancestors’ stories and his interaction with the food and stories of the south. His narrative would have benefited from a more sequential order of events, but, instead, the reader is left reeling after introductions to different ancestors at different times without little sense of timeline order.