I’m writing the following statement on March 27th, 2024. Recently I’ve been teaching an African American Food Culture course (as well as other art and African American studies classes) at California State University Fullerton. (I also teach at Otis College of Art & Design).
Teaching the food class has inspired me to revive my cooking blog. I had lost energy for upkeeping it long ago when I was forced to transfer the blog from Posterous blog sites to WordPress about a decade ago. After the Posterous site went down fully, all of my images were lost as they had referred back to the original posts. So in this WordPress blog, those earlier images all appear as “broken”. It makes me want to cry and scream. My heart hurts so much because of the amount of time and love I had put into creating this archive. Now I am starting up again.
I think I might be mostly inspired by the scholarly Black foodways work of Toni Tipton-Martin, Jessica B. Harris, and Michael Twitty…but especially Tipton-Martin’s book, The Jemima Code. Black food scholars are making me re-value myself as a cooking artist and they are emphasizing to me that my cooking is very good and important. The visual artist and chef, Clementine Hunter is also an inspiration. So is the cookbook, Ghetto Gastro (2023) and a relatively new friend I have who is a Southern Foodways expert and writer. His name is Lolis Eric Ellie. I met him at a party hosted by my artist friend Ronda Brown (who also is an amazing cook) who was hosting the party for her friend, the late cultural writer/critic Greg Tate.
I want to also mention that I have a cookbook gifted to me around 2007 by the visual artist Synthia Saint James. I consider that book to be an inspiration also for the marriage of my visual artmaking practices and my culinary arts practice. I’m now trying to figure out how to marry my various talents in more novel ways.