James Baldwin, “Nobody Knows My Name:  A Letter from the South”

 Lech Lecha!  (Go forth, get you out, Go to yourself…!) to the land which I will show you….”  Bereshit/Genesis 12

It’s time for a deep, deep breath.  It has been a little over two weeks since our campaign closed and well, as you may well know–we were successful.  The past two weeks, apart from a visit to Pittsburgh for the Slavery to Freedom exhibit planning to Phillipsburg Manor and the end of Hebrew school…well.. you get it–its been busy.  I can’t be happier with the love and support of a lot of people who took the leap of 5-10-8-36-bucks and beyond.  Thank you for not saying, “I don’t have any money….,”  thank you for not saying, “that’s nice but I’ll spend my ten bucks on Starbucks but good luck with your project.”  We donated to other campaigns, several of which were successful and hopefully those campaigns will give healing to young patients, bring a grassroots movement for peace in the Middle East an anchor, and give other people a headstart on their visions, dreams and solutions for a better future.  “Good luck” is not enough these days–it takes resources, action, good wil and moral support.  You will see a lot of praise for our Anonymous Angel—who stepped in at about 12 hours to go or so and saved us and made me feel like there is a G-d, and G-d moves through people to answer our prayers.

Almost six months ago I was sitting at a Thai restaurant and asked a close friend the question, “What do you think of this project? I’ve always wanted to go to the Deep South and see the places where my family history started and write about it all through the lens of food.” First question:  ”What are other people going to get out of this journey if its personal, why should they help?”   I had a road atlas in hand and a .50 cent notebook and a few pencils.  In between vegetable spring rolls and a rice and tapioca pudding with black sesame, we took out a pencil, and a route started to form….and a vision shaped itself around that route.

At the tail end of the campaign an Amazing Anonymous Angel stepped forward with a check that completed the amount we set our goal for.  We cannot begin to thank all of you–friends like Andrew, Heather and Mark who knew me when I was 20 and always told me I had what it took to do something special with my mind and vision no matter how bad things were in life  or how far away good things like this seemed.  It was new friends like Rob and Megan who gave this project a major boost and provided constant support It was long time friends like Beth and Jennica and Misty who  have never stopped believing in me from the day they met me and share with me the love of bringing history to everybody. It was Rabbi Jack Luxemburg of Temple Beth Ami and Rabbi David Shneyer of Am Kolel both sources of constant support and moral care.   It was master archivist Janet Stanley–who has watched me walk through the door of her library for almost 20 years.  It was scholars Kym Rice and Martha Katz-Hyman my editors for World of a Slave, and anthropologist Richard Wilk, my editor for Rice and Beans who gave substantially and told everyone they knew!  It was Vernice Woodand–who gave not once–but twice–just because she believed in me/us that much.  Wow..It’s people like Sandor Katz, Ira Wallace and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Denzel Mitchell and Five Seeds Farm and Spike Gjerde of Woodberry Kitchen, Nancie McDermott, Bryant Terry, Jane Ziegelman, and other figures of note in today’s culinary world and people like Michael Pollan and the Lee Bros. who tweeted about it and gave new life to our buzz.  This is for Gretchen McKay who ran the FIRST story about this project! This is for Bill Daley of the Chicago Tribune, my ” sister” Brook Obie of Ebony.Com, Larry Brook of Southern Jewish Life, and for Miki Turner at Jet Magazine.  It was Kat Kinsman at Eatocracy on CNN and Claire Thompson of Grist.  It was the Henrique of the the Ebony Hillbillies for granting us a song to use for our campaign video and it was Joey W. for setting up my blog and getting the word out to thousands of people and being there for me every step of the way.  This is for Corey W. whose pictures got people’s attention and galvanized so many!  It was Andi Cumbo trying to tell the story of her home in Virginia….It was Sharon Morgan and Grant Hayter-Menzies constant posting and reposting of the news….It was all the people who liked me on Facebook and It was my so called Tweeps–you know who you are…..who constantly constantly retweeted about us. @stellacooks, @stellatex, @savoryexposure, @NEXTStepsYEP, @jwlucasnc, @virginiawillis, @megbailey, @WilliamsWrite, @ChefAmadeus, @Blackgayjewish, @superspace_zac, @Rexi44, @namoore, @blackamercooks, @Wordsmyth199, @Janenhowe, @indoorgarden_er, @LCAfrica, @sandrajlawson, @Sacredfoodguru, @Stephaniekays, @Robb4progress, @aywalton, @foodculturalist, and so so so many others who retweeted!

This is a special thank you to Tricia/Rose/Richard/Katrina of Colonial Williamsburg for being the FIRST to say–we want to be a part of this project!  It is a thank you to Ser Sesh Abtu-Heru/C.M. Boxley of Forks of the Road, and Kathleen Jenkins of Melrose Plantation at and Kathe Hambrick of the River Road African American Heritage Museum for being the guiding lights for this project–and to Somerset Place Plantation, Historic Brattonsville, Kingsley Plantation, Redcliffe State Park, Historic Latta Plantation, Hope Plantation, the Hermann-Grima House, Old Alabama Town, the people of Charleston, Savannah, Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, Annapolis, Baltimore, Williamsburg, Birmingham, Natchez, the Slow Food chapters of Richmond and Savannah, the JCC’s of Atlanta and New Orleans, Rabbi Michelle Goldsmith and Temple Beth El and the Jewish community of Birmingham as well as Larry Brook of Southern Jewish Life!

Nicole Moore–you are the Mother of this project you are the channel of our ancestors!

Joey W–you are the infrastructure  behind this project!

Johnathan and Khi –you are the creative magic behind this project!

The entire list of donors is on The Cooking Gene website….But this isn’t about a list..this is about being grateful and not being able to work on this posting without crying and praying and knowing that what I was created to do is finally coming together…that it and of itself is a miracle I wish on everyone.

“This ain’t no dream.  We ran away as slaves, but we come back Fighting Men!  Go tell your folks that Kingdom come, the year of Jubilee!”  Morgan Freeman, as “Sgt. Major John Rawlins”, in Glory, (1989)

Sitting here right now its almost sunset in the DC area and this computer is about to be shut off in honor of the Sabbath.  It’s been a ride like no other…..this journey to making this dream of mine to find my roots and trace them through food–and bring people together across lines of “race.” There is an old Yiddish proverb–”A man plans and G-d laughs.”  I know what that means now.  In less than two days time I will find out whether or not my dream was a marketable venture enough for people to want to read about our travels and watch and copy recipes as my team and I wind our way through the South.

I realize that for many people I am only as good as my bio and my “branding,” and those are just buzzwords for a public face.  But let’s cut the chase here–I need you because making it to and past my goal is the only way the Southern Discomfort Tour is going to take off and be of some meaning and use to people.  I had to think about it long and hard—how do I make this project NOT self-indulgent and make it complex enough to be rewarding for other people and not just me.

When I was a very little kid for some reason I had issues with being Black.  My Mother tells me that I often talked about Black people as being ugly or scary or not as smart.  If you’ve ever seen the “doll experiments”  you can guess why what that reason was.  I hated when my Mother would remind me about that…it was embarrassing–still is.  Of course things haven’t changed much in some arenas, although our opinions are.  That’s the weird thing about “race,” its a construct, its a thing…like gender….like sexuality…like nationality…like religion.  It does not really cross most human minds that we choose to opt in or out of these social constructs.  Indeed, they do give meaning and structure to our lives and human existence but essentially they are only as real as we put meaning and action behind them.  I choose to be an African American male-identifying Jew.  I am not inherently any of that….well the male part I can’t help–but how much of that is how I was raised and the society and culture I came through?

Point being–when I became “ethnic,” my life changed.  I became ethnic because I really wanted a reason to love being part of the culture I was born into.  So many negative stereotypes and perceptions born in slavery, oppression, segregation, cultural and class “tracking,” all sorts of little social beasties that we still have a lot of trouble talking about not just in America but in the entire Western world.  Because my Mom taught me to count to ten in Swahili (because that was popular back then and she lived several years in Kenya as a teenager), because my Dad had a Black inventors t shirt he made and sold, because I had Black history posters on my wall and because I went to family reunions, celebrated Kwanzaa, went to museums, listened to the whole gamut of our musical legacy, and watched an all Black cast of Oedipus with Morgan Freeman….LOL…I grew up ethnically Black.

Don’t get me wrong–I think ethnic Black and genetic Black are still related.  I believe DNA carries memory.  You can choose not to believe that metaphysical stuff–but I do.  I think we ache with stories and spells and prayers we don’t know the origin of.  We pine for genealogy because we know that part of the reason and rationale behind “us,” is in them–the dead and the spirit.  Every culture on earth just about has a relationship with their Ancestors.  In African cultures libation is poured, memorial prayers are said, altars constructed, shrines put up.  In Judaism one honors yahrtzeits and yizkor and say Kaddish and visit cemetaries and place stones on the grave to say “we still respect you, we were here.”

And then there’s that food thing.  I’ve said it once I’ll say it again–food is a powerful way to bring us all together and it serves as a vehicle for our identities–not static fixed identities but how they change even while they stay grounded in specific realities.  To use Annie Hauck-Lawson’s term your “food voice,” is a shifting paradigm. However, for most of us it starts and ends somewhere–kind of like our identities…”I am this—but I am not that….I come from—I am…”  etc. etc.  That’s our reality.  We are not one thing but many things.  Many things working together.  Kind of like a plate of something or  specific dish–different elements in concert with one another cooking into something new and complex and impossibly un-duplicated.

Ever since I was a little kid this identity thing has been important to me.  We pretend that culture is just coincidental–but its not.  It’s not like a food preference or a fashion–even though that’s what “ethnicity” means to a lot of people.  Culture is always there–its this language I’m typing in–its my thoughts on how the world is ordered and what’s right and what’s wrong.  It isn’t something that ever truly goes on the back burner.  We do ourselves a great disservice in the modern West pretending that one’s culture is waiting for us on a hook at home while everything else is the “real” us.  Nope.  You are not your suit tie skirt or pantsuit.  You are not your gym.  You are not any of those things. You are first and foremost a complex human animal with a complex thing balanced between nature and nurture called culture living inside of you.

I know that for some people this project is a little perplexing.  I know some people won’t get it.  I hope that people will get it.  I want you to understand that I really want to know where I come from because it effects my cooking and food and scholarship.  I want to know where I’m “located,” in the very culinary history I write about.  I’ve been envious for years of people from Italy or Greece who can tell you about an olive or something from their region and why they love it so much and how what they do is different and irreplaceable.  Those types always seem to be able to point out the antiquity of those foods and traditions.  All I want is to be able to have the keys to do the same.  The full story of Southern food has not been told.

Do you know what it was like to be an enslaved cook?

Have you ever seen anyone like me–a Black American male under 36 put on the funny clothes and cook and do the tasks of slavery to educate and motivate others?

Do you know the songs we sang when we cooked?  Do you know the special tools and techniques that have been forgotten?  Do you know the prayers and spells our grandmothers used to make things come out perfectly?

Do you have any idea of what its like to go to a Southern plantation site and see your culture and history marginalized, annihilated, obfuscated, removed, unremarked?

Do you know why we put the plates of our loved ones on our graves?  Sang poetically about the gourd? Marked our bowls with sacred signs, and scratched secrets into the shells of turtles?

Can you name a single enslaved cook?

Do you know what those women and men went through from day to day?  Do you know what they saw and experienced?

And then there is Africa….its my dream to know where my family comes from in Africa.   Millions of people are watching “Finding Our Roots,” and “Who Do you Think You Are?”  these days.  I dream of that…being able to watch that tree grow and use genetic research to go where records can’t.  I dream of being able to trace my Ancestors story in the flow of American and World history.  This means the world to me–giving honor to my Ancestors and celebrating them and their stories and reaching others and saying hey–because of this dish or this food– we are essentially, “related.”  We are one people.  One humanity with many Ancestors–and what they left binds us and makes us whole.

Getting on the road means learning and listening to people even as I present what I know and share my learning with younger people.  I don’t think one can truly know anything until they’ve traveled.  For me–my family history goes back to six places–Virginia, North and South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia.  The first four contain the most leads and its my hope that I can see the plantations or the remnants thereof–of the land my forefather’s worked.  And if you’d like to volunteer–just say so–and I can put you to work

I want my Ancestors to be at peace, and I want me to be at peace.  Even more so I want us all to be at peace.

I’m almost up to 1600 words…So here goes.

I love you.  Please help me live this dream.  Please.

We need you–I know I’ve bugged some of my readers by saying this for three months, but  this is the nature of crowdfunding—and its an opportunity for those of us without grants, loans or bank accounts above month to month survival to work for our public and pursue the dreams and Big Ideas that we hope will make the world a better place.

If I am engaging you, contributing to our project is a very small price to pay in order to keep enjoying the history, research and recipes I’ve worked hard with my friends to present to you here.

To my fellow African Americans–we complain a lot when sites and shows and movies and the like don’t reflect our history or experience.  We want them to tell it like it is…but many of my colleagues have complained that so often we don’t empower each other to tell our won stories.  ”Them,” don’t owe us our story well told.  ”We” certainly do.  We can take responsibility and ownership so that the world receives responsibly communicated narratives about the African American experience.  It’s your choice.   This is an opportunity to help a fellow African American teach our culture and share information about our culture with a lot of people and provide a lot of free content and information about our contributions to American civilization for the world to see.  I need to know my community supports me and isn’t just giving lip service to the idea that Black history is important.  I need to know that the same people who will rally in times of rain will rally in the sunshine too.  And that day is today–but the clock is ticking.

I can’t do anymore, can’t say anymore, can’t think anymore.  It’s up to G-d and you.

Shabbat Shalom

Michael

Michael

http://grist.org/food/southern-discomfort-tracing-a-regions-history-through-its-food/

We are going from Maryland to Louisiana in search of America’s culinary roots.  We need you more than ever.  We want to soar into this project and be amply prepared for all of the blessings and opportunieis to help others we encounter.  Please don’t hesistate or wait to the last minute–we need to know in the next few days that this will be possible.  Thank you!

Michael and the Team

And now for a recipe:

Sassafras Tea

In the markets ofSenegalandGambiatoday, various herbs and roots are sold to make herbal teas which are widely enjoyed.  InAmerica, the spring tonic “cure all” known to all of my grandparents—who came fromVirginia, South Carolinaand Alabama—was sassafras tea.  Because doctors were few and far between, and because enslaved communities were largely responsible for their own health and upkeep, sassafras was used as a tonic to keep a family in good health as much as possible.  Although it is alleged that sassafras roots have carcinogenic chemicals in them, it’s interesting that our forefathers and foremothers lived long healthy lives, drinking sassafras tea liberally. Persimmon tree leaves, full of vitamin C made another healthy herb tea, along with spicebush berries and wild herbs that grew on the ground.

1 quart of boiling water

¾ cup cleaned, dried, chopped sassafras roots

Boil the sassafras with the water and allow it to steep.  When the water turns dark red, the tea is ready.  Sweeten with honey to taste.

Michael

Green Glaze Collards

Yes, we’re going to keep posting it until the campaign ends on May 6th, at 11:59 PM Pacific Time……Because that’s how crowdfunding works and this work is not a hobby–its a job–we say G-d bless to our 70-plus funders thus far but strongly encourage our visitors, Facebook and Twitter followers to please make a donation of 18$ or more to the Cooking Gene Project on Indiegogo.  If you have 18 or more, please donate and save our project!  This is my life’s dream to find out where my ancestors came from and cook “with them” so please help us!  Here ya go:  http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Cooking-Gene-Project-The-Southern-Discomfort-Tour

OK—now onto “I’m Proud to be a Collard Person”

Seven days from now I guess we find out if we’re going to the Land of Cotton to find out more about my—and America’s culinary roots. As we rev up and make plans we want to give everybody a rush of blog posts to get any last minute “deciders” and “funders” an idea of what we’re really doing with the money we raise.  Bottom line: We’re telling stories—old stories anew and new stories nobody’s heard before about what enslaved people gave to American food and how my Ancestors fit into that story.  The moment that someone declares that everything there has to be done or learned has been done or learned, that’s when we get a ton of new important information about a topic—and to me this is more than a topic—its more than trivial—it’s my heritage, it’s my tradition, it’s where I come from.

If there is any American vegetable that screams African-American it’s the collard green.  There are many Collard People running around, but we aren’t all Black, some of us are green J   The collard’s complicated story with African Americans really speaks to the way food can unravel the mysteries of complex identities.  On the Southern Discomfort Tour—we hope to visit Hanover County, Virginia…historical ground one for the collard green in the enslaved community.  Here in 1781, Captain William Feltman of the Continental Army gave the first documentation available thus far linking Black folks in the Southern U.S. with the collard.  “The Negroes here raise great quantities of snaps and collerds
(sic) they have no cabbages here.”

Ezra Adams—South Carolina

“If you wants to know what I thinks is de best vittles, I’se gwine to be obliged to (admit) dat is is cabbage sprouts in de spring, and it is collard greens after frost has struck….I lak to eat.”

Background History

Collards (Brassica oleracea acephala) are not African,  they are temperate and Eurasian in origin, but their consumption, and with them—turnip, kale, rape, mustard and other greens are a healthy blend of tastes—West and Central African, Scottish, Portuguese, German and the like.  Many culinary historians agree that the green craze in the South is supported by tastes for spring greens among Celtic and Germanic Southerners but was really spearheaded by people of African descent.  In tropical West Africa, greens were available year round in gardens and markets and figured prominently

in regular meals.  Unlike Northern Europeans, West and Central Africans had a climate that supported a continuous variety of edible greens from both cultivated and wild plants.  Amaranth, celosia, inine (African spinach), and the leaves of cowpeas, cassava, okra, sweet potatoes, and other vegetables helped make up the 30-60 edible leaves prepared during the age of the slave trade.  Long before America there were varieties of plants botanically cognate to chenopodiums and phytolacca (read lambs quarter and poke) in West Africa.  Often referred to as “relish,” these African greens were made into a sauce to be eaten with rice, fufu or millet and some groups associated them with sacred medicine and vitality.

At some point in the Middle Ages, cabbages and turnips diffused south to what is now Mali from Morocco to feed Moroccan salt traders and scholars visiting Timbuktu.  While the first generation arrival of these plants was not said to spread out of the Moroccan quarter, these vegetables are still grown in the Sahel today as valuable market crops.  As early slave forts sprung up via the Portuguese trade, so did gardens to supply their dietary needs.  Cabbages and turnips enjoyed only measured success and usually depended on microclimate conditions that allowed for cooler breezes and night temperatures.  Kale and colewort (get it?  “collard” comes from colewort —chou vert/couve/cole) were frequently mentioned in letters and records of slave forts and their gardens.  You better believe these seeds and plants left the shelter of the forts and began making their way into the interior of what is now Ghana, Angola, Senegal and Nigeria.

Meanwhile African culture was happily eating greens gathered from the wild, the garden and from trees.  In Chinua Achebe’s classic novel of the pre-colonial Igbo world, Things Fall Apart, Ezinma, the charmed daughter of the main character, Okonkwo prepares “green vegetable” with her mother, noting a folktale where the greens shrink down and cause a catastrophe as a cautionary tale to pick as many greens as are necessary to feed one’s guests.

African and European tastes converged with greens “seasoned” with a bit of meat or salt fish and highly peppered merged with Portuguese caldo verde (greens soup, traditionally seasoned with linguica—or Portuguese cured meat/sausage) and later obtained the spiky taste of the capsicums—the New World “peppers.”  At least one reference refers to Africans adopting the European’s “cabbage soup,” noting that the elites enjoyed more meat with it and that it was highly seasoned with hot peppers.   In Brazil, couve or collards are a staple in the Black diet, and are a classic accompaniment to feijoada, the national dish of Brazil…a blend of African, European and Amerindian influences all under the umbrella of Afro-Brazilian spirituality…since it is a favorite dish of Ogum/Ogun, the Orisha of iron, war and meat.

Back to Hanover County, Virginia and beyond… Collards were not raised everywhere nor were they necessarily endemic to the South.  Coleworts were “sprout” greens…eaten while tender and non-heading, and as the descendant of kale and cabbage, the collard could be raised into the mild Southern winter where it sweetened under successive frosts and provided greens despite the season.  It is highly possible that the first Africans in Virginia, being Afri-Creoles from Portuguese Angola would have known the colewort and appreciated it’s cultivation by their 17^th century English captors.  The collard was in gardens both high and low, but their popularity was certainly encouraged by the presence of greens-loving cooks of African descent.  Some commentators described enslaved people’s quarters crowded with collard patches.  They were raised at Monticello and sold to the Jefferson family as well as cultivated from time to time in Jefferson’s experimental gardens.  “Sprouts” included a whole family of leafy non-heading greens but the colewort was chief among them:

Lettice Bryan’s Sprout (Read Collard) Recipe, The Kentucky Housewife 1839

Should be boiled in every respect like turnip salad, served warm with bacon, and seasoned at table with salt, pepper, and vinegar.  All kinds of salad should b thoroughly washed in two waters, otherwise it will be gritty. 

Remember that ritual your mother used to do of washing and cutting the greens?  That’s ancient stuff.

The variety you see in the picture above is my personal favorite, Green Glaze.  They are pretty, waxy, crisp, tough against bugs and extremely delicious.  They also happen to be the oldest variety we have/know of collard green dating back to the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, with the Georgia Southern or Creole collard out of the Deep South going back to the 1860s-1880s.

Slave Food: The problem with being Collard People

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad meant well when he wrote Eat to Live, in fact he presaged a host of health problems in the Black community and their larger detriment to the health and economy of African American communities.  However, he had a few bumps on the way including collards unfit for human consumption.  Actually, cowpeas, sweet potatoes, collards, kale, red peppers, onions, string beans and the like are fantastic natural foods.  Our ancestors ate Superfoods! Their role in preserving and benefiting the enslaved person’s diet—and the diet of those right out of Emancipation was widely noted:

“To the inhabitants of the country districts of the South, the collard is a very great blessing; because when boiled in a pot with a piece of fat meat and balls of cornmeal dough, having the size and appearance of ordinary white turnips, called dumplings, it makes palatable a diet which would otherwise be all but intolerable.”  James Patterson Green, North Carolina

Just Remember: Collard People Come in All Colors

As always–we have ten days to go–and we really need your support to make my life’s dream into a reality: Please support us—-remember Karma is a beautiful thing when we do the right thing—www.indiegogo.com/The-Cooking-Gene-Project-The-Southern-Discomfort-Tour

We cannot get on the road without you–so please please please support us and let us help others and make history happen!—thanks–Michael

Mango Salsa

3 small ripe mangoes, peeled and cut into small pieces

juice of 1 lime

2 scallions, thinly sliced

1/2-1 tsp of fresh ginger sliced into small slivers

Sea Salt–(I used Falksalt Red Chili salt—which is flaked Mediterranean sea salt with red chili flavors–)to taste… I love the Falksalt line–very very yummmy…rosemary, wild mushroom, chili, and wild garlic and citron–YES!!!!!

Coarsely ground black pepper–to taste

1/4-1/2 teaspoon of red Scotch Bonnet pepper (use gloves!)

Exchanges: cloves, allspice, papaya, grapefruit, orange, cayenne, serrano, red wine vinegar, apple cider vinegar, fish pepper….

Keywords: Late Spring–Early Fall , spicy, sweet, fruity, tropical, exotic

Serves 6-8

To those who are seeing this site for the first time, The Cooking Gene is my project going to the Deep South to find my ancestors and the places they lived while telling the story of slavery through food and telling the story of the African American contribution to American and Southern food through my family history.  We will be working with projects that enhance contemporary practices in regards to food, food history and awareness and food justice.  It is my belief that history is important to learn about and a joy to explore–but only once its put to work for the good of those living to the benefit of those who are to come.

Since this project caught on, well wishes and retweets have come from Matt and Ted Lee (the Lee Brothers) who I hope I get to meet per their invitation in Charleston, Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun, and others including my newfound friends Chrystal and Amir at the Duo Dishes blog.  I may well have a guest blog on their site in the next week so keep your eyes peeled!  After all this love floating around, I get a nice little shock after Hebrew school on Sunday morning….an email arrives stating: “Michael Pollan Just Tweeted About You.”

And what did Michael Pollan say in 140 letters or less?:

Summer plans? Check out the “Southern Discomfort Culinary Tour,” an exploration of slavery and food.  http://p2.to/1jiC

In Jewish tradition, a scholar may be nicknamed after his most well known or best work.  My name for Michael Pollan is The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  Looking over my shoulder at the groaning book shelf I see the book and I look at this screen and go—hey Omnivore’s Dilemma–thank you

We are thirteen days away from our campaign’s close.  This has been a busy, exhilirating, exhausting, trying, complicated, painful, joyful, wonderful, draining process–but its not over and the next 13-12 days are going to be some of the most stressful I’ve ever lived and hopefully the most prayerful and the most spiritual and the most focused and directed.  Before I plea some more I want to take the opportunity to give out some more gratitude and send a special message out:

• Thank you to all of my long time friends, supporters, allies and followers.  You did your part–you donated, you spread the word, you talked to friends, you networked and you did it because you have good hearts, minds and souls and I can’t thank you enough.  You are angels.
• Thank you to my new found friends and followers and people who said–wow I’ve never heard of this guy but this sounds amazing….thank you for the above and trusting me and giving me a mandate to fulfill.
• I believe in the Universe’s cosmic ability to get things done.  This project started when I was a little kid and asked, “What is a slave?  Why were we slaves?”  It came at the tail end of years of frustrating and grinding setbacks and hardships over a meal with a friend at a Thai restaurant where I asked the question, “Will this work?”  It was just an idea I was excited about, a life’s dream I wanted to fulfill, and a mission I felt I needed to speak to.  And now before my very eyes people are making it happen–people are making it real.  I don’t know what to say anymore than thank you and I know that in the next two weeks I can look myself in the mirror and say–all that was great but now it’s time to start the rest of my life in food—it’s time.

This posting will go out to a lot of people.  In some cases that will overlap…If everybody who has not donated, who has the means, donated say 18 dollars or more–this project would be funded overnight.  It’s that simple.  Michael Pollan’s tweet was like gold–it pushed us to over 3,500 in donations.  If we are short one cent, the deal we as other campaigners made with Indiegogo is that we will get our money minus that for campaigns that don’t make their goal.  If we make our goal and then some–we get a bonus and its more favorable to us. 

Trending for Twitty on Tuesday –May 1st…..

If you are on Facebook, Twitter, or Linked or a blogger-esp WordPress-In we ask you to post our link to your blog and tell people about it through your means

In the spirit of love and generosity we are finishing scouting out projects we will give money to fund before our campaign is up.  The Universe is not a place of need and want, and there is plenty of everything to go around if we can conceive it and try.  We are distributing small donations to 18 campaigns to make sure they know we want them to succeed and want their dreams to come true.  We hope that this will encourage people to support them as well and that the karma will continue to flow.  We know that all of you who have written in and donated and networked have done a lot–but as we push to the last week—we need you to spread the word even more.  Your word of mouth–will be the greatest gift after your donation that we can get towards making this happen.

We may be doing a quick Kickstarter once this is done for a pilot for a cooking show–and we hope to film the pilot on the road with a quality crew, etc. –but first we have to make sure we can get on the road and do this….

From my Ancestors and Me:  Thank You.  May all the blessings be overflowing.  For everyone.

Help Us, Help Everyone:  http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Cooking-Gene-Project-The-Southern-Discomfort-Tour