B SAYS

This is the best movie I have ever seen.

(Source: fuckyeahbeyonceknowles)

EBONY: But so many of the traditionally Black southern foods we enjoy are also killing us, clogging our arteries, slowing us down. Is that something we really want to pass down to our children?

Michael Twitty: The word we need to know is “veggievore.” Our ancestors were veggievores, and salt and meat were rarities. Some of the things we still make today — black eyed peas, sweet potatoes, string beans, kidney beans, whole grain rice — that’s what they ate. If there was meat, it was fresh game or fresh fish, which were much more nutritious than what we eat today.

The problem is what happened to us when we were out of slavery. Now we’re going to take our sharecroppers’ rations and go to the store and buy white bread, white flour, white salt, white sugar —we went from foods with color to foods without color. Isn’t that an ironic twist? In freedom we left behind healthier foods. It’s not just true for black people, but many of us went from simple agrarian diets [that were native to us in West Africa] to buying food at a store that isn’t healthy for you.

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Michael Twitty will be touring 50 locations in the South — from Maryland to Louisiana — embarking on what he is calling a “Southern Discomfort Tour.” As a culinary historian and historic interpreter, Michael will be cooking and having dinner and dialogue with the extended family members he has been able to trace back through slavery — both White and Black.

Michael Twitty is REAL.  Read the whole interview.  100% trill.  He actually may be doing what I did not even know was my dream job.  And I love his definition of veggievore. 

I get super offended when people try to tell me that soul food is “the woooorst” food for you.  My parents [are lowkey kind of old and they] grew up eating a lot of home-cooked/ soul food that consisted of locally and homegrown vegetables, freshly butchered meats and freshly caught fish.  And they grew up in Detroit.  In the 1950s and 60s.  Hardly any of that sounds like the artery-clogging, BMI-spiking soul food everyone rags on.

Soul food is the original slow food.  It needed no special name nor did it need any co-opting.  I look forward to this man expanding Black American culinary history.  Put down the Paula Deen and pick up some fucking Edna Lewis.  Educate yourself; it’s not my job.

Ebony.com interview here // Support the Southern Discomfort Tour

One-third of American girls start developing breasts by their 9th birthday. And this is earlier than even 15 or 20 years ago.

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On today’s Fresh Air, science writer Florence Williams explains why breasts are getting bigger and arriving earlier, why tumors seem to gravitate towards the breast and how toxins from the environment may be affecting hormones and breast development. (via nprfreshair)

I swear, I said this years ago.  Girls started developing earlier and more dramatically around the time I was in middle school, which would make them born between 1984 and 1989.  That’s about on time as far as the US food production timeline is concerned.  I know there’s no “scientific” evidence that hormones/ chemicals/ preservatives in meat, fish, and dairy are technically harmful, but whatever they’re putting in meat and dairy these days is giving 12 year old girls the breasts of women twice their age and bringing down the average age of menstruation and that’s scary.  

It’s one thing for you or your kid to eat McDonald’s or whatnot.  You know it’s not nutritious, whatever.  You may not be at a financial point where nutritional value of food is as important as whether or not the quantity of food you have is enough.  I love McDonald’s.  I think it’s amazing and delicious.  It’s a whole other thing to have supposedly healthy and fresh conventional food be overwhelmingly full of hormones and other funny stuff.  And then have more natural options be much more expensive and difficult to find.  The way food is produced, marketed, sold, and consumed is so weird to me.

(via nprfreshair)