 So I am the co-author of this book, Grubb Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen, and it came out in 2006. I'm pretty tired of reading from it, so I won't be reading from it today. But I will say, similar to Elizabeth, you know, my work is very influenced by art, culture, music, and I really try to bring all that together. And so in the book, not only do we have essays that talk about industrial agriculture and its effect on our health and the environment and local economies, but we have these original recipes that I created, and each recipe has a suggested soundtrack of music to listen to that either inspired me or that I think people should listen to when they're eating the dish. And, you know, original woodcuts depict in the fourth season, so some cool stuff. I won't be reading from this. My new book, Vegan Soul Kitchen, is coming out in March 2009, so I can't read from that yet, but I will be reading from an essay that I wrote, and it's really an extended kind of rant blog posting that I wrote in reaction to this study that was really vilifying African-American cuisine and, you know, kind of painting it as the bane of the health of the African-American community. So I submitted it to this website. It had over 100 comments, MSAN.com, put it on their web, their I'm home page, and then Edible San Francisco picked it up, so I'm going to just read some of it, because it's really the basis for a lot of my thinking around my next book. It's entitled Reclaiming True Grits. I probably took up four minutes of my reading time by all that. Mentioned Soul Food, and you'll hear scores of health and medical professionals claim that it is the downfall of the health and well-being of African-Americans. It is true that African-Americans have some of the highest rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers of any group in the country. But frankly, I'm getting sick of soul food being held evenly, partially responsible for this. The majority of people imagine the traditional soul food diet as unsophisticated and unhealthy fare comprised of high-calorie, low-nutrient dishes replete with salt, sugar, and bad fats. But rather than vilifying traditional soul food, let's focus on the real culprit, what I like to call instant soul food. Take instant grits. Mass production and distribution have diminished the original product's superb quality and have obscured the distinctive characteristics that make down-hold hominy so darn desirable in the first place. I'm from Memphis, Tennessee. And the taste of instant grits boxed up in a factory can never compare to the complex, nutty flavor of grits that have been stone ground in a Mississippi mill and slow cooked. So it's understandable that those who have only had that watered-down stuff read many of my friends in New York City, scoff at the mention of grits. Similar to instant grits, instant soul food is a dishonest representation of African-American cuisine. And to be clear, when I refer to soul food, I'm not just alluding to the processing, packaging, and mass marketing of African-American cuisine in the late 1980s. I'm also talking about the oversimplified version of the cuisine constructed in the popular imagination in the late 1960s. Real soul food is good for you. The term first emerged during the Black Liberation Movement as African-Americans named and reclaimed the diverse traditional foods. Clearly, soul food was meant to celebrate and distinguish African-American cooking from general Southern cooking, not ghettoize it. But in the late 1960s, soul food was discovered, in quotes, by the popular media and constructed as the newest exotic cuisine for white consumers to devour. Rather than portray the complexity of the cuisine and its changes throughout the late 19th and 20th century, many writers played up its more exotic aspects and framed the cuisine as a remnant of poverty-driven, anti-bellum survival food. Most self-proclaimed soul food restaurants, a considerable amount of soul food cookbooks in the canned and frozen soul food industry, reinforced this banal portrayal of African-American cuisine. Moreover, film and television routinely bombard viewers with crass images of African-American eating habits and culinary practices that further distort and demonize soul food. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for fried chicken, mac and cheese, collard greens and peach cobbler being reinterpreted, but romanticizing comfort foods that should be eaten only occasionally and presenting these foods as standard fare, not only re-writes history, but also normalizes unhealthy eating habits for African-Americans who are unaware of their historical cuisine. To paraphrase food historian Jessica Bihara, soul food was simply what Southern Black folks say for dinner. Sadly, over the past four decades, most of us have forgotten that when many African-Americans in the South ate for dinner just two generations ago was diverse, creative, and comprised of a lot of fresh, geloco, homegrown, nutrient-dense food. When I think about the soul food that my grandparents and their parents ate, I do have some fond memories of deep-fried meats, overcooked leafy greens, and sugary desserts occasionally making camion on our menu, but I also recall lightly sauteed ochre corn and tomatoes from their natural backyard garden in South Memphis. Divine recalations abound of butchered-that-morning-herb roasted chicken from Papa's coop, grid cakes fashioned from breakfast leftovers, and then grilled alongside pulled pork. Madea's chutney made from peaches that came from Mrs. Cole's mini orchard next door, and fresh watermelon purchased from a flatbed truck on the side of the road and served with salt sprinkled on each slice. There are African-Americans like the late chef and cookbook author Edna Lewis, food historian Jessica B. Harris, and Jay Foster, chef owner of Farmer Brown Restaurant San Francisco, who acknowledge a more complex culinary heritage and understand the African-American legacy of being green. It's time, however, that we all reclaim real soul food by learning from elders, rediscovering heirloom varietals, planning home and community gardens, shopping at the farmer's market, eating what's in season, pickling, canning, and preserving for leaner months, getting back into the kitchen and cooking and sharing meal with family and friends. So I'm going to cut it off there. So my new book is Vegan Soul Kitchen, and I was hesitant to actually call it that. I'm not a vegan. I was at one point, but it's actually a marketing term to sell to vegans. But for me, the book is less about the absence of meat and more about this emphasis on fresh, local, seasonal, and hopefully organic or sustainably raised ingredients for taking foods that are these staples from African-American cuisine, but mixing them with European, Native American, and American staples and kind of remixing and reworking to come up with something that's new and creative. So that's what's coming next year. And thank you for hearing me out.