This May Sound Like I’m Angry

This may sound like I’m angry.

That’s because I am.

I’m angry about food.

But not just food.

I’m angry about what gets buried with it.

What we let slip through our fingers.

What we protect so fiercely that we never get to pass it on.

Some recipes in families are so tied to memory, and they might as well be spiritual.

Not written in cookbooks, not on notecards, but in gestures.

In pinches, pours, and stirs done just so, the things you only learn by being in the room.

But those rooms are empty now.

We call it tradition, secrecy, and the selfish need to be the one who gets all the oohs and ahhs at the family gathering.

To be the keeper of the sacred gumbo, the only one who knows how the sweet potatoes get that crust just right.

We hoard recipes like treasure, and I get it—maybe it’s the only thing some of us ever had to call our own.

But it’s not treasure if it dies with you.

That’s not legacy. That’s vanity.

And the loss is deeper than ingredients.

Every time someone passes and their recipe goes with them, we don’t just lose a dish.

We lose a moment.

A whole damn lifetime of Sundays.

Of back-porch stories.

Of laughing so hard over The Red Kool-Aid and potato salad, you forget how hard life has been for a second.

Healing as it’s passed hand to hand with every spoonful.

You know what it’s like to taste a memory?

To close your eyes and feel the presence of someone who’s been gone for a decade, just because their dinner rolls hit your tongue the right way?

We lost that.

Because someone wanted to be special.

Because someone needed to be seen more than they needed to share.

And then life happened.

People fell out.

Phones stopped ringing.

The kitchen got quiet.

And just like that, the recipe is gone.

And all the meals it ever touched, all the stories it ever summoned—gone, too.

So yes—hell yes I’m mad.

Because these aren’t just dishes.

They’re time machines.

They’re inheritance.

They’re how a little Black boy in the Midwest learns about a cousin he never met, not through a photograph, but through how his mama seasons her Greens.

And we’re letting them vanish.

We call food “soul” and starve our legacy because we’re too proud, wounded, or petty to pass it on.

We forget that food was how our ancestors hid love in plain sight.

That in a world where everything could be taken—freedom, names, land—the ability to make a damn good meal was the one thing they couldn’t steal.

That’s what we throw away whenever we let a recipe die with a grudge.

You want to be special?

Be the one who teaches.

Be the one who says, “Come on. I’ll show you.”

Be the one who writes it down—not to post online, but to slip into the hands of the next generation.

To say:

This is yours now.

This is where we come from.

This is how we survived.

Because the pot of greens is more than flavor.

The macaroni isn’t just texture.

The peach cobbler is not just a dessert.

It’s home.

It’s a ritual.

It’s a reminder of who we were, even when the world tried to make us forget.

So yes—I’m angry.

Because we’ve buried too much already.

I’m tired of funerals where we cry over both the person and the food we’ll never taste again.

I’m tired of silence being passed off as tradition.

I’m tired of watching people wait until it’s too late to care.

If we want our culture to live, we must do more than eat it.

We have to honor it, share it, teach it, and protect it—not like a secret but like the gospel it is.

Because in the end, a guarded recipe dies in the dark.

But a shared one?

That’s how we stay alive.

By Kyle J. Hayes

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