Tell me about the song that you used to sing with the lemonade.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, lemonade, lemonade.

Name the shade, stir with a spade.

Cools your teeth and pots your hair, makes you feel good everywhere.

And it was called My Family, the slave song.

This is culinary history in Michael Twitty.

He still remembers the day he asked his grandmother about the name of her lemonade song.

He didn't know what a slave was.

So I must have been very young.

I must have been like three or four years old.

I had never heard anyone talk about slavery.

Like a thing, like something our family went through or other black families went through.

And just, you know, when you get those first glimpses or glimmers or what that meant,

it's like a punch to the gut.

Because now you know your story and your family story and who you came from.

Isn't like everybody else.

Michael has spent years researching the role of slavery and enslaved people

played in creating the food we eat in America today.

But in some ways, his work started even earlier, that day in the kitchen with his grandmother

and the lemonade and the slave song.

That's when he first began wondering about the origins of his family and their food.

...