Toni Tipton-Martin

Toni Tipton-Martin is an award-winning food and nutrition journalist and community activist who is busy building a healthier community through her books, classes, and foundation. She has been invited twice by First Lady Michelle Obama to the White House for her outreach to help families live healthier lives, and also received the 2014 Southern Foodways Alliance John Egerton Prize for this work. With the Egerton Prize as seed money, Toni hosted Soul Summit: A Conversation About Race, Identity, Power and Food in Austin over Juneteenth weekend. This unprecedented 3-day gathering invited writers, scholars, authors, chefs, students and anyone interested in food justice to come together and celebrate African American Foodways.

Toni is the author of The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks (University of Texas Press, Fall 2015), which tells the story behind her rare collection. The crown-jewel of this treasure-trove is a first-edition house servant’s directory published in Boston in 1827. The Jemima Code also is the title of her blog, and a traveling exhibit, featuring larger-than-life images of black cooks at work, curated from Toni’s gallery of authors. In 2005, she published an historic reprint of an early 20th century cookbook, The Blue Grass Cook Book, by Minnie C. Fox (University Press of Kentucky). Blue Grass contains the first known photographs of African American cooks and presents a new portrait of a role model working women can respect and learn from today. Toni also is co-author of A Taste of Heritage: New African-American Cuisine (Macmillan) and wrote the chapter on the South for Culinaria: The Food of the United States (Konemann).