CIC Alum B. J. Dennis Featured in The New York Times

"Mr. Dennis, 38, believes food is the living bearer of history.
He has devoted himself to promoting the cooking of
the Gullah-Geechee Nation, the descendants of West Africans
 who lived along the coast from North Carolina to North Florida."

Kim Severson recognizes Dennis in a New York Times article titled "Finding a Lost Strain of Rice, and Clues to Slave Cooking: The search for the missing grain led to Trinidad and Thomas Jefferson, and now excitement among African-American chefs." 

Chef Dennis' part in this story is his discovery of the rice in Trinadad.
"Mr. Dennis had heard about hill rice — also known as upland red bearded rice or Moruga Hill rice — through the culinary organization Slow Food USA and the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, the group that brought back Carolina Gold in the early 2000s. He’d also heard stories about it from elderly cooks in his community. Like everyone else, he thought the hill rice of the African diaspora was lost forever.

"But then, on a rainy morning in the Trinidad hills in December 2016, he walked past coconut trees and towering okra plants to the edge of a field with ripe stalks of rice, each grain covered in a reddish husk and sprouting spiky tufts. 'Here I am looking at this rice and I said: ‘Wow. Wait a minute. This is that rice that’s missing,’ he said."
Read this fascinating story here.