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44 maconmagazine.com | February/March 2026 outside their own community. Food also connects us to our origins. "Eating together allows you to be reattached through what you're eating," he said. "Macon is a great place to tell the food's journey from the root to the table." A major beneficiary of Mason's work is a group of Wesleyan College students and instructor Dr. Brandi D. Simpson, a professor of history at the school and co-director of Wesleyan's Lane Center. After working with him on a couple of previous projects, she contacted Mason to collaborate on a service- learning project for her African American history class. For Simpson, it was an additional opportunity to share her knowledge of West African foodways while exposing her class to the cultivation of food that included plants from a foreign land. During a conversation with Macon Magazine (see more on page 60), Simpson revealed that her journey toward developing that kind of appreciation for West African culture and cuisine did not occur until she was teaching in Conyers, Georgia. This followed living in Germany as a young child, growing up in Minnesota, and raising a family in New York before heading to the South to teach. It was during her time as an instructor in Conyers that she felt a connection and interest in that part of the world for the first time. She saw food as an easy, natural entry point for Wesleyan students, and Mason as the perfect person to teach them the ins and outs of gardening, along with the history of many plants with West African and Caribbean connections. "Foodways is a good entry point. It allows you to disarm people, then you can talk about difficult things. Everyone's interested in food. It's endlessly fascinating to people," Simpson said. "Education is essential to closing the culinary divide. If we can talk about what we eat and why we eat it, we can see our humanity and how much we share together." "Everyone's interested in food. It's endlessly fascinating to people. Education is essential to closing the culinary divide. If we can talk about what we eat and why we eat it, we can see our humanity and how much we share together." Public historian and Fort Valley State University lecturer Deitrah Taylor echoed some of Simpson's points when discussing the Gullah Geechee connection to Mason's work. Many of the foods grown and consumed by the Southeastern coastal descendants of West Africans mirror what originated in that part of the world. Items such as red rice, seafood, fresh fish, and sweet potatoes (or yams) are routinely found on plates on both sides of the Atlantic. Taylor works extensively with Mason in varying ways and is appreciative of his effort to cultivate foods that bind us all, knowingly and unknowingly. "These foods give us (Gullah Geechee people) a spiritual tie to those ancestors whose names we can no longer call," Taylor said. "What he's doing also gets people to try the food and get exposed to what