CIA Chef Roshara “Ro” Sanders didn’t know she was Geechee until she was already a trained chef.
She’d been eating her family’s okra stew her whole life, which was a recipe passed down from her World War II veteran grandfather to her mother to her. It was just what they ate. Then she started traveling to Africa as part of her work developing curriculum at the Culinary Institute of America, and food historians kept telling her the same thing. Michael Twitty told her: this is Gullah, this is Geechee. She went again with BJ Dennis and Mashama Bailey, and they confirmed it.