SEATTLE — When Seattle's Quinn Miller Murphy was a kid in the kitchen with her parents, she had no idea it would inspire her first book.
"What Did my Ancestors Eat?" is a children's book that celebrates culture through food and family.
"Food is I think, community to me,” Murphy said.
Murphy didn't write this book just to sing the praises of her dad's jambalaya, influenced by jollof rice from Africa, or her mom's scones, which began in Scotland as bannock. She wrote it for mixed race kids like her.
"I was an avid reader growing up, I’ve always loved reading, and I can't really pinpoint a book in my K-12 experience that I read that had a mixed-race character in it,” Murphy said. “That's not something I got to see growing up. I didn't see families that looked like mine in the books that I was reading."
This brightly illustrated board book goes into territory "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" never explored. Like slavery. One passage in the book mentions enslaved ancestors bringing recipes with them to the Americas.
"I didn't want to fudge that, I didn’t want to pretend that story was going to be other than what it was, which was we came from West Africa, we didn't come here of our own volition, we were enslaved people, and then we landed in New Orleans,” Murphy said.
This is not to say that "What Did my Ancestors Eat?" will be a big heavy for your 4-year-old. Rather, this book could connect them with more than a meal the next time the family sits down together to eat.
"I think that kids have a wild capacity to understand far beyond what we think they can,” Murphy said.
KING 5's Evening celebrates the Northwest. Contact us: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Email.