In September 2025, I took a trip to New Orleans, Louisiana for a work conference, and one of the extra-curricular tours was the Whitney Plantation. I had never been to a plantation and wanted to experience it first-hand, for the history and the feeling of slavery. Little did I know that I was going to learn so much about food and make so many strong connections to the Blood Type O Diet.
The bus ride to the plantation was long and heavy with much anticipation. We watched the miles of trees and water as we drove by, and my coworker said he saw an alligator lurking in the water. Eeeek!
Our tour guide was an older white woman who was a retired educator, born and raised in New Orleans. She guided us through this tour with all seriousness, acknowledging that even as a local resident and educator, she did not know New Orleans’ history of slavery until she began working at Whitney Plantation.
Sugar Cane Plantation
I learned sooo much on this tour… about food! The Whitney Plantation was a sugar cane garden, in which the enslaved chemists (her words) figured out a way to harvest, manufacture and ship sugar, from plant to granules, by hand. Sugar was, and still is, big business, and we as Type Os suffer the worst from the heavy promotion to overconsume it.
Creole Recipes that Originated in West Africa
Our tour guide revealed that the slaves brought over their recipes from West Africa, which became the Creole and Cajun cuisine of Louisiana. Black eyed peas and okra are staple ingredients in well known Creole dishes, like jambalaya and gumbo.
One of the other tour guides came over to the states from Senegalese for research and related the food he tasted in New Orleans to the food his mother cooks back home.
Our tour guide said that her mother cooked the same recipes when she was a child. Seeing this direct recipe connection from Louisiana to West Africa was so satisfying to experience, knowing that there is much debate these days about where the slaves of the 17 century actually came from.
The Slaves Might Have Been Type Os
The last point of Blood Type O confirmation was when I learned that there was a point in time when the slave population decreased in size for a while on the Whitney Plantation because the women slaves were not eating enough meat and animal fat needed to become pregnant.
This result is a characteristic of the health pattern of Blood Type O women, which I also am, so these African slaves must have been Blood Type O as well. When you look at the food list guide for Type Os, you will see that many of the foods are native to tropical parts of the world, like the continent of Africa. These are foods like beef (cows), buffalo, bananas, black eyed peas and okra.
Type Os need red meat and animal fat to survive and to reproduce, and following the general diet advice to limit animal protein, with a goal to ultimately eliminate, means infertility for Type O women. The enslavers knew this.
So what did the enslavers do about it? They threw the slaves a party and gave them all the meat they wanted to eat in order to improve their reproductive health. Soon enough, the women slaves became pregnant and began growing the population again.
I Wanted to Learn More
When the tour was over, I was beaming with curiosity and wanted to learn more. I browsed the few cookbooks available in the gift shop of the Whitney Plantation and found some that may have more information about where the ingredients and recipes in the African-American culture originated from. I know that many were simply made up of food scraps and whatever we had access to, but I’m sure these books will share more insight.
Here are the ones I really considered buying, and definitely added to my book wish list are:
The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty
We are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land and Legacy by Natalie Baszile (author of the TV show Queen Sugar)
Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking by Toni Tipton-Martin
If you have any resources in the form of reputable articles and books on the origins of African-American cuisine, feel free to leave them in a comment below.
Read more about how I navigated the restaurants of New Orleans for 6 days, while sticking to the Blood Type O Diet HERE.
My Offerings
Thank you for reading about my experience in New Orleans. I placed a lot of orders while there, but I use a system I created which is outlined in my Restaurant Food Scripts. These scripts are great for Type O diners to know exactly what foods to look for on the menu as well as what to modifications to ask for when placing your order.
My Blood Type Food List Guides will provide you with the most important foods to eat for your well-being. There's one for each blood type.
If you'd like to jump right into your Blood Type O Diet healing journey, I suggest you start with my Blood Type O Nourishment Calibration Codes course for a step-by-step guideline on how to listen to your body, source the best Type O foods and begin healing your gut.