How did you become interested in food and the South?
What is so interesting about food?
What do food and race have to do with one another?
a discussion with John T. Edge
I came in late to the fraternity of food and letters. Seven years ago, the sum total of my adult life experience was six years of drinking and debauchery that passed for a college career, but I did quite yield a degree. Then, after an eight year turn as a corporate salesman, I went back to college. I immersed myself in the Center for Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. I realized, during my time as a graduate student, that if I am to come to a better understanding of my native region, if I am to come to a better understanding of our nation as a whole, food may well be the best entree available to me.
I’ve come to the conclusion that, in writing about and thinking about food, we have the opportunity to engage our nation in a grand dialogue that matters. Food offers a non-threatening entree to big issues, those of race, class, gender, poverty, that whole shooting match. I think it’s time we claim our professions rightful place in the cultural firmament.
While food is one great marker other the South, the other is race. The South’s fitful dance of black and white has marked our food culture in significant ways. For the longest time, that old bastard Jim Crow dictated who could sit down to dinner with whom. The thing was, our foods were always integrated. Black-eyed peas and okra from West Africa and the chess pies and puddings of Anglo-Saxon tradition have long shared the same menu hereabouts.